Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (6 page)

At this low point, Elvira de Hidalgo moved into the center of her life, and for the next five years Maria was to be the most important person in de Hidalgo’s life, and de Hidalgo the most important person in Maria’s. De Hidalgo, Spanish, lively and well rounded, came straight from the world of Maria’s dreams, from the world of the Met, La Scala and Covent Garden. In love with Greece, she had recently joined the teaching staff of Athens’ leading conservatory, the Odeon Athenon. It was meant to be for a season; it turned out to be for years. To confuse coincidence with cause is always a risk, but there is no doubt that had Elvira de Hidalgo not been trapped in Greece by the outbreak of the Second World War, Maria’s career would have been drastically different. It was Evangelia who, her ear always to the musical ground, heard of de Hidalgo’s arrival and determined that Maria should audition for her. The result was that Evangelia provided Maria simultaneously with the best teacher and the best mother she would ever have.

The audition was their first encounter. The aria Maria had chosen to sing was from Weber’s
Oberon
: “Ocean! Thou mighty monster.” While Maria was awaiting her turn, de Hidalgo kept looking at that awkward creature in the corner staring at her crushed sandals and biting her nails. “The very idea of that girl wanting to become a singer,” she thought then, and said later, “was laughable.” But seconds after Maria started singing, de Hidalgo closed her eyes. What she heard was “violent cascades of sound, full of drama and emotion”; what she saw was a vision not only of what that voice could become, but of what that singer, that young woman, could become. Maria was admitted to Athens’ leading conservatory tuition-free as de Hidalgo’s personal student.

From the moment Maria arrived for her first ten o’clock class, de Hidalgo began the long, hard and often painful process of uncovering all Maria’s remarkable capacities, not only the obvious musical gifts but the intelligence, the passion, the will and the audacity that were to add up to her uniqueness. As for Maria, with de Hidalgo’s guidance she constantly surprised herself. She discovered and began to use musical muscles and dramatic strengths she never knew she had. Until de Hidalgo came into her life, Maria’s range was so narrow that many teachers at the conservatory were convinced that she was not a soprano but a mezzo. Now she started developing her high notes and discovering her low chest notes. It was absorbing, at times exhilarating. “I was like the athlete,” she said years later, “who enjoys using and developing his muscles, like the youth who runs and jumps, enjoying and growing at the same time, like the girl who dances, enjoying the dance for its own sake, and learning to dance at the same time.”

Maria arrived at the Conservatory at ten every morning and, apart from a short break for lunch, she worked with de Hidalgo until eight at night. “It would have been inconceivable to stay at home,” she said; “I wouldn’t know what to do there.” But it was not only that she wouldn’t know what to do there. If home is the place where love is, then “home” had never really been home for Maria. It had been “there,” and her close relationship with de Hidalgo made it easier to be away from “there” for longer and longer periods.

In Maria’s eyes, however, Elvira was more than a mother; with her magical knowledge of whole new worlds of music, with her gifts of singing and with the aura of stage glories around her, she was more like a fairy godmother. The existence of a fairy godmother made it easier for Maria to begin in her mind to turn her mother into the wicked stepmother. This childhood tendency of seeing people and things in terms of clear opposites, of “good” or “bad,” was to stay with Maria long after her childhood. Experience, and her relationship with Onassis, softened the tendency, but it seemed as though nothing could ever eradicate it. People who were “good,” even “very, very good,” like her great mentor, Tullio Serafin, for example, suddenly became “bad,” and either they later turned “good” again, or once classified “bad,” remained “bad” forever. Elvira de Hidalgo has the distinction of being the only person in Maria’s life who remained above such fluctuations of fortune for nearly forty years. Her picture, apart from that of the great nineteenth-century soprano, Maria Malibran, was the only one in Maria’s flat when she died.

