Maria Callas

by Arianna Huffington

  After Genoa, Maria spent the whole of June working with Serafin on the creation of one of her greatest roles: Norma. She worked on it with passion right up to the opening night in Florence on November 30. Serafin and she were becoming inseparable. Not only was he spending all his spare time working with her on Norma, but he conducted her in Turandot in Rome at the famous Baths of Caracalla and then returned with her to Verona. Her Turandot at the Arena of Verona erased from the minds of the Veronese any qualifications that her Gioconda of the previous summer may have left. But it was Norma that absorbed Maria, and by comparison, the nine Turandots and the five Aidas that she sang in between were little more than distractions.

  Throughout this intense period, Meneghini, far from being a distraction, was an inexhaustible source of strength. He was always there to listen to her fears about her work, her worries about her reputation, her complaints about her colleagues; he was there to fortify, protect and encourage her. It was as if Maria had only the most fragile shell, so nothing was to touch her save his soothing hand. As for Maria, she obviously cared for him, but what that meant was clear neither to herself nor to those around her. Whether it was clear to Meneghini is difficult to say; what seems certain is that, whatever his doubts may have been about the depth of her feeling for him, he did not behave like someone who felt in any way shortchanged in their relationship. There was, however, a chorus of relatives and old family friends, led by Madame Meneghini, who shouted from the rooftops that their “boy” was not only being shortchanged but used, abused and cruelly exploited by this wily “woman of the stage,” as Mamma Meneghini insisted on calling Maria.

  In July 1948, back in Verona to sing Turandot, Maria found that the Meneghini family’s objections to her had penetrated the Veronese elite, rife with the hard, calculating snobbery of provincial high society. Maria found the atmosphere oppressive and even painful. A rising operatic star, praised and admired, would be expected to find the spectacle of an elderly, straitlaced lady clinging to her middle-aged son amusing, sad, pathetic—anything but painful. Yet Maria found it impossible to remain detached. The woman who was a revolutionary in her art longed for the conventional in her private life. And the Meneghini family was refusing to accept her into their world. “They said,” she remembered with bitterness years later, “that I had only come to Verona to marry a rich man.”

  The truth was that Meneghini, despite his family’s opposition, would have married her at any time during the year they had known each other. His life was becoming increasingly absorbed in hers, and on the strength of the previous year, simply in terms of hours devoted to her work, he was no longer a manufacturer of bricks but Maria Callas’ personal manager. Yet Maria hesitated. “I have met a man who is madly in love with me,” she wrote to her mother soon after she had met Meneghini. “He wants to marry me. I don’t know what to tell him. He is fifty-three; what do you think? He’s very rich and he loves me.” Evangelia was far from enthusiastic at the prospect of Maria marrying a man thirty years her senior, and she said so in no uncertain terms. But her mother’s opinion in the matter was, in truth, of very little concern to Maria. She often asked for advice as a way of exploring her own feelings rather than to be told what to do. She no longer felt that her mother’s approval was essential to her happiness. In short letters with long periods of silence in between, she went on informing her of what was happening, but both the letter writing and the soliciting of her opinion were becoming increasingly mechanical activities. She wrote to her godfather, who wrote back telling her to follow instinct, not arithmetic. He, after all, had married a girl little more than half his age and they were blissfully happy together.

  Maria’s indecision about saying yes to Meneghini was just one instance of her contradictory impulse to drive people away, while suffering panic whenever anyone threatened to desert her. Still, Meneghini was in no great hurry, and Norma and the even more imminent Aida left no spare energy for personal dilemmas. Aida, first in Turin and then in Rovigo, though far too static to be a natural part for Maria, was received warmly and praised lavishly. Renata Tebaldi, whom Maria had briefly met when she was singing Isolde in Venice, was in the audience in Rovigo; at the end of the performance, Tebaldi’s loud and distinct “Brava!” stood out from the cheers of the audience. And it was Tebaldi’s salute that gave Maria her greatest joy and satisfaction.

