Maria Callas

by Arianna Huffington

  The first setback, particularly painful because it was utterly unexpected, came when Nicola Moscona, the famous bass who had been so impressed by her in Athens, refused to see her, pleading endless engagements. She persevered and finally did see him with a specific request: an introduction to Arturo Toscanini, at the time the reigning monarch of classical music in New York. Moscona refused point-blank to bother the great Toscanini with one more young, ambitious, fat soprano. Maria’s only comfort was to promise herself that she would never, ever speak to him again. (In 1950, in fact, Moscona sang Oroveso to her Norma in Mexico, and it is hard to imagine that their exchanges were limited to those between the High Priestess and her father.)

  One of her hardest trials in New York was her meeting with the great tenor Giovanni Martinelli who had been a stalwart of the Met for over thirty years. He listened to her carefully and his verdict was a blow. “You have a good voice,” said the great Martinelli, looking down from the top of the operatic Olympus, “but you need many more lessons.” Here was the star of the Athens opera being treated like a vaguely promising schoolgirl by a man who occupied one of the chief places in her musical pantheon. Ever since she had arrived in New York, Maria had kept up with all that was going on in the world of music, especially with everything that was happening at the Met. Reading and dreaming about all these glorious opening nights, she had begun to feel more and more like an outdistanced runner. Martinelli made her feel that she was not in the race at all.

  The hurt must have been very real, but Maria’s response to all blows was to refuse to acknowledge even to herself that she had been hit. Not showing that she had been hurt was one of her great talents; she would do anything rather than face her pain. Later, the layers of hurt and resentment dammed the flow of life in her, stunted the responses of her heart and separated her from happiness or contentment, but in 1945 such an attitude of resignation was unthinkable. Whatever Moscona, Martinelli and all the others thought and said, Maria’s overwhelming sense of purpose remained. At that time in her life, success was the only thing. There was a perverse kind of pleasure in being in a hurry, in having some urgent appointment to keep, even if it turned out to lead to another rejection.

  Maria began 1946 in a belligerent mood, prepared to meet new adversities and fresh disappointments with the fortitude of the hard-pressed but well-armed soldier. Her fanatical determination was her shield, but her greatest weapon was her unyielding belief in her worth as an artist. At last, toward the end of January, she met two people who shared this belief. Eddie Bagarozy was a New York lawyer who had been dabbling in opera all his life. His wife, Louise Caselotti, was a mezzo-soprano with a greater actual experience of Hollywood musicals than of opera, but with a very good reputation in New York as a singing teacher and coach. Maria auditioned for them and instantly found herself with two friends and protectors who believed in her talent and liked her company. Their Riverside Drive apartment was to become within a few days Maria’s second home, as much a refuge from her father as de Hidalgo’s had been from her mother.

  It was not that Maria was not getting along with her father, but she was tired of his inability to share or even understand her operatic dreams. Opera bored him and all the technical twaddle about it bored him even more. And as there was no telephone in the apartment, Maria had to make all her phone calls pleading for auditions from the drugstore where her father worked, to the accompaniment of his “I told you so” headshakings. It was becoming exasperating. With the arrival of the Bagarozys on the scene, Maria at last had two people with whom she could talk endlessly about the one thing she really cared for. She also had a telephone.

  She would arrive at Riverside Drive early in the morning, work most of the day there, alone or with Louise, and often have dinner with her and Eddie. Once again she was feeling the vitality that comes from being the center of attention. She had experienced this in Greece, and in New York she had begun to suffer from withdrawal symptoms. Although a crowd of two is not exactly a substitute for a capacity audience at the Met, the effect was unmistakable: Maria was feeling alert and full of hope.

