Maria Callas

by Arianna Huffington

  At Giulini’s suggestion, Maria took a solo curtain call. Di Stefano boiled over, and before anyone realized what was going on, he had thrown aside Alfredo’s clothes, walked out of the production and was soon fleeing Milan. There were three more performances left, and Giacinto Prandelli took over the role of Alfredo. Di Stefano, however, was by no means the only one who resented Maria’s blazing success, the adulation showered upon her and the unchallenged way in which, especially after Tebaldi’s departure, she reigned at La Scala and held court at the Biffi Scala. The ranks of the resentful were further swollen by Maria’s attitude which assumed that the world was a hostile place. It was as if she was seeking—however unconsciously—confirmation of her instinctive mistrust of everyone. Such confirmation was not hard to find, especially on June 5, the third performance of La Traviata, when Maria’s “Sempre libera” was interrupted by heckling and whistling designed to throw her off course. “Sempre libera” came to an ominous halt and it took Maria several moments to regain her composure and complete the aria. She demanded a solo curtain call, and came out determined to defy her enemies, only to find herself overwhelmed instead by the passionate welcome of her friends.

  But the resentment Maria aroused was by no means the creation of her own mind. La Scala magazine devoted an entire editorial to it soon after the eruption of hostilities during Traviata. “No doubt Callas has many enemies. First of all, her colleagues who are convinced that to be a native Italian and endowed by nature with a lovely voice is all that is needed. They are only concerned with the emission of notes and with singing in the manner of fifty years ago, without ever letting their eyes stray from the conductor’s baton. These people, who are organically incapable of sacrifice and effort, who owe nothing to study and all to nature and accident, accuse Maria Callas of aggressiveness because, as the result of much sacrifice and effort, she is vocally and physically able to sing and interpret everything. Shall we say that the clamorous recognition and her own striking personality will rise above the attacks? Is this a consolation for Callas? One thing is certain: the price to pay for separation from the herd is high.”

  While isolation is by no means a condition of greatness, Maria did feel isolated from colleagues and the world around her, and often, despite the echoes of clamorous applause in her ears and the presence of Meneghini by her side, she felt very alone. So it was with a child’s joy that she welcomed her old teacher, Elvira de Hidalgo, to Milan. Elvira had been teaching at the conservatory of Ankara in Turkey for the previous few years and arrived in Milan at the beginning of August to spend a holiday with her brother Luis who was living there, and with Maria. Pupil and teacher had kept in constant touch through all these years and now at last Elvira could hear the transformed Maria sing, accompany her on her shopping expeditions down Via Monte Napoleone, advise her on the final touches for her new house. Maria was at the time recording Madama Butterfly, with Karajan conducting and Nicolai Gedda as Pinkerton. For the recording of Rigoletto that followed, the magical trio of Callas, Gobbi and di Stefano were once again together; and once again Serafin was conducting. Maria had a selectively short memory and, now that di Stefano had charmed his way back into her life, his operatic walkout seemed to belong to a very distant past.

  It was a hectic summer but not too hectic for numerous fittings at Madame Biki’s. The latest Dior originals were added to the latest Biki creations, with the result that Maria’s autumn 1955 collection was her most glamorous and eye-catching so far. But it was still a rather strait-jacketed elegance, with plenty of severe suits and tailored dresses. On September 24, Maria, wearing one of Biki’s creations, arrived in Berlin. La Scala had reassembled the principals of the original 1954 Lucia for two performances as part of the Berlin Festival. Karajan was conducting and it was confidently expected that the 1954 Callas-Karajan triumph in Milan would be repeated in Berlin. What happened, though, far surpassed expectations. Hundreds spent the night before the first performance outside the opera house, both performances having been immediately sold out and, as the first night was broadcast, the enthusiasm, the ovations and even the stamping of feet are forever preserved on tape.

