Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (15 page)

 . . . I beg you not to repeat this Leon—but my mother wrote a letter cursing etc. as is her usual way (she thinks) of obtaining things, saying also that she didn’t bring me into this world for nothing—she said she gave birth to me so I should maintain her. That phrase I’m sorry but it’s hard to digest.
   It’s hard to explain by writing, Leon, when I see you I’ll explain. Only believe me I did and I will do my best for them but I will not permit them to exagerate. I have a future to think of and also I would like a child of my own.
   Please, love me and believe in me—we are so much alike . . .

She did feel a special affinity with her godfather and commented on it in many of her letters. Besides, she felt enormous gratitude and love for him; he was the only person in her life to whom she could write consistently and intimately, without screen or reservation:

Nobody else but you dear Leon helped me and gave me courage then, and I’ll not forget it. Neither will I forget when I had to fulfill my contract to Verona and I didn’t have the money to leave. If it were not for you, dearest . . . Not only that but I only had $70 with me—and not one winter clothing. It’s hard to believe but it’s true. . . . Please write to me both of you for I sincerely love you both.
   I kiss you and Sally so very much.

Please write—

   Maria

At the same time, Maria sent a letter to her father inviting him to join her and Meneghini in Mexico in July 1951 for her South American season. On the principle that “my enemy’s enemies are my friends,” Maria was aligning herself with her father, and taking one more step toward totally closing her heart to her mother. From this point until Maria died, she saw her mother through a distorting haze, as a shadowy, almost menacing figure. Throughout her life she remained in the grip of this unconscious adolescent rebellion—haunted by her mother, but right up to the end frozen in her belligerence.

Meanwhile, Italy was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Verdi’s death, with festivals springing up all over the country. Maria’s Verdi year began at the Teatro Comunale in Florence on January 15, 1951, with her first
Traviata
. She had started working on it in May 1949 when she and Serafin were going by ship to Buenos Aires for seven weeks of performances there. At the time there were no plans for her to sing Violetta, and for over a year before she did sing it, she kept declining offers to do so, feeling not yet ready for the part. When she finally accepted the Teatro Comunale’s offer, she and Serafin started working together again.

They worked long and hard, but for the first time the magic of their collaboration seemed tarnished. Perhaps because she was no longer prepared to play the respectful student to the celebrated maestro, perhaps because she was still recovering from her illness, perhaps because, however subconsciously, the role of the guru was now filled by Visconti, Maria was constantly irritable with Serafin and ready to flare up. On one occasion she did. It was their first quarrel, the prelude of worse to come, though when the first night arrived there was no trace of animosity. However fierce he could be at rehearsals, once the curtain went up on the first performance, Serafin was always there, ready in every way to support the singers. “When I am in the pit I am there to serve you because I have to serve my performance,” he would say. And Maria paid lavish tribute to this side of the maestro shortly after his death in 1968: “We would look down and feel we had a friend there, in the pit. He was helping you all the way. He would mouth all the words. If you were not well he would speed up the tempo, and if you were in top form he would slow it down to let you breathe, to give you room. He was breathing with you, loving it with you. It was elastic, growing, living.”

When the final curtain came down on
Traviata
on the first night and Maria and Serafin acknowledged the applause hand in hand, whatever had passed between them during the rehearsals seemed to belong to the past. “Here was a great accomplishment,” said Serafin later, summing up Maria’s first Violetta, “and it surprised many.”

She left Florence for Naples. There were only a few days before, on January 27, 1951, the fiftieth anniversary of Verdi’s death, she was due to sing her first
Trovatore
in Italy. She spent them rehearsing and working with Serafin on her Leonora, perfecting with his guidance what she had achieved a year earlier in Mexico with instinct alone. The reviews of that first night, however, did not suggest that there was anything great or even exceptional about Maria, or any other member of the cast, even though it included the celebrated Giacomo Lauri-Volpi in the title role. Lauri-Volpi was so incensed at what he described as “this dreadful indifference” to vocal art that he wrote an open letter to the Naples press in protest, with special vehemence reserved for the failure of the critics to acknowledge the greatness of Callas.

Maria, who in any case was never very fond of the melancholy Leonora, was downcast by the lack of enthusiasm and relieved to leave Naples for Palermo where she was to open the spring season in
Norma
. She had barely arrived in Palermo when she received an urgent call from La Scala. It was Ghiringhelli himself: could she come to Milan to take over Aida from the indisposed Tebaldi? No, she could not, was the unequivocal reply. Singing once at La Scala as a replacement was enough. She would sing there again in her own right or not at all. She knew that Ghiringhelli could not afford to withhold a proper invitation for much longer. Nor did he. But he did hold out much longer than it would have seemed possible. When Gian Carlo Menotti told Ghiringhelli that his choice for Magda in
The Consul
was Maria Callas, Ghiringhelli exclaimed, “Oh, my god! No, never, never, never! I promised you that any singer you chose would be acceptable to me, but I will not have Maria Callas in the theater unless she comes as a guest artist.” Menotti went to see Maria and begged her to accept. She refused absolutely; and, as he was going out of the door, she stopped him: “Mr. Menotti, I want you to remember one thing, however, that I
will
sing at La Scala, and that Ghiringhelli will
pay
for this for the rest of his life.”