  She was in just such a mood when she received a phone call from the office of the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. Edward Johnson had finally agreed to see her. What happened next was to become part of the Callas legend. Edward Johnson heard her and offered her a contract for the leading roles in two productions of the 1946–47 season: Beethoven’s Fidelio and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. The contract was offered on the spot, and, to the stupefaction of the general manager and other members of the Met staff present, it was turned down. Maria Callas, at the age of twenty-two, was refusing to make her debut at the Met as Leonora and Butterfly. The decision was not as mad as it seemed. She did not want to sing Fidelio in English, and very understandably she did not want to parade her 180 pounds in the role of a fragile, fifteen-year-old Japanese girl. It was nonetheless an amazing response, an immediate and intuitive decision. Surely no opera singer who has made the rounds of the New York operatic world and has been turned away every time draws a balance sheet of pros and cons, and then decides against an opportunity to make her debut at the Met.

  Everybody jumped on her. What did she think she was doing? Had she gone mad? Eddie Bagarozy, who had read enough of his pocket Freud to know about one’s unconscious usurping one’s reason, stayed away from his office the next day and spent a large part of it tiptoeing around Maria, asking her if she were suffering from a death wish, if she perhaps did not want to succeed, if she had, after all, given up on life—and other equally pertinent questions. There was nothing covert or ambiguous about her mother’s letter which was dispatched as soon as the news reached her: “Have I suffered all these years for you so that you can go and throw away such a golden chance?” At a time like this her father’s lack of interest in her operatic career was a positive relief.

  “I’m sure I’m right,” insisted Maria. “My voices have told me so.” Maria had taken to referring to her instinct as “my voices,” at first in complete earnest but gradually, as she began noticing eyebrows being raised, half-jokingly. Whatever name she may have given it, her decision to turn down the Met contract was a victory of instinct and intuition over logic and reason. It also showed the kind of trust in life which at this time colored all her decisions.

  Maria may have felt and known that she was right, but as she began once again knocking on doors that would not open, she would have had to be superhuman not to begin doubting the wisdom of her decision. The process of doubt and self-recrimination began after her audition with Gaetano Merola, impresario of the San Francisco Opera.

  “You are young, Maria,” he said avuncularly. “Go and make your career in Italy and then I’ll sign you up.”

  “Thank you,” she replied coldly, with the directness that was to become legendary, “but once I have made my career in Italy I will no longer need you.”

  Maria’s postmortem on all the rejections turned out to be a good deal more painful than the rejections themselves. She found herself looking back in regret and self-reproach. She was to say later that she was her own sternest critic. It was no platitude: she was, to a degree that was draining and at times even self-destructive.

  It must have been at the end of 1946 that Maria finally admitted to herself that, despite the defiant “I’m on my own now, Mother,” she missed and needed her mother. At least it was then that Maria wrote to ask her, almost pleading with her, to come to America. The bond of dependence and defiance that tied her to Evangelia was so strong that she was suddenly overcome by the sense that nothing important could really happen to her unless her mother was there. Since Evangelia could not find the money for the journey, Maria tried to get the money from her father, but George, who was earning only a modest salary, did not seem prepared to make the kind of sacrifices that would be needed to bring his far-from-beloved wife to America. Maria, not easily defeated, went to ask her godfather, who readily lent her the money for her mother’s trip.


  So on Christmas Eve, via Marseilles, Paris and London, Evangelia arrived in New York on the Queen Elizabeth. Her husband and daughter were there to meet her. Maria was delighted and, even more important, relieved. She had found her father a caring and well-meaning, but at times a very exasperating, companion. He could be maddeningly lethargic and lamentably silent; he was sluggishly indifferent to life outside the drugstore and his daughter, and even those interests were limited. Certainly he could be supportive, occasionally even enterprising and high-spirited, but most of the time his provincial narrowness had a dampening effect on Maria’s enthusiasm. It made her long for her mother’s burning ambition; she had forgotten with distance and time how much she had been scorched by it.

