Medea was a replacement for Scarlatti’s Mitridate Eupatore. After Maria’s Medea in Florence, the public response was so overwhelming that Ghiringhelli felt he had almost no option but to include Medea in the forthcoming season; Maria’s Medea demanded to be heard. For Margherita Wallmann, who was directing the production, the last-minute switch was a nightmare. As if all her problems with sets, costumes and staging were not enough, ten days before opening night Victor de Sabata fell ill. Despair crept over La Scala. Suddenly Ghiringhelli saw a savior in the shape of Leonard Bernstein, who was just coming to the end of a long concert tour in Italy. At the age of thirty-five, Bernstein had written musicals and one symphony, he had conducted the New York Philharmonic, he had taught at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, but he had never worked in an opera house, he had never even heard of Cherubini’s Medea, he was exhausted from his Italian tour, he was suffering from acute bronchitis—and he had ten days before opening night. But he fell in love with Cherubini’s score at a glance, and to the absolute delight of everybody at La Scala, he said yes. His two main worries after he had said yes were the decomposing first-edition score with which La Scala had provided him and his impending meeting with Maria—especially since he wanted to cut out one of her arias. The tattered pages went on giving off dust throughout the rehearsal and making tears stream down his face. But Maria found the Bernstein amalgam of sharp wit, good manners and sense of drama irresistible. As for Bernstein, working with Maria was to make up for all the coughing, the sneezing and the tears. “Then came the famous meeting with Maria. To my absolute amazement she understood immediately the dramatic reasons for the transposition of scenes and numbers, and the cutting out of her aria in the second act. We got along famously—just perfect. She understood everything I wanted and I understood everything she wanted.”
On opening night, Maria, at her most powerful and most magnetic, had the audience enraptured. Or as Bernstein put it: “The place was out of its mind. Callas? She was pure electricity.” In the last act, when Medea is ready to murder her children, she was seen, as the curtains parted, lying head downward diagonally on the high staircase of the temple, a great bloodred cloak and her glowing auburn hair spread out around her. Totally immobile, gazing into the stormy night sky, she sang her first line: “Numi, venite a me, inferni Dei!” (“Deities, come to me, infernal gods!”). At the first rehearsal, Maria broke down in tears. “I can’t sing from such a position. It’s impossible,” she said to Margherita Wallmann between her tears. But she did, and the tornadoes of applause at the end continued to ring in her ears for hours afterward.
“This place will sink,” cries Medea. “You do not mark the center. Grass, earth, stones, speak to me.” So much of the music Maria chose to sing—and she was increasingly in a position to sing only what she chose—appealed to the primordial emotions, passions and sensibilities latent in modern man. “Maria identified with Medea,” said Margherita Wallmann. “She was still a very young woman, married to a much older man. I am sure that certain sexual frustrations found an outlet in her work—unfulfilled passions were released in her singing and acting.” This quasi-Freudian interpretation seems far too narrow to encompass the phenomenon of Maria. It was not only her own unfulfilled passions that were released by her singing and acting, but the unfulfilled, packed-down emotions of the modern public. Maria went beyond even that. Throughout her life, she played out in stark colors the conflict going on, in a much less clear and defined way, in each one of us: the conflict between our rational, respectable, conventional, “normal” self and the deeper, primordial self, home both of the darkness we harbor and of all life-giving forces. The divorce between the two was in her case painful and dramatic. Medea and the respectable housewife represented the two extremes—the uncontainable primitive emotions and the straitjacketed, meticulous, obsessive order with which she was surrounding herself. It was as if these emotions were to be tucked away in life as were her dresses, with matching gloves and shoes and labels indicating where and when they had been worn. Onassis helped reconcile these extremes for a while. When that was over, all that was conventionally respectable, even prudish, in her came to the surface to stay, increasingly dominating her public pronouncements. “In those days there was restraint,” she said in 1971 to a student soprano singing “D’amour l’ardente flamme” from The Damnation of Faust at the Juilliard School in New York. “I wish it were like that now. Now, it’s all exposed.” Was this the same Maria Callas who had sung Medea, Norma and Lady Macbeth?
