Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (8 page)

Even before the success of
Tosca
and the concert in Salonica, Maria was ready to tackle anything; no role and no difficulties could intimidate her. She was fearless in the face of challenge and felt convinced that she had the ability to sing any role she could get. In the summer season of 1943,
Tosca
was followed by the Greek premiere of Eugen d’Albert’s
Tiefland
. “When you are very young and on the threshold of a career you have all the confidence in the world,” she said in 1961. “There is nothing you feel you couldn’t tackle and do splendidly.”

In this frame of mind Maria turned Marta in
Tiefland
into a challenge and an opportunity to create for the first time for Greek audiences the tormented martyr, the archetypal Romantic heroine. Marta is the oppressed mistress of a rich landowner; she falls in love with a shepherd and at the end of the opera flees with him to the hills. Maria was determined that her performance would be a revelation. She pursued Leonidas Zoras, the conductor, everywhere, demanding extra rehearsals. He remembers how they spent many nights not just going through the score note by note but with Maria testing her interpretation of each musical phrase. Every ten minutes, the oil lamp, filled with wartime watered kerosene, started exuding black smoke. Maria would get up, blow it out, clean it, light it again and go on singing. Ten minutes later, she would get up and repeat the same ritual. And so on through the night. Leonidas Zoras had never before come across such patience, persistence and endurance.

The opening night of
Tiefland
on April 22, 1944, brought Maria her first standing ovation and her first international publicity. An opera written by a Glaswegian of French descent who identified himself entirely with Germany, it was originally put on to placate the Germans who were making threatening noises about the partiality of the Greeks for Italian opera. As a result the premiere of
Tiefland
was widely covered in all German-language papers and “Maria Kalogeropoulos, Greece’s foremost and most beloved opera singer,” was at the center of the coverage.

After the Allies had landed in Normandy on June 6, the end of the war was at last clearly in sight. In that fateful summer of 1944, Maria had a small part in the only modern opera she ever sang,
O Protomastoras
(
The Master Builder
) by Manolis Kalomiris, and on August 14 she sang Leonora in the Greek premiere of Beethoven’s
Fidelio
in the amphitheater of Herodes Atticus. With the end of the war imminent, Maria sang and portrayed the ultimate victory of love over everything, including fear, tyranny and death. Leonora unlocks Florestan’s fetters, and as the heavenly tune in the oboe begins, she can only utter half phrases in the background, overwhelmed by joy and love. The audience was just as overwhelmed. Maria’s performances, even the most elaborate and perfected, had and would always have an element of something brewing, a mysterious anticipation of something still to come. At that particular moment, with Athens on edge, expecting some decisive war news, that quality in her performances struck a chord in the audience that drove them wild. Under the cloudless Athenian summer night they cheered, they yelled, they threw their hats in the air. No one could tell whether it was the Greeks or their enemies who cheered the loudest. She never sang Leonora again.

In October the Germans marched out of Athens and the Greek soldiers who had been in Italy with the Free Greek Army came back to a liberated Greece. For nearly a week Athens was delirious, and the Athenians, intoxicated, without any help even from ouzo or retsina, sang, danced and threw flowers at each other in the streets. Maria and Jackie climbed up to the roof of their house, tore up the “occupation money” the Germans had issued and tossed the pieces to the street below, singing Greek anti-German songs. In the background the tension between ELAS, the Communist resistance group, and all the other resistance forces was growing, until at the end of November it boiled over. General Scobie, commander of the British troops, ordered the dissolution of all guerrilla forces; ELAS refused to disband and prepared to fight.

In a few days Maria would be twenty-one. Her father wrote a letter enclosing a hundred dollars but no address. It was the first sign of life from him for six years, and the letter arrived at a time when his younger daughter was at her most confused and uncertain. What should her next step be? A few times she tried to get an answer by reading the cards or even the coffee grounds; she would finish her Turkish coffee, turn her cup upside down and then try to determine what all the different lines left by the grounds meant. Her aunt Pipitsa, who spent hours every day predicting her own and everybody else’s fate, had told her once, but, hard as she tried, she could not remember all the elaborate details.

