Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (13 page)

Already, in 1949, Maria began shedding operas from her repertoire. After Buenos Aires, she never sang Turandot onstage again. She had already appeared in the part twenty-four times in seven cities. “I sang Turandot all over Italy,” she explained once, “hoping to God that I wouldn’t wreck my voice, because you know . . . it’s ruined quite a few voices.”

Serafin, who conducted all Maria’s performances in Buenos Aires, also conducted her farewell concert on July 9—on the 133rd anniversary of the Argentine Declaration of Independence. Despite his presence by her side, Maria was feeling very lonely; she was irritable most of the time and could not wait to get home. She was in constant touch with Battista. He wrote and sent telegrams; she telephoned—after all, the Argentinians were paying. Meneghini wanted to know everything. He had asked the management to send him every review, and in his letters he pulled all unflattering comments to pieces. For although her Norma was unanimously praised, there were plenty of unflattering remarks about her Turandot and her Aida. Each unflattering remark increased Maria’s longing to be back in her first real home. Meneghini, like a devoted Italian housewife, had been furnishing and decorating the penthouse he had bought for them. Zeffirelli, who later visited Maria in her home, described its style as “poor man’s Zsa Zsa Gabor”: everything gilded, imitation rococo curtains, three different kinds of flowered wallpaper and a pink marble bathroom fitted with golden crystal, golden mirrors and shocking pink curtains.

This was Maria’s new environment, and she loved it. She slipped into the role of Signora Meneghini as though all her life had been a preparation for it; she picked up the Veronese accent immediately, and when they were at home she spent hours in the kitchen cooking pasta for Titta. Their home overlooked the Arena of Verona, and from its balcony Maria would watch the Arena at all hours. She watched rehearsals, she watched performances; she watched the sun rising and the moon hovering over the deserted amphitheater. She had traveled a long way since her Gioconda at the Arena only two years before, but pleasant though it was to let her mind wander over what had been achieved, Maria’s focus was on the distance still to be traveled. On September 18, in the Church of San Pietro in Perugia, Maria tackled her first oratorio; she sang Herod’s daughter in
San Giovanni Battista
, a little known work by Alessandro Stradella. The music bored her, and she was relieved when the night had come and gone. “I need never sing an oratorio again,” she told Titta, before she threw herself into her third Verdi role.

Nabucco
at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples was the last main project of 1949. Gino Bechi was singing Nabucco, and Maria was determined to steal the opening night’s honors from him. Bechi was Italy’s most popular baritone and he was, after all, singing the title role; but Maria did not intend to waste the opportunity of opening her 1949–50 season at the San Carlo by being no more than the first among the supporting cast. Nor did she; that first performance has been preserved in a small archive of primitive recordings—the earliest recording of a complete role sung by Maria—and there is no doubt that on that December night in Naples, she immersed herself totally in her fiery, fearless Abigaille.

“The thunderbolt of my revenge is already suspended over you,” sings—or rather shouts—Abigaille, the warrior-daughter of the Babylonian ruler, determined to destroy her unfaithful lover and reign over Babylon. Maria sustained the ferocious intensity throughout, unleashing with every word all the fury that Verdi intended, and more besides. Her rousing fierceness was particularly appropriate for the occasion. On the first night the audience at the San Carlo, with the war still in their minds, responded to the stirring chorus “
Va, pensiero
” with much of the same intensity and abandon that its patriotic overtones had stirred in the original audience in 1842 and for that matter in the vast throng that sang it at Verdi’s funeral. Those who had previously only heard Maria sing arias out of context sat up sharply: Callas on the operatic stage was a different Callas, thriving on the dramatic life she quickened in the other characters as well as in herself.

The New Year began with
Norma
in Venice. Throughout 1950, Maria’s fame was growing with every appearance, but while she was traveling from Venice to Brescia and Aida, from Brescia to Rome and Isolde, and from Rome to Catania and Norma, her eyes were fixed on Milan. There had still been no sign and no word, or even whisper, from La Scala.

Suddenly, the silence was dramatically broken. Maria was asked to take over the part of Aida which the ailing Tebaldi had had to renounce. So her debut at La Scala was to be as a replacement. Aida was by no means Maria’s favorite role, and she would much rather have made her debut at La Scala in a production created for her, but at last, however unsatisfactory the circumstances, there was to be a debut. The first performance of
Aida
was to be on April 12. The Meneghinis arrived in Milan at the end of March, and Maria had to face her first covey of reporters.