  That was on October 19, 1948; and now, with a great sigh of relief, she could look forward to a stretch of forty clear days until November 30, Florence and her first Norma—the role of the Druid priestess, which more than any other became closely associated with her name. November 1948 was spent entirely on Norma. Even Meneghini, who was by now used to her, could not help observing that there was something almost fierce about her absorption in the Druid priestess.

  Maria sang Norma ninety times in eight countries—more often than any other part in her repertoire of forty-seven roles. “Maybe Norma is something like my own character,” she said in 1961, when she was totally absorbed, no longer by Norma and singing, but by Onassis. “The grumbling woman who is too proud to show her real feelings and proves at the end exactly what she is. She is a woman who cannot be nasty or unjust in a situation for which she herself is fundamentally to blame. With Norma I work as if I had never sung it before. It is the most difficult role in my repertoire; the more you do it the less you want to.” But in 1948, Maria did not simply want, she longed, to do Norma. It is hard to describe the intensity of feeling that was pressed into those forty days. “It will never be as good as it is now in my mind unsung,” she said one morning to Serafin, as they were about to start rehearsing. And it is true that very rarely—and more often at rehearsals than at performances—did she have the satisfaction of achieving in reality what she had created in her mind.

  Bellini knew that Italians went to the opera house for the song and the singer, and for little else, but in Norma, the greatest of his operas, he gave them much more than the simple pleasures of luxurious sounds and sustained high notes. Each aria contributes to the development of the action, and the way the arias blend with the recitatives contributes to the unique power of Norma among Bellini’s operas. Maria spent a large part of the forty days working on the recitatives. “Find the rhythm and proportion,” Serafin told her, “by singing them over to yourself as if you are talking.” She had an uncanny architectural sense which told her just which word in a musical sentence to emphasize and just what syllable within that word to bring out. “It is a deep mystery,” said Nicola Rescigno, who was for a time Maria’s favorite conductor, “why a girl born into a musically unsophisticated family and raised in an atmosphere devoid of operatic tradition, should have been blessed with the ability to sing the perfect recitative.”

  The technical demands of Norma went far beyond the recitative. They included complete mastery of trills, scales and all the bel canto ornamentation; great breath control to sustain Bellini’s long, arching melodies; and the kind of stamina that would make it possible to remain onstage for three-quarters of the opera, with flights of lyricism one moment followed by dramatic outbursts the next. Maria was determined to meet all these demands. And she did—at first with relative ease then gradually with more effort and pain, until, at her penultimate performance as Norma at the Paris Opéra in 1965, she was too exhausted even to change into her last-act costume: the red-and-gold cloak for the final act had to be put on over the costume she was already wearing.

  Yet in 1948, as Maria prepared to sing the role, she knew that her technical command, despite the endless hours she had devoted to it, was only the foundation on which her Norma was to be built. Step by step she has described how she created each new role: “You read a role and in the beginning you’re enthused, you’re exalted. . . . Then you take the music and you learn it as though you were in the conservatoire. In other words, exactly as it’s written, nothing more and nothing less, which is what I call straitjacketing. Having broken this down completely, then you can take wings. . . .” Norma, far
beyond being a great technical challenge for her, was a supreme challenge of heart and mind. Wagner described it as “all heart, closely, intimately linked to the words.” Mother, warrior, lover, leader, Norma is a Druid priestess who against her holy oath gives way to her passion for a Roman proconsul, Pollione, has two children by him and in the process of discovering his betrayal and love for Adalgisa, a virgin of the temple, experiences and gives expression to the full range of human emotions—rage, hatred, jealousy, fear, despair, tenderness and finally a self-sacrificial exultation that leads her to offer herself as victim on the pyre in Adalgisa’s place. “She seems very strong, very ferocious at times. Actually she is not, even though she roars like a lion,” said Maria, comparing Norma yet again to herself.