  That Christmas of 1946, the first Christmas in nine years that the three of them had spent together, was a disastrous reunion. George’s extramarital adventures seemed to have resolved themselves into a steady relationship with Alexandra Papajohn, a homely and unassuming woman a few years younger than himself, who many years later was to become his second wife. Evangelia slept in Maria’s bedroom from the first night, thus leaving no one in doubt as to the terms on which she had returned to her “husband’s” home. She came back playing the part of the wronged, self-sacrificing mother who had seen her children through everything while her good-for-nothing husband idled his life away. It was not a part designed to bring about real family feeling, but at first they all tried to keep up the fiction of intense family affection. After a while none of them could respond, unable to create such feeling when it was clear that there was not an ounce of love between the parents. Maria, having discovered that it was not easy to live in a world that did not contain her mother, was now discovering once again that it was even less easy to live in a world that did.

  Her mother had been her closest collaborator and at the same time her most resented adversary. Maria thought that she had missed the first, that she needed to lean on her mother’s strength and draw on her mother’s faith in her. But she had missed the enemy just as much as the collaborator. The enemy made it possible to avoid facing the conflicts and divisions within herself by projecting the cause of all her difficulties onto her mother. She had always blamed her mother for pushing her relentlessly on, safely ignoring the fact that she was her own worst slave driver. Yet the guilt she felt whenever she reduced the pressure on herself, even to the extent of spending an hour less vocalizing than she thought she should, was sometimes overwhelming, and guilt would invariably drive her to work twice as hard the next day.

  Among Maria’s other grievances was her loathing of Evangelia’s philistine values and inhibitions—an effective way of denying elements of these despised qualities in herself. But she allowed her mother to persuade her to start going to church again, a practice she had given up since her arrival in New York. On many a Sunday morning mother and daughter, dressed in somber black or blue, would set out for the Church of St. Spyridon to pay their respects to a being in whom Evangelia had never really believed and to whom Maria prayed for success with a primitive reluctance to leave untried any possible source of assistance.

  Toward the end of 1946 she at last had something specific to pray for. Bagarozy, largely fired by his enthusiasm for Maria, had decided, with the help of an Italian agent, Ottavio Scotto, to launch the most ambitious venture of his life: reviving the Chicago Opera and creating a new company for it, the United States Opera Company, with the specific purpose of bringing some of the best European singers to America. Here Eddie’s personality and flair came into their own. He did not have enough money to hire a rehearsal hall, but he managed to assemble in New York some of the best talent available from European opera houses, including Max Lorenz, one of the greatest Wagnerian tenors of the day, Hilde and Anny Konetzni from the Vienna Opera, and Tullio Serafin’s son-in-law, Nicola Rossi-Lemeni. The curtain raiser was to be Puccini’s Turandot, and the conductor, Sergio Failoni, in the absence of a rehearsal hall, had to rehearse the entire company, chorus and all, in the Bagarozys’ three-room apartment on Riverside Drive, with their dog Baby providing some interesting accompaniments at unexpected moments.

  Eddie Bagarozy had that rare, intangible gift that would have made him a marvelous leader of a mountaineering expedition. In his presence people became at once more adventurous and more determined—more adventurous because there was an audacity in his own nature that immediately communicated itself to others, and more determined because behind the ebullience there was a deep commitment to whatever he undertook and a still deeper commitment to whatever he initiated. While the opera company was rehearsing enthusiastically in New York, the Chicago papers were full of excitement about this great operatic event. Soon the excitement had spread throughout the American musical world. Eddie had managed to get both the cognoscenti and the press excited. To the cognoscenti he offered Turandot, Puccini’s last opera, not heard in America for two decades. And for three months, he had given the press, with its passion for sensations and enigmas, dribs and drabs of information about the “mystery” Greek to be unveiled in the title role.

  As the rehearsals continued in Chicago, Bagarozy became more and more convinced that his “mystery” Greek soprano was to be a sensational overnight discovery. As for Maria, elated by the scent of success, she fully expected Turandot to be a brilliant harvest after the fallow year just coming to an end. Suddenly all the resistances and rejections of the last eighteen months seemed to heighten her present sense of exhilaration. Turandot had become the stuff of her waking life, more real than anything else. When she was not rehearsing, she was being fitted with her mock-Chinese costumes. And when she was doing neither, she was singing Turandot in her head and revolving in her mind the character of the Chinese Princess who puts to death her suitors who fail to pass the test of her three riddles.