“How are you feeling, Madame Callas, now you are about to sing at La Scala? Are you excited?”

“La Scala, magnificent theater. . . . Yes, I am thrilled, of course I am thrilled. Great theater. But I am nearsighted, you see. For me all theaters are alike. Am I excited? La Scala is La Scala, but I am nearsighted:
ecco tutto
.”

The message was quite clear. The management of La Scala had obtained Maria’s services as a replacement, but if they were looking for gratitude or reverence, they had better look elsewhere. There was something pinched in all of Maria’s answers that day. It was clear that she resented being a substitute. It did not come naturally to her, nor did it bring out the best in her. Battista tried in vain to make helpful interjections.

“What about the public, Madame Callas?”

“The public? What about the public? If I sing well they applaud, if they don’t like me they whistle. It’s the same everywhere.”

“What about your voice, Madame Callas? They say your voice is uneven.”

“Well, let them say what they want. I sing the way I sing.”

“And life, what about your life?”

“My life! What a life—moving in and out of hotels, living out of trunks. . . . Some envy me for my trips around the world. Some trips—from one stage to another. . . .”

So the image of the new Aida with which the first-night audience at La Scala had been fed through the press was hardly that of a positive, endearing human being. This time it was not the fault of the reporters either. With her deliberately indifferent responses, Maria may have fooled the press, La Scala’s management and the readers, but she could not fool herself. She was suffering from her usual first-night nerves—only multiplied a hundredfold. After all, this was La Scala and the audience for the prima of
Aida
was unlike any other she had faced before. It was studded with ministers, foreign dignitaries and the bejeweled wives of the Italian Establishment; and in the presidential box was the president of the republic himself.

Maria longed for a triumph; she expected at least a sensation. Meneghini expected a definite offer for Maria’s permanent engagement at La Scala. What they got instead was a polite reception, lukewarm reviews and a Delphic remoteness from Antonio Ghiringhelli, the notoriously aloof manager of La Scala. Ghiringhelli took an instant dislike to Maria. He sensed right from the start that here was an artist he could neither control nor easily categorize; and the power she exuded unnerved him. He was much happier in the company of the chorus and the corps de ballet in whose ranks he found partners for his endless round of casual affairs. Among the easily overwhelmed chorus girls and ballerinas, it was much easier to maintain his cherished detachment. “Going to bed with me,” was his standard line, “gives you no hope for a better part. Understand that?
No hope
. But if you don’t go to bed with me, you have the
certainty
of no better part.”

This was the man on whom Maria’s career depended for the moment, and he seemed determined to thwart it. So Maria sang the remaining two
Aidas
for which she had been contracted and left for Naples. She knew she would be back, and next time on her own terms. Ghiringhelli could delay her conquest of La Scala but he could not prevent it. She sang four more
Aida
s in Naples, and as soon as the last one was over she returned to Verona. There were only ten days left before she had to cross the Atlantic for her first Mexican visit. Meneghini, who was, however nominally, head of the family business, stayed behind.

On May 13, 1950, Maria arrived back in New York for the second time in her life. Her father was once again there to meet her. From the airport they went straight to the hospital where Evangelia was being treated for an eye infection. Maria had stopped in New York on her way to Mexico to see her parents and her godfather and, more specifically, to show her new, famous, rich self to her mother. This objective could not be accomplished in a few hours between planes and still less in the confines of a hospital. So Maria invited her mother to join her in Mexico as soon as she was well enough. With her round-trip ticket in her pocket, Evangelia was out of the hospital faster than any doctor had dared predict.

She arrived in Mexico at the beginning of June. She was met at the airport by Maria and a couple of dignitaries from the opera house; she was ushered into her room at the Hotel Prince—connected with Maria’s—by the manager, who had already ensured that the room was full of flowers; and she was instantly showered with invitations to dinners, embassy parties, government receptions. She was the Queen Mother, and it was clear that everybody adored the Queen. It was equally clear that Evangelia, although she had had no practice in this role, took to it with the greatest of ease. Her personality lent itself to the role, but it must have been made easier by the fact that she had been rehearsing it in her mind ever since Maria held a street audience spellbound with “La Paloma” back in 1933.