De Hidalgo’s clear sense of the extraordinary destiny ahead of her pupil began to communicate itself to Maria, who felt more and more that she had been singled out for a very special purpose. De Hidalgo awakened in her a realization of the greatness and grandeur of their art. She also gave the ugly duckling her first vision of the swan she was to become. It seemed immeasurably distant from what she now was, but de Hidalgo did more: she bridged the gap between the vision and the reality, not only with her teaching but with her understanding, her encouragement and her love. She taught Maria how to dress, how to walk across a stage and how to walk across a street, how to stand and yet pulsate with movement, and how to move and yet stand tall inside herself. She also introduced Maria to the miraculous possibilities of those two hands and arms that had until then been hanging awkwardly from her shoulders. And Maria began to create miracles with them.

Perhaps the greatest treasure de Hidalgo gave Maria, in the competitive world of opera, was a vast repertoire of tragic, romantic heroines. She gave her Norma, Elvira, Gioconda. In turn Maria would give them as revelations to an unsuspecting musical world. She had learned many of these operas by heart long before she could have sung them properly. Elvira lent her the full scores that she could not afford to buy, and Maria, in order to give them back as soon as possible, would memorize them. Riding on top of the bus, walking in the street, eating, dressing, Maria would be rehearsing, her mind full of runs, roulades, trills, cadenzas—the whole panoply of bel canto embellishments.

For de Hidalgo, bel canto was much more than “beautiful singing.” Many years later, echoing her teacher, Maria defined it as “a specific training of the voice, the development of a technique for making full use of it as a player of the violin or the flute is trained to make full use of his instrument.” It involved a precision, discipline and sense of authority that came surprisingly easily to the sixteen-year-old conservatory student. This relentless groundwork was at the heart of the professionalism and perfectionism that marked Maria’s whole career. Through the long days and nights of working with de Hidalgo, it was this meticulous technical training of her voice that was the teacher’s first priority and that gradually became the pupil’s obsession. Long before Maria’s heart was filled with brokenhearted queens and tragic priestesses, her mind was full of all the ways she could turn her voice into a perfectly agile instrument, ready to lend reality to all the technical feats she was perfecting with her mind. It was part of her instinctive greatness as an artist that, however fascinated she may have been by florid embellishments and athletic feats, she used them but was never used by them.

At times Maria talked of her voice as though it was a Siamese twin, a physical appendage with a life of its own. Often she treated her voice almost as a semihostile, intractable force outside herself. “The voice was answering tonight,” she would say, or “The voice was not obeying tonight.” It was to be a long, continuing struggle.

While Maria was perfecting her roulades, Greece had begun preparing for war. After the fall of France and Italy’s entry into the war in the summer of 1940, the tension had been mounting. It was no longer possible to ignore the fact that Greece’s involvement in the war was only months, perhaps even days, away. The prime minister, General Joannes Metaxas, began speaking publicly of the national danger and quietly, but determinedly, Greece mobilized. On October 28 it began. The Italian minister presented Metaxas with Mussolini’s ultimatum: allow Italian troops to take up strategic positions on Greek territory or war would follow. Metaxas rejected it instantly with no more than a laconic “No.” Italian troops immediately crossed the border, but were promptly driven back, and the Greek army even found itself occupying about a quarter of Albania.

So when, late in November, Maria made her professional stage debut at the National Lyric Theater, Athens was celebrating and Maria was singing and dancing in a barrel in Suppé’s operetta
Boccaccio
. Her part was not the kind triumphs are made of, but if not a triumph, it was a solid success. She was applauded, praised, appreciated, for the first time recognized as an established, professional singer. She was finally acting out her mother’s fantasies, except that by now they had become her own. She was exultant, and so was Greece. The period that followed the repulsing of the Italian forces was full of elation and what proved to be a short-lived optimism.

As for Maria, she was to have triumphs that made singing in a barrel at the Lyric Theater of Athens little more than a practical joke, but then her delight was never directly related to external success. Indeed the triumphs, won at greater and greater cost, brought her less and less joy. “I’m never satisfied,” she said thirty years after she had leapfrogged her way out of the Lyric Theater, beaming with happiness. “I am personally incapable of enjoying what I have done well because I see so magnified the things I could have done better.”