  It was a triumphant ending to an evening that had begun on a note of panic. Meneghini’s plane from Milan had been delayed and, minutes before the curtain rose, Maria was still nervously pacing up and down her dressing room, full of superstitious anxiety at the thought that Meneghini would not be there in time for the start. “I can’t sing, I can’t sing if he is not here . . .” she had been mumbling, more to herself than to anyone else. The opera house officials were themselves pacing nervously up and down, getting more anxious by the minute. Scouts had been posted everywhere to give the signal as soon as Meneghini’s form darkened the door. A couple of minutes after the curtain was due to rise Meneghini appeared; never before had so many people longed to see him so much. He was at once escorted to his box, Maria caught a glimpse of him from behind the curtain, and the performance could begin. Avanti maestro! At the end of the performance there was a reception at the Italian embassy. Efi Zaccaria remembers Maria hovering around the platters of Italian delicacies, frequently darting but rarely settling.

  Back in Milan at the beginnning of October, Maria could look at 1955 as her greatest year so far. Yet some of the greatest triumphs of the year were still ahead of her. They took place in Chicago, where she opened the season in I Puritani on October 31. Renata Tebaldi followed on November 1 with Aida. They shared the star dressing room but, even though it was Maria’s suggestion to invite Tebaldi, the schedule was carefully arranged so that they never met. Maria followed Renata with Il Trovatore, Renata replied with Bohème, and Maria came back with Butterfly. “I don’t ever want to hear her Butterfly again,” said someone after the opening night; “I’ll end up liking this dreadful opera.”

  There was no time off for Maria in Chicago. She had chosen to be on display the whole time; when she was not actually singing, she attended cocktail parties, luncheon parties, dinner parties, or she met the press, smiling for photographers, praising the opera management, praising the town or ostentatiously applauding Tebaldi’s Aida and Tebaldi’s Mimi. Tebaldi did not reciprocate the accolade but the town more than reciprocated what Maria had been giving them. As Roger Dettmer, music critic of the Chicago American, put it: “The town, we all know, has been Callas-crazy for more than a year, and none has been more demented than I. In the proper role and in good voice, I adore the woman; I am a slave in her spell.”

  And Maria became a slave to her slaves. Never before had an entire town unanimously treated her as a combination of queen, sorceress and divinity. And never before had she put so much energy into gaining and maintaining the public’s favor; never before had she made such a consistent effort to be universally “nice” and universally liked. “Fame,” she once said, “is a boomerang.” The approval and adulation that fame brought her had become a subtle trap. Because Maria’s store of self-approval remained, most of the time, very low, she came to rely almost entirely on the approval of others. So the woman who had cast her spell on so many was in even greater need of them than they were of her. The greater the adulation the tighter the trap, especially since, as she said herself, she was plagued with endless doubt and feelings of unworthiness. “Even when people look at me with obvious affection, that makes me twice as angry. You think, ‘these people are looking at you in admiration—why should they? I don’t deserve it.’ ” The less she felt that she deserved admiration the more she was determined to present to the world a version of herself that was deserving. But excessive concern with presentation and effect is bound to boomerang too: “Misrepresentation, as I have found to my cost,” she said a few years after Chicago, “can happen only too easily.”

  What happened in Chicago on the last night of Butterfly cannot easily be defined as misrepresentation: for Maria it was a tragic ending to her frenzied love affair with Chicago; for less reverent souls it was simply knockabout farce. The third performance of Butterfly on November
17 was an unscheduled one. Lawrence Kelly and Carol Fox pleaded with Maria to give one last performance, and in a glow of goodwill she agreed. One of the critics had said on the opening night that “ . . . anything short of a disaster was bound to be a triumph,” and this was ten times as true of the closing night. The applause seemed to go on forever and by the end Maria was visibly drained. Then the real drama began. Marshal Stanley Pringle and Deputy Sheriff Dan Smith, looking in their felt hats and off-white raincoats as though they had stepped out of an early Bogart movie, had managed to penetrate the cordon the Lyric’s management had thrown around Maria. They burst triumphantly into her dressing room and Maria, still in Cio-Cio-San’s kimono, was at first struck speechless with anger and bewilderment. When she found her voice, she spoke with the wrath of a goddess, proudly and indignantly declaring herself above earthly laws. “I will not be sued! I have the voice of an angel! No man can sue me.” The marshal, unflustered and unimpressed, proceeded to carry out what the law required: the physical transfer of the document. He thrust Bagarozy’s summons into Maria’s kimono and, his business completed, turned to leave. She was hysterical with fury, as immortalized in a photograph that marked the turning point in the public image of Maria. Her garish Cio-Cio-San mouth twisted with anger, her black eyes distorted with hate, Maria in one instant became the image of the tigress.

