Maria Callas

by Arianna Huffington

  Evangelia was in her element. Well aware of the approving glances of her fellow passengers, she basked in their admiration. She was wearing a closely fitted gray suit and a black felt hat with a long brown feather, and she felt more elegant and more assured than she remembered feeling for years. The hat, bought after numerous shopping expeditions for the express purpose of impressing her family, had to have half its brown feather cut off a few days later, after it had nearly put out the eye of an Athenian bus driver. But for the moment the stylish length of the feather only attracted more attention to the elegant lady in gray and her awkward young companion.

  It was night when they arrived in Athens. They were met at the station by Evangelia’s three sisters, her three brothers and Jackie. Maria’s grandmother, who was ill in bed, was waiting for them at her house beyond the Acropolis where Evangelia and her daughters were to stay for a month before moving to their own house. Uncles and aunts, cousins, uncles’ colleagues and aunts’ friends, neighbors and strangers who cared to stop and listen, however briefly, knew by now that the thirteen-year-old Maria, her voice and her career were the reason the family had packed up and arrived in Greece. Tales of prizes Maria had won, vocal feats Maria had accomplished and audiences Maria had conquered were being busily told and retold, and expectations stood precariously high.

  Evangelia aimed to mobilize not only all her relatives, but everyone she could lay her hands on, in the cause of her daughter’s career. The day after she arrived in Athens Maria’s life became that of an auditioning machine, producing songs on demand for anyone whom her mother could persuade to sit down and listen. It is little wonder that she contracted such a distaste for singing socially on demand that when, during that celebrated first cruise on Aristotle Onassis’ yacht Christina, Winston Churchill pleaded with her to do him the honor of singing something, she astounded everyone present by coldly replying that she would not.

  Evangelia had pinned all her hopes on her family’s help. But the family was not impressed. For a start, singing was relegated to a very low rung on the social ladder unless it was obviously successful. So they cautioned prudence, they rebuked immoderate ambition, they scorned quixotic dreams. Good voices and musical talent were no news to them. After all, didn’t Aunt Sophia play the guitar beautifully? And how about Aunt Pipitsa on the mandolin? And Uncle Filon and Uncle Efthimios, what voices they had! Uncle Efthimios was the encouraging exception: “Don’t push her too fast. She’s only a little girl,” he kept telling his sister. “She’s in a new country with a new family. Let her get used to us. Then I’ll arrange an audition for her.”

  While finding people to listen to her daughter, Evangelia was also busy moving from her mother’s home to a furnished house nearby. At the beginning of September 1937, Efthimios, through his contacts with the Royal Theater, arranged an audition for his niece with Maria Trivella, who taught at the National Conservatory in Athens. On the day of the audition Maria was panic-stricken—the same kind of feeling that would grip her almost invariably before she went onstage. “Before I sing I know nothing, don’t remember the part, don’t know where I start. It is panic, not knowing one thing before you go onstage.” The morning before the audition, Maria’s panic was compounded by her mother’s terror. Evangelia’s hands were trembling as she helped Maria into her white organdy dress and brushed her bangs. Still more anxiety surrounded the arrival of Maria’s grandmother and two of her aunts who, together with Jackie, Uncle Efthimios and, of course, her mother were to accompany Maria to the audition.

  Once she started singing, Maria was free of her own and her family’s fears. “This is talent!” exclaimed Maria Trivella, and promptly agreed to take Maria as a pupil for both singing and French. She did much more than that; to help Maria get a scholarship from the conservatory, she conspired with Evangelia to falsify her age. The authorities, happily accepting that Maria was sixteen and not thirteen, agreed to pay for all her music lessons.

  Maria Trivella was not just Maria’s first teacher, she was like a surrogate mother. From now on, Evangelia’s role as the driving force behind Maria was secondary. Maria was becoming increasingly self-propelled, though at no time in her life was she to be self-sufficient. Always she needed at her side someone who believed in her, encouraged and sustained her. It had to be someone sufficiently convinced of her gift and greatness to reflect them back to her; and she went on feeding off the faith that she herself had inspired. Maria’s professional life could be loosely divided into separate periods, each named after its chief sustaining figure: the Trivella period, the de Hidalgo period, the Serafin period, the Meneghini period, the Visconti period, the Zeffirelli period and the di Stefano period.

  The Trivella period was the dream period. The more confident of her talent Maria grew, the more she dreamed of where it could lead. She had never worked so hard. Very often she had her meals in Trivella’s studio; when she was at home, her mother would bring them to her room and she would go on working with her plate on her lap. There were no distractions in her life, and all her energies were poured, in one uninterrupted flow, into her voice and her singing. She was so utterly obsessed by her career that at times she seemed totally oblivious to everything else. She never wondered then, and for many years never had to ask herself, what was driving her on. All she knew was that she had a passionate need to set herself apart by being admired and singled out, and in the early years it was this struggle to succeed that dominated her life. It obtruded even on the peace of her occasional days of rest, and prevented her from feeling pleasure and pride in herself by making her focus all the time on what remained to be conquered.