But on that November night in 1940, the first of hundreds of first nights, she allowed herself to savor her success. Her whole family was there applauding, yet after the performance it was to de Hidalgo that she ran for reassurance that it had gone well. Yes, it had gone well,
very
well, smiled Elvira, and all the sleepless nights and the nerves and the panics were instantly washed away. The more withdrawn she became from her mother and Jackie, the more devotion she felt for de Hidalgo; and the closer she felt to her, the more detached and, gradually, the more angry she felt with her own family. All this time she had been driving herself on with huge quantities of food and nervous energy spurred by ambition. Going out, flirting, making friends, formed no part of her life. It was not until much later that she learned about romance and the sudden leapings of the heart—the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.

Her adolescent urges, however thoroughly suppressed in the daily grind of study and music making, were making themselves felt. Without being aware of it, she was finding it harder to stifle her resentment toward her mother—resentment for all Evangelia had not been, for all the love she had denied Maria and for all the love she had unconditionally poured on Jackie. Jackie had by now learned to take her mother’s special ministrations completely for granted and to be, if not spoiled, outrageously favored. The result was that Maria seemed to be almost constantly in a state of combustion. She had learned to invest her emotions and wild impulses in her work, but she found it increasingly difficult to do so at home. She felt more isolated than ever, and aloofness became her only shield.

3

A
T THE BEGINNING OF
A
PRIL
1941, the Germans came to the aid of their humiliated Italian allies, and on April 6 they bombed and almost destroyed Salonika in northern Greece. General Metaxas had died a couple of months earlier, but under their new prime minister, Alexander Koryzis, the Greeks were no less determined to fight. Athens steeled herself, awaiting the bombs.

On April 6 at Patissiou 61, Evangelia, Maria, Jackie, her fiancé and Athena, the maid, were more at one than ever before. Family resentments were set aside for the moment. As soon as dinner was cleared from the table, Maria began singing “La Paloma.” They all joined in. Suddenly on that first night of the Nazi invasion, everything else stopped. Time stopped, everything fell into place, became of a piece. Despite the underlying anxiety about the future, there was joy and laughter inside Maria’s home. What is more, there was a real, deep peace. Outside there was no doubt that the war was on: the food shops were empty after the housewives’ rush to stock up as much as they could, radios everywhere blared out warnings, news and information about the dead and the injured, and the cafés were full of men arguing, swearing and drowning their fears in ouzo and retsina.

Two weeks later, as the Greeks were fighting a series of rearguard actions, withdrawing farther and farther to the south, the prime minister committed suicide. It was an act that symbolized the growing demoralization of a nation. On April 27 what they most feared took place: the Germans occcupied Athens. It was as if a plague had hit the city. The streets became deserted apart from soldiers in Nazi uniforms. Schools, theaters and public offices were closed and there was a six o’clock curfew. Maria, with Jackie and her mother, joined the long lines of women in black headscarves on the sullen pilgrimage from church to church lighting candles for their men, for their families and for Greece. Suddenly the religious ritual became all important. Maria would go into a church, right foot first, crossing herself as she went in and as she came out, and every Friday she would wash all the icons with wine and put fresh cloths on the altar.

Yet Maria was present only physically in all these activities. Her mind remained full of arias, trills and scales, and her heart longed to be back with de Hidalgo. So despite her mother’s objections, despite Uncle Efthimios’ long, graphic descriptions of what would happen to her one dark night as she was walking home, and despite her own fears of walking alone through the deserted streets, Maria decided that at ten o’clock every morning she would be at de Hidalgo’s house. She stayed there the whole day and walked home at whatever time in the evening she stopped practicing and studying. She broke the Nazi curfew not with any great sense of heroism, but rather with a matter-of-fact defiance—as if the Nazi soldiers in the streets represented nothing more than an inconvenience and a slight change in her routine.

By the spring of 1941, Crete had fallen to the Germans. The conquest of Greece was total, and the king and his government barely managed to escape to Egypt. Friends had been asking Evangelia for some time now if she was thinking of trying to flee with her daughters back to America, but she never seriously considered it. For a start, Jackie would not hear of leaving her fiancé behind and, war or no war, Maria would not be dragged away from de Hidalgo. At the same time, the last they had heard from George was that he was traveling around the States selling pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, and could not for the moment give them a fixed address; so even if they had been willing to leave, there was really nowhere for them to go.