  Her pain at what she experienced as Chicago’s betrayal came out as bitter anger. The precise nature of the abuse she hurled on the process servers, the Lyric’s management and the inhabitants of Chicago is irrelevant. The eyes and the mouth said it all. Dario Soria and Walter Legge were both present, and with the help of Meneghini and Lawrence Kelly they smuggled Maria out through a side door. She spent the night raging in the apartment of Lawrence Kelly’s brother, reviling everyone in and out of sight. Meneghini fanned the flame with his usual enthusiasm. At dawn, having had no sleep at all, she bathed, dressed and was driven, together with Meneghini, to the airport to catch the first plane out of Chicago. In Montreal she changed planes for Milan. Back home, she still felt just as victimized as on the fateful night itself. “I couldn’t have been betrayed worse,” she wrote to Dario Soria’s wife. “When I write you the details you will freeze in horror.”

  The question of how the process servers had slipped through the cordon remained unanswered, although speculation and conspiracy theories abounded. Lawrence Kelly remained convinced until he died that Carol Fox had deliberately let the process servers backstage to guarantee her position in the power struggle by alienating Maria from him. As it turned out, the incident ultimately bound Lawrence Kelly and Maria closer together than ever before.

  She left Chicago utterly convinced that she had been betrayed by the Lyric’s management and swearing that she would never, ever return to Chicago. The end of her year of triumphs found Maria in a desperate state. Her dark view of life and the world was once again confirmed, only this time, coming so soon after so much success and so much glory, it was more deeply painful than ever before.

  To compound her bitterness, she was greeted on her arrival in Milan with advertisements in the newspapers claiming that “La Callas” had lost her weight by a steady diet of Pantanella’s “psychological macaroni.” She was in no mood to be amused, especially as the ingenious pasta company had produced a certain Dr. Giovanni Cazzaroti—complete with medical certificate—to lend support to its claim. Prodded by Meneghini, and with the reports of the Chicago incident still echoing in her mind, Maria did the one thing even a novice public relations man would have advised against. She issued a writ against Pastificio Pantanella, and this became the second link in the heavy chain of her legal entanglements. Thus began what the headline writers were soon to call “the battle of the spaghetti.” It dragged on for nearly four years and turned Maria into the heroine of a ludicrous saga that became all the more newsworthy when it was revealed that the head of Pastificio Pantanella was Prince Marcantonio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII’s cousin. The suit was settled in her favor in August 1959, when the Rome Court of Appeals awarded her damages. By then the press had largely forgotten about the Prince, the Prima Donna and the Macaroni, and Maria had other more pressing things on her mind than a four-year-old lawsuit. The spaghetti victory turned out to be a rather hollow one, though at the time Maria issued the writ it had seemed essential for her to win. Together with the bitter aftertaste of Chicago, the legal battle blighted the celebrations of her thirty-second birthday. It also intensified her already acute sensitivity to any demonstrations of hostility. Such demonstrations by the “hissing snakes,” as Maria had taken to calling them, had by now become an expected ingredient of a Callas night. And the bigger the night, the more likely the demonstrations.

  In December 1955, La Scala’s gala opening night was even more of an occasion than usual. Maria had automatically once again been given the honor of opening the season, this time with Norma. President Giovanni Gronchi was in the audience, Pierre Balmain had created the elaborate floral decorations, and so spectacular was the jewelry worn that, even with the lights out, the auditorium still seemed to glitter. The noise level of the anti-Callas demonstrators heightened the sense of excitement and anticipation. The hissing was irritating, even hurtful, but it was balanced by the unprecedented ovations that greeted Maria’s curtain calls. What was much more painful for Maria and much harder to bear was the way in which, since the turning point of the Chicago photograph, every rumor that was started about her was unquestioningly accepted and passed on.