Maria closed the year with Medea and it was with Medea that she opened 1954, always to sold-out houses. In between she spent a few Christmas days at her home in Verona. “If these were better times for music,” wrote Emilio Radius, “Maria Callas would be the most famous woman in Europe.” She was soon to be exactly that and more, and the fame had less and less to do with music. Meanwhile she was steadily losing weight and her confidence rose with every pound she shed. What with her growing success and her constantly improving appearance, Maria was acquiring that kind of self-confidence which enables a human being to take the risk of loving others. Although her security was far from deeply rooted, it meant that Maria could allow herself to become more relaxed with those around her, more aware of them and more caring toward them.
If headlines could build security the ones that greeted the first night of Lucia at La Scala, on January 18, 1954, would have made her secure forever:
LA SCALA IN DELIRIUM
FOUR MINUTES OF APPLAUSE FOR THE MAD SCENE
A RAIN OF RED CARNATIONS
The rain of red carnations had begun even before the audience went wild at the most famous mad scene in all opera. Maria picked up the red carnations one by one in a graceful allusion to the coming scene in which, as The Opera News reported, “she outdid many a stage Ophelia.” The plot of Donizetti’s Lucia, in which the heroine is forced to marry a man she does not love, was taken directly from Walter Scott’s novel. Maria was fascinated by it; Karajan, who conducted and directed the Scala production, was no less fascinated, even going to the trouble of touring the Walter Scott country to get the feel of its architecture, its light and its ironwork. The moody, dim lighting Karajan achieved in his production was all important for the effect of Gianni Ratto’s impressionistic designs. Maria hated the bare, stylized sets, but adored working with Karajan. Her visual realization of Lucia was largely her own and there were touches of striking originality in it. At the beginning of the Mad Scene, she emerged at the top of the staircase with her hair disheveled, wearing over her nightdress a long white robe with immense sleeves opening in a hundred pleats and with a glazed stare in her eyes. She was not holding a dagger and her reasons for this break with tradition provided eloquent testimony to the integrity of her dramatic sense: “I dislike violence and I find it artistically inefficient. Where it is necessary to include the shedding of blood, the suggestion of the action is more moving than the exhibition of it. I always eliminated the knife when singing Lucia. I thought it was a useless and old-fashioned business, that the action could get in the way of the art, and realism interfere with the truth.” It was the perfect epitaph for a thousand modern productions, often as untruthful as they are “realistic.”
Sandro Sequi, the Italian stage director who watched and studied many Callas performances during her prime, talked about “the Callas secret”: “This alternation of tension and relaxation, I believe, was the key to Callas’s magnetism, why her singing and acting were so compelling. Think of the movement of her arms in the Mad Scene of Lucia. They were like the wings of a great eagle, a marvelous bird. When they went up—and she often moved them very slowly—they seemed heavy, not airy like a dancer’s arms, but weighted. Then she reached the climax of a musical phrase, her arms relaxed and flowed into the next gesture, until she reached a new musical peak, and then again calm. There was a continuous line to her singing and movements, which were really very simple. Everything about her struck me as natural and instinctive, never intellectua
l. She was extremely stylized and classic, yet at the same time human—but a humanity on a higher plane of existence, almost sublime.”
Thousands thought Maria sublime, but just as many were busy enumerating the faults of her voice. Picking at the flaws in Maria’s singing, as one of her more ardent Milanese admirers put it, was like pointing out that in Leonardo’s Last Supper the knives needed polishing. Nevertheless the nit-picking was going on, the downright condemnation of her voice as ugly, even unmusical. And the criticism seemed to be growing in direct proportion to the adulation.