The day after her twenty-first birthday, on December 3, 1944, fighting broke out in Athens. ELAS and its ancillary Communist groups rose against the government, and in the bloody struggle that followed, Athens nearly fell into Communist hands. The Civil War turned out to be much more bitter and violent than anything Greece, let alone Maria, had experienced during the occupation. Thousands were killed, including Evangelia’s younger brother, Filon. Jackie was staying with Milton when it all happened; Maria was alone with her mother in their apartment, and they lived there in a state of siege for twenty days. It was by far the worst ordeal they had been through, and the solidarity born of misfortune brought them a little closer to each other. They had no way of heating the apartment, no light and very soon no food except for a big box of dried beans that they found in one of the cartons containing their Red Cross rations. All they could hear day and night was the sound of explosions, sirens, the rattle of machine guns and the screams of dying men. For the first time in the last seven years, Maria could neither study nor even sing to herself. They were fast running out of beans and fear was beginning to paralyze her will. Suddenly help came in the form of a small boy with a letter from an officer of the British forces assisting the government against the rebels. A devotee of Maria, he was asking her and her mother to come to the British embassy in Constitution Square. It meant risking stray bullets and jumpy partisans, but they had no option. They took nothing with them except their icons and they made it to safety the day before Christmas. The day after Christmas, Maria and Evangelia, together with all the embassy personnel, stood outside the embassy to see Winston Churchill arrive to thank the staff for their fortitude, before he set off in an armored car for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a meeting with the Greek cabinet.

In the New Year, Maria and Evangelia were taken to the Park Hotel to join Jackie and Milton, and they stayed there until a truce was negotiated on January 13. The task of reconstruction could now begin. And it was awesome: whole towns and villages had been destroyed, tens of thousands had died in the fighting or from starvation, and the currency had collapsed. Back in Patissiou Street, Maria longed to leave Greece, to leave behind the mother who seemed determined to run her life and career, to leave Jackie and Milton, to leave her resentful colleagues at the Athens Opera, to leave the memories of sirens and machine guns. She wanted to start again, but she had no idea where and, still less, how to begin.

The decision was made for her when the Athens Opera announced that it was not renewing her contract. “She has played too active a part in the last months of the occupation,” was the explanation. This was a time, immediately after the bitter Civil War, when appointments and dismissals were decided by ideology and political affiliations, and anyone with no strong political commitment was decreed to have been “on the other side.” Maria had sung for Italian soldiers; she had sung to audiences that included Germans and Italians; she had sung in an opera staged to please the Germans; she had accepted food from many Italian and even some German admirers. At the same time she had ignored many of the conquerors’ rules and defied their orders. She was neither a heroine nor a collaborator. Like the average citizen of an occupied country, she walked the tightrope between self-preservation and a cluster of other higher but less urgent human values. The accusations leveled against her have no foundation in anything other than the expectation—just or unjust—that those with great gifts, and therefore greater opportunities for heroism, should be heroic. But whatever the ideological convictions of those running the Athens Opera, it is not hard to see the accumulated envy of her opera colleagues behind the decision to end Maria’s contract.

As to where she should go now, Elvira de Hidalgo was insistent: it had to be Italy. Throughout the war, de Hidalgo kept reminding her that only in Italy could she expect to find the world fame she craved and which her teacher knew would be hers. Maria, whose respect for de Hidalgo bordered on awe, had not once disregarded her advice. In many ways she was still the obedient, grateful disciple, but, at this turning point in her life, her instinct was pointing her toward America. And Maria’s loyalty to her instinct—even, as she once said, when she could not express or understand it—was unconditional. In vain did de Hidalgo plead with her to reconsider. Maria’s mind was made up.

Her mother was totally unaware of her decision. Early one morning in April 1945, as Maria was pouring their coffee, she said without turning to look at her, “I’m going to America.” So that was that, except for the long interval of hurt silence that followed.