  At the Teatro Comunale in Florence on November 30, 1948, there were no such character comparisons. The comparisons were instead with Ponselle and with Pasta and the effect was, as Stendhal wrote of Pasta, “an instantaneous hypnotic effect upon the soul of the spectator.” It was a performance that brought out all the lyricism in Bellini’s music, and made it possible to understand why his contemporaries compared him to Chopin. Maria was elated by the response of the audience and the critics, but for her, the achievement had been far short of her ideal: “I can’t wait to sing Norma again,” she told Meneghini at the end of her second and last performance in Florence. The next day Maria left for Venice, and Titta—the name to which Giovanni Battista Meneghini now answered—for Verona.

  Once in Venice, exhausted but too excited to notice, she threw herself into her second Wagnerian role: Brünnhilde. Die Walküre, with Maria Callas as Brünnhilde, and Bellini’s I Puritani with Margherita Carosio, one of Italy’s leading sopranos, as Elvira, were the two major new productions of the 1948–49 Venice season, and Serafin was conducting both. Maria spent most of the time, when they were not formally rehearsing, working either by herself or with Serafin at the maestro’s suite at the Hotel Regina. One evening, tired of practicing the Ho-jo-to-hos of Brünnhilde, she started sight-reading and playing about with the music of Elvira. Serafin’s wife came back from talking on the telephone in the next room and stood motionless in the doorway listening to Maria sight-read one of Elvira’s arias. The phone call had been from a desperate Serafin who exactly ten days before the opening night of I Puritani had lost his Elvira. Margherita Carosio had succumbed to a particularly nasty form of influenza that had spread through Venice, and she had had to cancel all her performances. So far the arduous search for an alternative had proved entirely fruitless. With her husband’s anxious voice still ringing in her ears, Madame Serafin could hardly believe it when she walked into the living room to hear Maria singing Elvira. She said nothing except, “Tullio is on his way here. Will you do me a favor? When he comes in will you please sing that for him?” When Serafin arrived, Maria did precisely that. He made no response. After all, the next day, January 8, was Maria’s opening night as Brünnhilde.

  The following morning at ten, Maria was still in bed when she was called on the telephone: “Please put on your robe and come down,” demanded the maestro.

  “I haven’t even washed yet,” protested Maria. “It will take me about half an hour.”

  “No, no, no, come down as you are.” And of course she went. At that time she could deny Serafin nothing.

  “Sing,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Sing what you sang to me yesterday.”

  There was another man there, whom Maria, the sleep not entirely gone from her eyes, recognized as the musical director of the opera house. Maria leafed through the score and, as instructed, sight-read the aria. Then she stood there perplexed and slightly embarrassed, watching the two men whispering to each other. Finally Serafin acknowledged her presence.

  “Well, Maria,” he said, “you are going to do this role in a week.”

  “I’m going to do what in a week?” she exclaimed, unable to believe what she was hearing.

  “You are going to sing Puritani in a week. I will arrange for you to have time to study.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I have three more Walküre’s. I can’t do it. . . . It’s ridiculous. . . . I really can’t.”

  “I guarantee that you can,” were Serafin’s last words on the subject, uttered with the full authority of experience and reputation.

  Maria was instantly convinced: “Maestro, my best I can do. More than my best I cannot promise.” She remembered years later that she was thinking: “Well, if they are crazy enough to believe I can do it . . . I am still young, and when you are growing you have to gamble.”

  She did gamble. The aria she sang was all she knew of the part, and even this she had only sight-read. She did not even know the opera’s plot, and it would be hard to find two parts in opera more different than Elvira and Brünnhilde. She sang the mighty, dramatic declamations of Brünnhilde on Wednesday and Friday and spent all the time in between on Elvira’s trills, runs and roulades. Sunday morning was the dress rehearsal of I Puritani, Sunday evening was the final performance of Walküre. Maria sang one of the highest coloratura parts and a couple of hours later she was singing, admittedly not in the original German but in Italian, one of the most formidable dramatic roles in all opera.

