Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (12 page)

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
Turandot
s, 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 fully 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.

Immediately afterward they left for Genoa. It was an apt symbol of the nature of the Meneghini marriage that the day after her wedding, Maria Meneghini Callas was boarding the
S.S. Argentina
alone. Her honeymoon was spent with
Turandot, Norma
and
Aida
, the three operas she was to perform in Buenos Aires.

Just before she left Genoa, she had sent a cablegram to New York: “
Siamo sposati e felici
.” This was how Maria had chosen to announce her marriage to her parents—after the event and in Italian. It was not exactly difficult to translate the message but, as Evangelia was to complain later, what was wrong with “We are married and happy” or the Greek equivalent? “After all,” she said, “Maria did not stop being Greek when she married Meneghini, nor did she forget her English.” But Maria loved symbolic gestures and this period—the Italian period—of her life was studded with actual and symbolic breaks with her past.

Evangelia said nothing about her feelings to her daughter. Instead she sent white bridal flowers and a letter: “Remember, Maria, you first belong to your public, not to your husband.” Maria replied that both she and her husband were perfectly aware of that. The idea that Maria first belonged to herself had never entered her mother’s or her husband’s head; and at that time it would have seemed totally alien to Maria too. It was ten years later that she got a glimpse of what she had left out of her life, and cried out: “I want to live.”

6

O
N
M
AY
20, M
ARIA OPENED AT
the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires with
Turandot
, and one of the most highly prized items for collectors of Callas tapes is a three-minute fragment from this performance, with Maria soaring effortlessly over the heavy orchestration. “In the role of Turandot,” wrote the music critic of
La Nación
, “Maria Callas showed all her vocal gifts as well as her magnetic presence.”