  Everyone who was present during those rehearsals remembers Maria’s Turandot to this day: at the age of twenty-three she had managed to capture both the imperious coldness and cruelty of the Oriental Princess and the fire and sensuality that are burning underneath. On the surface, Maria’s potential for eroticism seemed so faint and tenuous that Louise had argued vigorously against her husband’s choice of Turandot as the vehicle for revealing Maria to an astonished world. But Eddie, who had from the beginning been fascinated—too fascinated for Louise’s liking—by Maria’s complex personality, had sensed that the womanliness and the passion were all there underneath the ice of Princess Turandot and the drabness of the young Maria.

  The American public was not meant to be astonished—at least, however, not yet. Without warning, the American Chorus Singers’ Union came up with a demand for a deposit, to guarantee payment to the members of the chorus, that Bagarozy simply could not meet. He tried to raise the money. The opening date that had been announced and advertised everywhere for January 6 was postponed for a week, for two weeks, then until January 27. The enterprise that had started with such an impetuous rush suddenly began to lose momentum. The union hierarchy was impervious to Bagarozy’s charms and the angels began to lose faith. The demoralization spread even faster than the excitement Bagarozy had managed to generate, until he had no option left but to declare bankruptcy both for the enterprise and for himself. The Chicago Opera House organized a benefit concert to raise funds for the artists’ return journey, and Eddie began selling everything he had—his car, his wife’s jewels, his house on Long Island—to pay some of his debts.

  Maria was adrift once again. Objectively she was back where she started; psychologically it was much worse. Recognition was snatched from her on the brink of success. Even her mock-Chinese costumes were taken away from her. But her instinct for survival, her deep, almost mystic, patience, carried her through. Also, being near Eddie made the collapse much easier to take. Sunk beneath demands from creditors, process servers, singers and musicians, he was still able to convince those around him that he was the guardian of some prodigious treasure.

  On February 6, 1947, Maria returned to New York with Nic
ola Rossi-Lemeni. The first morning back found her at her usual hour at the Bagarozys’ apartment going over parts with Louise; the United States Opera Company and Puccini’s Turandot belonged to the past. Maria was looking ahead to the future, waiting for the lightning to strike. And it did. Giovanni Zenatello, the famous tenor who was now artistic director of the Verona Festival, was in New York looking for a soprano for the title role of Ponchielli’s Gioconda. He was vacillating over the choice between Zinka Milanov and Herva Nelli, but Rossi-Lemeni, who had already signed a contract to sing at his festival the following year, convinced him that he should not make up his mind until he had heard Maria. Maria arrived with Louise for her audition at Zenatello’s apartment on Central Park West.

  With Louise at the piano she sang the aria “Suicidio” from La Gioconda. She had hardly begun singing when Zenatello, unable to contain his excitement at what he was hearing, rushed to the piano, turned the pages of the score to the passionate duet between Enzo and Gioconda, and despite his seventy years, he began singing it with Maria with a passion and intensity he had forgotten he possessed. The offer to sing Gioconda at the Verona Festival was almost an anticlimax after what Zenatello described as “not so much an audition as a revelation.”

  Maria started getting ready for her journey to Verona with the excitement of a young girl preparing for her wedding. Both Evangelia, who worshiped “the done thing,” and Maria, who to a very large extent shared her mother’s creed, wanted Maria to arrive in Verona with a complete trousseau of dresses, shoes and handbags, so that she could conquer Europe offstage as well as on. But the combined funds made available to them by father and godfather only produced two suits and one dress—all in the straitjacketed style that mother and daughter regarded as appropriately restrained elegance and which for many years was the hallmark of Maria’s taste. The minitrousseau ready, Evangelia set herself the task of drawing a list of “thirteen points” of advice for her daughter, which included the reminder that life was full of disappointments and ended with God’s commandment: “Honour thy father and thy mother.”