Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (11 page)

That first week of enforced leisure was largely spent wandering around Verona, indulging in an activity the pleasures and agonies of which she was just discovering—shopping. While Maria was discovering shopping, Meneghini was discovering that shopping with his future wife would reduce anyone to blasphemy or tears. She was an undecided and exasperating shopper, and even when someone else was paying, she found herself brought to a standstill by the difference between the price she thought something should cost and the invariably higher price it did cost. Later, when she had more money than she could possibly have spent in her lifetime, her greatest joy was to go to Woolworth’s or Macy’s and devote a whole morning or even a whole day to buying bric-a-brac—a lemon squeezer, a potato peeler, a new kind of coffee grinder. On one occasion in 1962, Maria, lunching at Claridge’s with her friend Edith Gorlinsky, spread out the entire loot of her morning’s Woolworth’s expedition on the table and, pushing the china and the crystal to one side, proudly displayed the knickknacks.

The novelty and pleasure of Verona, shopping and Meneghini’s company could not sustain her for more than a week. With Meneghini in tow, she was off to Milan to begin once again the round of agents. For the next two months, and despite Serafin’s lobbying on her behalf, it was as if Verona had never happened. Maria was beginning to realize, more fully than ever before, what an extraordinary departure she represented from the musical conventions of the time. “Immediately after my debut in Italy,” Maria said later, “I was not loved that much. . . . No agent would give me a job. . . . I was something new to listen to and they disliked anything that took them away from tradition.” She was later described by the Italian critic Teodoro Celli as “a star wandering into a planetary system not its own.” She would have been much more at home in the nineteenth century than she was in the twentieth. In the century of Pasta and Malibran, the century of unbridled romanticism, the voice became an instrument in the service of emotional drama; and this was the forgotten tradition to which Maria belonged. From the outset she recognized the totality of voice and emotion, the one the perfect dramatic embodiment of the other. She could fan anger into a conflagration, just as she could distill melancholy into an essence that could break one’s heart. And, without in any way detracting from the drama, she brought “finish” back to the music: each phrase, each word, was meticulously weighed; words were used positively as part of the musical sculpture she brought to life; and, although she raised vocal display to new levels of expression for our time, she never allowed it to become meaningless embroidery. Technique was subordinated to expression, and vocal beauty to dramatic truth. “It is not enough to have a beautiful voice,” Maria explained later. “What does that mean? When you interpret a role, you have to have a thousand colors to portray happiness, joy, sorrow, fear. How can you do this with only a beautiful voice? Even if you sing harshly sometimes, as I have frequently done, it is a necessity of expression. You have to do it, even if people will not understand. But in the long run they will, because you must persuade them of what you are doing.”

In the end they did understand, although a considerable minority remained unconvinced and bitterly opposed to her. In the autumn of 1947, however, it was those who did not understand who were in charge of the casting, and they clearly could not cope with the “peculiarities” of the Callas voice. What they were after were beautiful, ravishing voices—Tebaldi voices. Well-known as the favorite of Toscanini, Renata Tebaldi had made her debut at La Scala the year before and was visiting Verona surrounded by the aura of that success. The famous rivalry between Callas and Tebaldi was partly real, partly dreamed up by the press and largely symbolic of how musically and dramatically irreconcilable these two singers were. The differences between them were reduced by the Tebaldi partisans to “beautiful” and “ugly” and by the Callas faithful to “dull” and “exciting.” Their paths first crossed at the Verona Festival. Maria was the visiting mystery soprano; Tebaldi, singing Marguérite in Gounod’s
Faust
, was the star female attraction. Although they were obviously fully aware of each other’s existence during the festival, they did not meet face-to-face until the following year.

The time when Maria’s star would climb higher than Tebaldi’s was not far away. Meanwhile, however, while Tebaldi was being feted at one opera house after the other, Maria was sitting in Milan waiting for the telephone to ring and growing more and more depressed. It was Serafin who enabled her to make her next vital move. An official of La Fenice was dispatched from Venice to Milan to sign up Maria for the production of
Tristan und Isolde
that the maestro would be conducting in Venice. It was in fact a package deal: Isolde in December, Turandot in January and 50,000 lire per performance. Maria signed the contract without reading it, and only after she had signed did she turn her attention to the fact that she had agreed to sing a part she did not know. She revealed this to Serafin when he arrived in Milan the next day, and fully expected Serafin to be appalled. Instead, he was amused. “One month of study and hard work is all you need,” he assured her. This solid demonstration of his faith in her was enough to wash away the bitter taste of the previous two months.

Suddenly the surrounding world ceased to exist and there was nothing but the role. A triumph was around the corner. The opening night was just before Christmas; it was to be her first triumph outside Athens, and Athens already seemed a lifetime away. Her unqualified success made this Christmas—her first in Italy, her first with Meneghini—the happiest of her life. In the new year, Isolde was followed by Turandot, and the Turandot that she was to have sung in America turned out in Venice to be a marvelous confirmation of the promise Isolde had held out. Her acute sense of what is emotionally right was here enhanced by a no less sure sense of what is dramatically right. That was the majority opinion, but not the unanimous one. Louise Caselotti, who had come to Venice to hear Maria and to look for some work for herself, was, as she put it, “alarmed” when she heard Maria’s Turandot. “The soaring high notes we admired when we were preparing the part for Chicago had lost their freedom and hovered badly. Her low register was also weak. I knew that she was on the wrong track and told her so.” Even if Madame Caselotti genuinely believed that Maria was on the wrong track, there is little doubt that it was a wrong track she would have given a lot to be on herself.

Maria, despite her public statements to the contrary, would never be indifferent to praise or blame. She resented criticism, but she resented insincere praise just as much, and felt no hesitation about showing it. And criticism from friends was registered as disloyalty, almost betrayal. In many ways she needed betrayal to feed her image of Maria against the world. She was therefore on the lookout for it all the time. Louise Caselotti and her husband were the first casualties. On this occasion, Maria was to some extent right; Louise’s frustrated ambitions made it impossible for her to rejoice in Maria’s success. But there was also a part of Maria that, as soon as she started getting ready to leave America, wanted a break with Eddie and Louise Bagarozy. A break with them would be one more symbolic break with the past, with all its uncertainty, fears and pain. Each new phase in Maria’s life was signaled by the breaking of old friendships even more than by the making of new ones. She had almost a bonding instinct toward whoever was dominant in any given period of her life, as if she had time only for her art and one other person, and her other friends would fade into the background. For the moment, Meneghini had replaced everyone else, always by her side through these first uncertain Italian days.

Venice was the turning point. The offers began pouring in. It is true that the musical citadels—La Scala, the Met, Covent Garden—had not yet fallen, but 1948 was a good, even a great year. Maria’s itinerary in the course of that year was a complete tour of the great Italian cities: Venice, Udine, Trieste, Genoa, Rome, Turin, Rovigo, Florence. In Trieste, Maria sang her first Verdi heroine: Leonora in
Forza del Destino
. Torn between passion and filial love, Leonora gave Maria plenty of opportunities for dramatic expression. And like the great tragedian that she instinctively was, she exploited them all. From Trieste she went to Genoa to sing Isolde once again, this time with her friend Nicola Rossi-Lemeni as King Mark. She sang Isolde five more times in Rome in 1950 and then, as soon as she could choose, she dropped this Wagnerian role from her repertoire.

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.