On May 26, Maria opened at the Maggio Musicale in Florence in
I Vespri Siciliani
. This was to be the opera that brought Ghiringhelli from Milan, contract in hand, offering her the honor of opening the 1951–52 season at La Scala; it was one of her greatest Italian triumphs and the only opera she was ever to direct twenty-two years later.
I Vespri
, based on the massacre of the French by Sicilians at Palermo in 1282, was one of Verdi’s less frequently performed operas. The production was revived by the Florence May Festival as part of the festivities for the composer’s fiftieth anniversary, with Boris Christoff as Procida and the Austrian-born conductor Erich Kleiber making his Italian operatic debut. Lord Harewood, then editor of
Opera
, was there for one of the rehearsals and he described Maria’s first entrance on the stage: “ . . . The French have been boasting for some time of the privileges which belong by rights to an army of occupation, when a female figure—the Sicilian Duchess Elena—is seen slowly crossing the square. Doubtless the music and the production helped to spotlight Elena but, though she has not yet sung and was not even wearing her costume, one was straight away impressed by the natural dignity of her carriage, the air of quiet, innate authority which went with her every movement.” He was equally impressed by what he heard: “ . . . there was an assurance and a tragic bravura about her singing which was frequently thrilling.”

The performance was recorded, and right from the start we can feel the total success with which Maria created theater through her voice. The chorus of praise was unremitting and Maria fed ravenously off it, but the applause, the praise and the adulation were nothing compared to the offstage triumph: La Scala was at her feet, and the terms of her contract included three leading roles, thirty appearances during the initial season and 300,000 lire, practically $500, a performance. This was the laying on of hands, and Maria was in ecstasy. Whatever glories she had gained outside Italy and however distinguished some of the other Italian opera houses, La Scala offered the ultimate endorsement.

Maria’s last performance in
Vespri Siciliani
was on June 5. Four days later, still in Florence but at the more intimate Teatro della Pergola, Maria was opening in her first world premiere: Haydn’s
Orfeo ed Euridice
. Written for London in 1791, it had waited 160 years for Maria and its first performance. The classical style of Haydn was a long way from Verdi’s Sicily, and Euridice had little to do with Elena, but Maria managed the eighteenth-century style as though it was all she had ever sung. Her versatility had by now become legendary among the cognoscenti all over the world, and it was highlighted in America by her first recordings. As her fame spread across the Atlantic,
The New York Times
carried a review of Maria in
Orfeo
under the title “New Yorker excels.”

Athens, New York and Verona were all claiming her for their own. The Scala contract had been signed and Covent Garden was trying to get her to sing
Norma
in 1952. Sander Gorlinsky, who was ultimately to become her exclusive agent, arrived in Verona to make the arrangements. He found Meneghini in one of his “catch me if you can” moods and left empty-handed. “I nearly gave up,” he remembers. “But I decided to go back to Verona and make another effort. When I arrived at her apartment she was in bed and Mr. Meneghini mercifully out. ‘I’d love to do it,’ she said, and signed the contract right there in the apartment, at a fee of two hundred and fifty pounds a night.”

Full of confidence and expectations, Maria left with Meneghini for Mexico. Her father was already there, waiting for them. George Callas’ two week stay in Mexico was an overwhelming experience. Not only was Maria the heroine of the Mexican public, she was also given every possible accolade by the press and every honor and hospitality by both the cultural elite and the local socialites. All George Callas’ sober reservations about having his daughter on the stage evaporated in the general intoxication. He and Meneghini, close in age and similar in their somber disposition, were getting on beautifully together. Their shared pride in Maria was powerful enough to overcome the father’s lack of Italian and the husband’s tortured English. Maria had little time to spend with her father in between performances and rehearsals, but enjoyed having him by her side, and knowing that he was there in the darkened auditorium, proudly watching and applauding her. The more her resentment toward her mother increased, the more love and warmth she felt for a father who had never made any demands or burdened her with his expectations.

After three performances of
Aida
with Mario Del Monaco, who went on heroically oversinging his way through the opera up to and including the dying fall of the final scene, Maria sang her first Mexican
Traviata
with Cesare Valletti. At her husband’s insistence, she was paid in gold dollars in Mexico, which Meneghini, like a pirate, put in a little bag bought especially for the purpose.

The Mexican visit was an unqualified triumph, but Maria left for her next stop, São Paulo in Brazil, exhausted, her legs massively swollen and her nerves strained to breaking point. The wear and tear of traveling and performing, the petty annoyances and vexations on-and offstage, and lately an unusual loss of sleep—all took their toll. But that was not all. More exhausting than the irritations and the work of the present were the replays of her past—past mistakes, past performances, past judgments—that haunted her. Even more exhausting were her fears for the future. La Scala had surrendered, but that was as much a source of anxiety for Maria as a source of exultation. The higher she climbed, the greater the reputation she had to maintain, the greater became the burden of past and future that she had to carry. The past was no more, the future was yet to come, but Maria went on sacrificing the joy of the present to that unborn future and that dead past. It is small wonder she was exhausted.

She had to cancel all her scheduled performances of
Aida
in São Paulo and only appeared in
Traviata
, alternating as Violetta with Renata Tebaldi. The cancellation of
Aida
brought the first personally critical comments from the South American press, which also carried some very unflattering things that Maria was supposed to have said about Tebaldi’s Violetta. Had she said them? Had they been distorted? From now on, in the reporting of Maria’s sayings and doings in the press, these were to become staple questions. However much Callas lovers might have wished it otherwise, the only correct answer would almost invariably have to be: yes, the press did exaggerate what she said and did, but yes, she
had
said it or done it.

Maria arrived in Rio de Janeiro from São Paulo to be greeted with a press full of Tebaldi’s Violetta. Renata had opened in Rio a week earlier and had been wildly acclaimed, as was Maria when she opened in
Norma
at the Teatro Municipal on September 12. Parallel triumphs simply increased the tension. Tension between prima donnas was nothing new in operatic history, but there was a new element here, not easy to define but unmistakably present: it was the extent of the public’s identification and involvement. Maria’s comments, inflated by the press, made battle inevitable. Lines were drawn and positions openly taken. The musical world—and by no means the musical world alone—was beginning to be divided into Tebaldists and Callasites.