There was one last concert in July to raise money for the trip, one last soprano lead in Karl Millöcker’s
The Beggar Student
in August and one farewell lunch given by the mayor of Piraeus in September. Maria had asked her mother and Jackie to stay away both from the lunch and the farewells on the quay. “I am on my own now, Mother,” she said, and Evangelia knew it would be pointless to resist. Only Elvira de Hidalgo was on the quay to see the
Stockholm
leave that sunny September day. She was saying good-bye to the greatest artist she had come across in her teaching career. The “de Hidalgo” chapter in Maria’s life had, for the time being, come to an end.

4

M
ARIA WAS ABOUT TO LAND IN
America with a hundred dollars in her purse, no idea of where to begin looking for her father and one single operatic contact, the Greek bass Nicola Moscona, who had heard and praised her in Athens. Yet far from feeling terrified, she felt exhilarated. For the first time in her life she had stood up both to her mother and her teacher. She had rejected their authority, accepting full responsibility for her life and, for the moment, she felt the strength and freedom that accompany such acceptance. When she walked down the gangplank onto the pier, her exhilaration made her totally impervious to the fact that her coat was frayed, her pockets nearly empty and friends and relatives nowhere in sight.

As Maria emerged from customs, a man of about sixty with thinning hair and a slight mustache approached her and asked her if she knew a Maria Kalogeropoulos. She fell into her father’s arms and wept for several long minutes before she could get enough breath to ask him how he had found out. He told her, hardly able himself to hold back his tears of joy. He had been reading New York’s Greek-language newspapers every day, and a few days earlier something had made him look down the list of passengers bound for New York on the S.S.
Stockholm
; and there he saw the name of his daughter.

Suddenly Maria had a place to live—a small, modest apartment on West 157 Street—and a father to look after her until the engagements began to come in. After four years of occupation, civil war and deprivation, New York was like a fairyland. For the first few days she floated in a state of childlike astonishment and joy; she could hardly believe that the place was real. The first person she went to see was Dr. Lantzounis. She found her godfather married to an American girl exactly her age, who had been head of the volunteers at his hospital. “God was good to me,” he said to Maria; he had his wife, Sally, success and a growing reputation in his field. Although he did not know or care much about opera, he was full of encouragement and support; more practically, he asked Sally to take Maria shopping for some less shabby clothes. They got on very well together, the two young women wandering around New York.

Maria spent hours walking, with Sally, with her father, or alone, and every few streets she would stop to sample here a cheeseburger, there a pizza, and a few streets later, a pancake or two with maple syrup. “I was hungry as you are hungry when you have not had enough to eat for a long, long time. I ate and ate . . . ,” she remembered years later. Her waistline expanded accordingly, but she was totally unwilling to do anything about it. In certain parts of New York, she found herself surrounded by women who exuded the kind of elegance and style she had seen before only in fashion magazines. Part of her longed to model herself on them, but knowing how far short of the impossible standard she fell, she rejected it altogether, put on even more weight and began to look almost aggressively inelegant.

After four years of relentless work she was suddenly released from the burden of looming engagements and grim efficiency. She threw herself into decorating her room, keeping house, cooking for her father and even bringing sandwiches to the nearby drugstore where he worked. Then, just as the languid, easygoing, caring part of her was beginning to emerge, she pulled back. Decorating and domesticity were beguiling, but she was not going to be beguiled. The absolute singleness of purpose that had been driving her for the past five years asserted itself again, and, while New York was getting ready for Christmas, Maria began the round of agents, studios, directors, fellow singers and impresarios. The response was dismaying.

“I have sung
Tosca, Fidelio, Tiefland, Cavalleria Rusticana
,” she would proudly announce. “Where?” was the invariable response. And all she could say, by way of reply, was “In Athens.” It soon became very clear that fame in an Athenian opera house does not travel well—and certainly not as far as New York. The rejections piled up, each one leaving its residue of bitterness and renewed determination. It was Maria’s first real taste of professional adversity. She had not expected it and was not prepared for it. But Maria Callas, as she called herself again now that she was in New York, knew her value, and if they, whoever
they
might be, did not, time, she was convinced, would set them straight.