Norma, Aida, Tosca and Leonora in
Il Trovatore
(a new addition to Maria’s repertoire) were all widely acclaimed by critics who competed with one another in their use of superlatives and by a public who again and again became almost hysterical in their enthusiasm. All four performances were recorded, so we can actually experience the enthusiasm for ourselves instead of just imagining it through the reports. As the music critic John Ardoin observed, “Callas was born with an instinct to enjoy the upper hand in a dramatic situation.” And at the Palacio de Bellas Artes on May 2, she reached the heights of her performance in
Norma
at the moment of triumph over her faithless lover—when they both know that she holds not only his fate but the fate of their children in her grasp: “
Si, sorr’essi alzai la punta
”—“Yes, I raised the dagger over them.”

Kurt Baum was Pollione, and the tension between him and Maria was electric. In
Norma
it remained offstage, but in
Aida
, where he was singing Radames, it descended to the footlights. Throughout the first act of
Aida
on the first night, Baum kept holding the high notes in a manner which infuriated Maria and positively enraged Nicola Moscona, who was singing Ramfis and who took Baum’s vocal fencing as a personal affront. Once, in New York, Moscona had refused all Maria’s pleas for help and Maria had sworn never to speak to him again. Now, at the first interval of
Aida
, Maria and Moscona joined forces in her dressing room and worked out their plan of retaliation. Instead of Verdi’s ending for Aida in the Triumphal Scene, Maria would soar upward an octave and sustain a full-voiced E flat
in alt
virtually all the way through the end of the orchestral finale. The two strategists, like all good strategists throughout history, ensured the cooperation of the two main neutral powers, Amneris and Amonasro, by consulting them in advance. Giulietta Simionato and Robert Weede gave their full consent to the interpolation of the lethal E flat. The jolt that Baum got when he heard the E-flat go on and on and on was not quite lethal, but it led to a full-scale declaration that he would
never
sing with Callas again. The audience loved it. It had nothing to do with high art and little to do with great singing, but it had all the excitement of watching someone let go of the trapeze. And opera audiences love a good circus act at least as much as circus audiences do.

The third act had plenty of fresh circus elements in it: Baum overheld just about every note he could overhold; he forgot to ask “
Chi ci ascolta?
” (“Who hears us?”), so that Aida’s father had rather anticlimactically to volunteer the critical information; and after Amneris’ reentry, following Patti’s principle that a singer has only a limited number of high notes and when one has been sung it is lost forever, he simply decided not to sing his lines, thus preserving every ounce of voice for his final dramatic outburst.

“When one is a young performer,” Maria once said, “one is more of an athlete than an artist.” And in Mexico, the artist gave way to the athlete in her, the musician to the show woman.
Aida
was followed by
Tosca
, and even without Kurt Baum to prompt garish oversinging, something in the Mexican air or the Mexican audiences elicited from Maria the crudest and most vulgarly overdone performance she ever gave. Maria’s Tosca was later to transcend all the limitations of the role and the opera, but that June night in Mexico, it confirmed everything that
Tosca
detractors, including Maria herself, had ever said about the work. The cast of
Aida
, with Kurt Baum and Maria setting the tone, clearly did not take Patti’s advice about using up the future. Whatever the artistic merits, the audiences were ecstatic, and Evengelia was bursting with pride.

The public side of Evangelia’s stay in Mexico was in all respects a dream come true. Her daughter had reached the pinnacle she had dreamed of, she was there to share the triumphs with her, and everyone was ready to give to the mother her full share of the glory. But that was merely a stage-set facade, the public posturing disguising a private nightmare that both mother and daughter were doing their best to ignore. There was no real relationship between them. As Evangelia put it later: “Maria was formally, sometimes ostentatiously kind, as she might be to a distant relative, a cousin perhaps whom she had known for years and was fond of only at arm’s length.” It was as if Maria had put on the whole show to demonstrate that yes, the mother had achieved all her dreams, but no, she had no special claim on the daughter. Evangelia’s only source of intimacy with Maria was washing her underwear, black with the dye of Aida’s makeup, and rubbing her with alcohol when she got back to the hotel and collapsed into bed after some of the more exhausting performances.