  At the beginning of January, del Monaco, who was singing Pollione to Maria’s Norma, was quoted in the Italian press bitterly complaining about her: “As I was preparing to leave the stage at the end of Norma I felt a hefty kick on my calf. I stopped for a moment in surprise to rub my leg and when I could finally walk again Maria had taken all the applause.” Maria kicking a fellow singer on the calf in order to steal a solo bow! Hardly believable, and it certainly would not have been believed before that fateful Chicago photograph made anything about Maria believable—and the more outrageous the more convincing.

  As for del Monaco’s story, what seems to have made him explode against Maria was Meneghini’s reaction to the torrential ovation he had received during the first act of that January Norma. It was still the time of officially recognized claques which, apart from the unofficial ones organized by devotees or enemies of a particular singer, were sanctioned by the opera house to raise the general level of enthusiasm. At the intermission, Meneghini went up to Ettore Parmeggiani, who had been a tenor at La Scala and was now the official claque chief, and admonished him for what he considered excessive and partisan display of enthusiasm toward del Monaco. Parmeggiani went straight to del Monaco to enlist his support in proving the allegations false. It was as if some malevolent spirit kept pushing Meneghini to intervene, almost invariably at the wrong time and in the wrong way. On this occasion it was spectacularly the wrong time. “You and your wife,” stormed del Monaco, “don’t own La Scala, you know! The audience applauds whoever deserves applause.” And throughout the performance, whenever they were both offstage, he went on yelling at Maria.

  By this time Maria aroused stronger feelings than any living singer. The mere mention of her name induced paroxysms, favorable or unfavorable according to taste. Was she a goddess for whom there was no worthy place in our second-rate world or one of the most extravagant megalomaniacs ever to walk upon a stage—or was she, perhaps, both? For many who could not fit her into a neat musical category, her voice was alien, disturbing; and for those who identified beautiful singing with a smooth, contained line and tone, no amount of vocal color and dramatic authority would compensate for the unsteadiness in the top notes, the occasional shrillness and the veiled quality of her middle range.

  It was hoped that Maria’s triumphant return appearance as Violetta, in an extraordinary total of seventeen performances during the season, would silence some of her enemies. In fact at the end of one of these performances they showed rather dramatically th
at, far from relenting, they were growing more enterprising. In the middle of all the bouquets and the rain of flowers at Maria’s feet, a bunch of radishes fell on the stage. The audience saw them before the nearsighted prima donna, and they gasped with embarrassment on her behalf. Maria the consummate actress rose to the occasion. She picked the radishes from the stage and clasped them to her bosom as if they were the choicest orchids. The story made headlines in Milan and within hours had crossed the Atlantic.

  Once off the stage, Maria let the cool mask drop and the tears flooded her eyes. The acclaimed, adored prima donna, gaily spending millions on her houses, jewelry and wardrobe, endlessly smothered in flowers and adulation, experienced demonstrations of hostility deeply and painfully as a direct assault on herself—especially when Meneghini kept focusing on them and inflating them. “One indignity upon another,” is how he described such hostility, making it even more likely that Maria would allow it to disturb her out of all proportion to its real significance. But there was little time to brood.

  In between singing seventeen Traviatas, Maria was rehearsing her second comic role, Rosina in Il Barbiere di Siviglia. It was a revival of an old stock production put together with no flair or imagination. If one compares Maria’s Rosina with her Fiorilla in Il Turco in Italia, it becomes clear that in comedy she needed light-handed and inventive direction such as Zeffirelli provided in Turco. If in tragedy an inspired director was important in drawing out her special sensibilities, in comedy he was essential, especially when the comic heroine has to be fresh, feminine, guileful. There was something earnest in Maria which made her gauche and heavy when she was trying to be light and delicate, and when she tried to portray wily womanhood, her dramatic instincts let her down and she ended up appearing vulgar. She did not trust herself, and to compensate she both oversang and overacted. She, who normally achieved the maximum effect with the minimum of movement and gesture, used, according to Luigi Alva who was making his debut as Count Almaviva, “too much pepper, exaggerating gestures. This, coupled with her horrible costumes, made everything she did seem ridiculous.” Also Il Barbiere is not a prima donna vehicle, and Maria tried to turn it into one. “She was aggressive, a viper, acting as though Rosina had the whole situation wrapped up in her hands,” said Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, who was Basilio. “But no single artist can shift the emphasis from Figaro and all the other colorful characters so beautifully balanced by Rossini.”