There was another battle that Maria was winning, and her victory was reflected in the downward trend of a chart kept at home by the Meneghinis:
Gioconda
92
Aida
87
Norma
80
Medea
78
Lucia
75
Alceste
65
Don Carlo
64
Twenty-eight kilos (sixty-two pounds) lost between the Gioconda of December 1952 and the Don Carlo of 1954—the last production in the Scala season. But the figures tell less than half the story; the result was a mythical transformation. “She became another woman,” said Carlo Maria Giulini who was conducting Alceste, “and another world of expression opened to her. Potentials held in the shadows emerged. In every sense, she had been transformed.” She could now even be lifted above three bearers’ heads and borne aloft into the temple as the curtain closed on the second act of Alceste.
Gluck’s Alceste had never been performed at La Scala before. Too classical for the Italian temperament, it was nevertheless a wonderful vehicle for Maria, and a wealth of talent headed by Giulini and Margherita Wallmann was lavished on the production. They both loved working with Maria. “For me,” said Giulini, “she was il melodramma—total rapport between word, music and action. It is no fabricated legend. In my entire experience of the theater, I know of no artist like Callas.” Margherita Wallmann had been fascinated by Maria even before they met. Margherita had caught a glimpse of her one night in a restaurant; at one point, Maria removed her glasses: “ . . . Her huge, dark eyes, they haunted me, for I felt I had seen them before. One day I realized where. They are exactly like those of the famous statue of the charioteer of Auriga at Delphi.” There is no doubt that Greek subjects stirred deep emotions in Maria. The classic gestures of Greek tragedy were no mere details in her performance; they came from her own great depths. But, as always, there were many who disliked Maria in Alceste and Klemperer was one of them. Once when Walter Legge took her to a concert of his, Klemperer told her as much: “Your Lucia is marvelous,” he said. “Your Aida . . . your Norma . . . but your Alceste, forgive me for saying so, is not good. . . . We must do something together.”
“It would be an honor.”
“What would you like to do?”
“Alceste, of course, Maestro.”
The maestro’s reservations notwithstanding, Alceste, the Queen of Pharae, was a fitting vehicle for the new Maria. With no high Renaissance bulk about her, she was in everything linear, elegant, dignified, graceful. In everything, that is, onstage. Offstage, even with her new figure, the new Biki wardrobe and her new poodle, Toy, in tow, Maria was the oddest mixture of grandeur and clumsiness—a combination of the inspired and the commonplace. As François Valéry, one of her closest friends in the last years, put it, “She could be extraordinarily beautiful and at times almost ugly.” Yet from the moment she stepped on the stage, through some almost mystic transformation, Maria became the character she was to play. Giulini summed up this transformation as he saw it happen during Alceste: “Offstage Maria is really a very simple woman of humble background. Alceste, however, is a great queen, a figure of classic nobility. Yet Callas transmitted all Alceste’s royal stature. To my mind it is useless to search for an explanation. It is a kind of genius.”
Six days after her second appearance as the Queen of Pharae, Maria made her first appearance as Elizabeth, Queen of Spain, in Verdi’s Don Carlo. She looked stunning in costumes of black, silver and white, designed by Nicola Benois and inspired by Velázquez. She had at last reached her desired weight and it was an ironic tribute to her transformation that the rave reviews were reserved for her physical appearance and her regal bearing; her singing was received with much less enthusiasm. Riccardo Malipiero, writing in Opera, felt that “ . . . Perhaps Callas’ voice is not quite suited to Verdi’s music. . . . This wonderful singer, so confident in difficult passages and powerful in dramatic passages, lacks the sweetness and softness necessary in moments of abandon . . .” Others felt that she would have been better as the fiery Eboli. In fact Ebe Stignani as Eboli got the greatest honors of the night. Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, who had instigated Maria’s first engagement at the Arena of Verona, was Philip II. He had remained a friend with whom Maria could relax and be at her most natural—and her most vulnerable. “Despite Maria’s power,” he remembers, “she often doubted herself and grew anxious, fearing failure. She could never rest because of the great obligations she felt to her work. She frequently asked practical advice about her acting. And if I suggested a gesture or pose she liked, she’d say: ‘Now, you gave me something I should have thought of myself.’ ”
Somehow Maria never overcame her frustration at the knowledge that she could not do everything, think of everything, achieve perfection in everything. The frustration stayed with her all her life and it grew as the difficulties with her voice increased. Right to the end, when she could no longer sing the high soprano roles, and opera houses around the world were offering her instead any mezzo-soprano part she cared to choose, Maria refused to consider any of them, except for Carmen—and she would sing that only on record. It was as though singing mezzo-soprano roles, accepting that she was human and therefore subject to waning powers, was equivalent to conceding defeat. In many ways she never forgave herself for not being superhuman.