  In those years in Athens she gave the impression of concentrated willpower and, at times, chilly resolution, which was hardly likely to endear her to her fellow students at the conservatory. “Her earnestness was oppressive,” said one of them, looking back on that time. As for Maria, her need to shine and to outshine meant that she based her relationship to the other students on the same illusion on which she was later to base her professional life. Convinced that when others came forward, she herself went back, she fancied herself locked in combat with the world, continually afraid of seeing her own success overshadowed by the success of others.

  It was as if she had joined forces with her mother in pushing aside the needs of the deprived child in her in favor of the nascent prima donna. Yet the needs of the child for love, and for space in which to grow, were not extinguished. Suppressed, they festered and turned instead into bitterness and anger. And the more they were suppressed, the longer the shadow they cast. It was as if the accumulation of resentment and anger had become a quality of her being, to be seen in her eyes and heard in her breathing.

  Later on, at the height of her transformation, she acquired a certain calmness, a certain silence—accessories of the regal dignity which she strove to project right to the end of her life. As a close friend of hers put it, however: “When I was near Maria, her appearance may have been of calm and silence, but if I sat near her quietly, without talking, I never felt calm or silence coming from her. Deep down the turmoil was hidden. On the surface everything was quiet; underneath I felt the volcano getting ready to explode at any moment.”

  With the little girl in her kept quiet by ever-increasing quantities of food, Maria could, relatively undistracted, dedicate herself to the realization of the artistic greatness she sensed was hers, and the pursuit of the golden chalice of fame and success that she knew must follow. Madame Trivella was her main teacher and guide during these first two years, but she was not the only one. George Karakandas taught her acting at the conservatory and David supplemented her singing lessons at home. George Karakandas was paid; David wasn’t. George Karakandas was a well-respected and established teacher; David was totally unknown. But in later years, Maria would say that she owed more to David than she owed to most of her conservatory teachers. She would spend hours watching fascinated while David, perched in his cage, almost burst his feathered throat singing. She would p
ut her fingers on her throat and watch David’s quiver, and every few moments she would break into amazed cries of “How does he do it?” She felt he had a secret she could snatch from him. So she kept singing with him, trying to control her voice as he controlled his song, until exhausted she had to stop while David sang merrily on. Maria had lost her race with David, but one morning she found her revenge when, soaring through an aria from Lucia, she saw Elmina suddenly tumble from her perch to the floor of the cage. Elmina, Maria’s first casualty, had fainted, apparently unable to withstand the power of the young girl’s vocalizing. After the fainting scene had been repeated twice more while Maria was singing, Madame Evangelia, tired of pouring cognac and water down Elmina’s beak, resolved that Maria would never again sing one note until Elmina had first been banished to the most isolated room in the house.

  All this vocalizing, the hard work and sleepless nights were rewarded when, a few days before her fifteenth birthday, Maria made her stage debut singing Santuzza in a student production of Cavalleria Rusticana. She had determined that she would win the first prize in opera at the conservatory, and she knew that the decision rested on her performance in Cavalleria. Her fighting instinct had been fully aroused. With typical exaggeration, she told her mother that if she did not get the first prize, she would give up the stage. She did win, and the applause and the success continued to ring in her ears. They were the first taste of what, magnified and magnified again, was to become a regular occurrence, though never a routine experience.

  “I work: therefore I am,” she told Kenneth Harris in an interview for The Observer thirty years later. “What do you do if you do not work?” In Athens just before the Second World War, Maria was not only happiest when she worked, she virtually existed only when she worked. She knew that when she was not working she was least happy, least secure and most prone to start comparing herself with Jackie. Jackie, at twenty-two, slim, tall, flattered and admired, had also acquired a highly eligible escort—Milton Embiricos, son of a very rich and well-established shipping family. In the summer of 1939 Jackie and Milton became engaged. Only two months earlier, Mussolini had marched into Albania, and Greece for the first time had a Fascist neighbor. But the rumbles of the gathering storm were ignored in Greece as elsewhere; there were no thoughts of war in the family party celebrating the engagement with a trip to Corfu on Milton’s yacht Hélène. Milton put them up at the Grand Hotel and showered all sorts of luxuries on them. Evangelia was in heaven. Maria was in despair. Jackie was lost to her, ecstatically happy and about to be taken away. And as if this was not enough, Maria, a fat and awkward fifteen-year-old, felt ignored and out of place. She could not wait for that “special” holiday to come to an end. She looked at her sister’s social life as one standing on a cold pavement looks through the window at pleasant firelit intimacies. She felt lonely and was frightened by her own loneliness.

  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 oper
a, 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.