  Two days later, on January 19, 1949, at the opening night of I Puritani, the unbelievers had no option but to believe. It is true that Maria had memorized the music but not quite all the words, yet nobody seemed to mind or even to notice that the prompter kept feeding her lines. When the time came to sing the aria “Son vergin vezzosa” (“I am a charming virgin”), she misunderstood him and sang instead “Son vergin viziosa” (“I am a vicious virgin”). But given her genius, to criticize a few small mishaps would have been like complaining that there was not enough salt and lemon to go with the loaves and fishes for the five thousand. Maria’s achievement was indeed seen as a miracle—a miracle that everybody except Serafin had ruled out as impossible until it happened. “What she did in Venice,” Franco Zeffirelli said after her death, “was really incredible. You need to be familiar with opera to realize the size of her achievement that night. It was as if someone asked Birgit Nilsson, who is famous for her great Wagnerian voice, to substitute overnight for Beverly Sills, who is one of the top coloratura sopranos of our time.”

  Maria became the talk of Italy, her feat described in hushed tones as unique and unprecedented. In fact, three-quarters of a century earlier, the great Lilli Lehmann had performed a similar feat, but this had been relegated to history where it could not detract from the sensation caused by Maria’s triumph. The gamble had not merely succeeded: it marked the turning point in Maria’s career. A singer among singers was being transformed into the singer of the century. From now on the only thing that would interrupt Maria’s steady rise to fame would be the difference between the lesser and greater triumphs and the larger and smaller scandals with which her career and her life were increasingly punctuated. For Maria, the ecstatic notices were, at last, the certificate of acceptance for which she longed.

  There was, however, no vein of complacency in her and no resting on yesterday’s laurels. A couple of days after her last Elvira in Venice, she was once again donning Brünnhilde’s armor—this time in Palermo. A week later she was in Naples wearing the icy mask of Turandot. She sang four Turandots, and then immediately left for Rome where on February 26 she sang her third and last Wagnerian role: Kundry in Parsifal. Kundry was not a major part in Callas’ repertoire. On November 25, 1950, Maria was to sing her for the last time in a radio broadcast, again in Rome. That performance was recorded, and we can feel from the recording the special drama that Maria brought even to a role that never really became her own. Both Kundry the seductress and Kundry the woebegone come alive as they did on that first night in Rome. Zeffirelli, who was in Rome designing As You Like It, remembers going to the wardrobe where his costumes were being made the day after the Parsifal dress rehearsal: “There was no way to get a seamstress to think about my work. They were all fu
lly occupied, around masses of chiffon of all colors, and they were all talking about this phenomenal new singer they had heard the night before. I took a sudden hatred for this woman, depriving me of a day’s work, but, nevertheless, that night I went to hear her sing Kundry. . . . Like thousands of other people, I was immediately taken by the extraordinary quality of this warm personality and the sound of that voice. I remember my ears were absolutely buzzing—the power of this woman and the presence. . . . There was something unique happening.”

  Spring arrived and with it a contract from the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, but that was not until May. In the meantime, Italy, fascinated by the reports of Maria’s feats in Venice, longed to hear her demonstrate her virtuosity and versatility. So Radio Italiana invited her to sing a program of Verdi, Wagner and Bellini arias. That was in Turin on March 7. A few months later, in November 1949, Maria made her first commercial recording for Cetra, a selection of Wagner and Bellini arias on three twelve-inch records.

  She had a month to prepare herself for her South American trip, and the realization that for the first time in two years she and Titta would be separated by thousands of miles forced her to focus on the subject of their marriage. She decided to leave Italy for Argentina as Maria Meneghini Callas. Meneghini was granted a dispensation from the Church to marry outside the Catholic faith, and Maria, elated and excited, looked forward to marriage and to future triumphs with Titta at her side. On April 21, 1949, in the Chiesa dei Filippini in Verona, Titta and Maria became husband and wife. It was a very simple, almost sparse, wedding with no one there to represent either the Meneghini or the Callas families: just the priest, the sacristan and two of Meneghini’s friends for witnesses.