While she was still singing Don Carlo at La Scala, she began to record Norma. Now she had her chance to help those who had helped her on the way up. It was her turn to influence casting and select her conductors—so Nicola Rossi-Lemeni found himself as Oroveso and, although Serafin had no official connection with La Scala, it was he who conducted most of the Callas operas recorded with the orchestra and chorus of La Scala. Norma was being recorded at the Cinema Metropol in Milan, and Maria’s arrivals and departures were watched eagerly by the Milanese. Autographs, handshakings, even spontaneous bursts of applause in the street—all the elements of mass popularity were building up. Visibility bred celebrity, which bred more visibility, which bred more celebrity; Maria was now on that particular carousel for good. Her celebrity was spreading even where she had not yet become visible. Requests for interviews from America came frequently, and Maria’s next goal was to repeat, even exceed, in America the triumph she had won in Europe. During an interview for the American magazine High Fidelity in one of the breaks from recording Norma, she articulated her artistic philosophy: “Every year I want to be better than the year before. Otherwise I’d retire. I don’t need the money. I work for art.”
As with many of Maria’s public pronouncements there was very little of Maria in them, and an awful lot of La Callas. It was more than true by now that she didn’t need the money, but she still wanted it both for itself and as a symbol of others wanting and needing her; nor did it mean that she stopped worrying about it. There was, however, a truly prophetic element in the statement. She did want every year to be better than the year before; and, even though she would never bring herself to speak the word, she did retire when she stopped getting better each year.
Recordings dominated the rest of that spring and summer. The long-playing record had stopped being a curiosity; a huge and growing market had opened and Maria’s records were in such demand internationally that EMI would not consider doing a recording at La Scala without her. Walter Legge had put together the winning combination of Callas-Gobbi-d
i Stefano, more often than not under Serafin’s baton, and this inspired partnership was to produce some of the greatest postwar recordings. In the spring and summer of 1954 the performances became an adjunct to the recordings. EMI wanted to record Verdi’s La Forza del Destino; Maria sang it at Ravenna. EMI wanted to record Boito’s Mefistofele; Maria sang it in the Arena of Verona, although, in the end, the recording was never made.
It was almost time to launch her American career. The Met had a ceiling of $1000 an evening for any singer, but for Lawrence Kelly and Carol Fox, two young concert organizers who were hoping to revive Chicago’s famous opera, the ceiling was dictated by what would persuade Maria to appear in Chicago. They agreed to everything: Maria’s choice of repertory—Norma, Traviata and Lucia; Maria’s casting suggestions, which meant that Gobbi, di Stefano and Rossi-Lemeni were all included; Maria’s, or rather Meneghini’s, financial terms—$12,000 for six performances and return travel and other expenses for two.
The news of Maria’s impending debut with the Chicago Lyric Opera had been trumpeted across the States long before the Meneghinis landed in Chicago at the end of October to a barrage of photographers and reporters. Maria’s life had become, especially in the popular papers, at once history and biography, legend and stereotype, epitomizing the American Dream. She was living out so many cultural and fairy-tale archetypes that the papers had a hard time choosing which to lead on: rags to riches, ugly duckling to beautiful swan, the infant prodigy returning as adult star, the little American from Washington Heights coming back home. The presence of George Callas by his daughter’s side meant that “the return of the native” aspect of the legend had no difficulty in winning the day. Maria was given a heroine’s welcome even before the sensation caused by Norma on the opening night. And after the performance, at the Angel Ball organized for the benefit of the Illinois Opera Guild, she did little more than shake hands and listen to unending congratulations.
Maria Callas Page 15
