The legacy of Maria Callas, twenty years after her death

A diva's legacy - December 1997

Maria Callas - the greatest operatic singer of the last half of our century, and

the most famous prima donna in history - died in 1977, 20 years ago. Biographies, plays, even ballets, have fanned the legend; EMI has marked the anniversary with its most voluminous Callas edition to date. Unknown recordings keep coming to light. You can now hear (though not on EMI) the eleven-year-old Callas in 1935 on an Amateur Hour radio broadcast, and the retired Callas rehearsing in private in 1976, the year before her death. It is fair to use the word “genius" of her; but we must also recognise the extraordinary nature of her ambition. Throughout her career, Callas wore two Janus faces: that of the severely conscientious, profoundly committed artist, and that of the head-line-making focus of scandal. Nor can you fully separate one from the other. She knew that scandal was good for business - but she was also instinctively, naturally sensational.

   The first sensational achievement of Callas's career was in 1949. After less than two years of work in Italy as a soprano in the heavily dramatic repertory, she stepped at ten days' notice into one of the most brilliant coloratura roles, Elvira in Bellini's “I Puritani”, traditionally associated with light voices, just three days after singing Wagner's Brünnhilde.

This kind of volte-face became a Callas trademark. As late as 1961, when her top notes were painful shrieks and her entire voice was fraying, her EMI “Callas à Paris” LP recital threw down three gauntlets at once: (a) it was her official debut as a French singer; (b) it included arias both coloratura and dramatic; (c) it ranged from high soprano music to items customarily sung by rich contralto voices.

   Callas often spoke of "serving" music. Most singers only serve music as far as is vocally congenial; she went far further, sacrificing comfort, loveliness, and the basic capital of her voice itself on music's altar. Although much slapdash "dramatic" singing has followed in her wake, she herself was fiendishly precise. How Callas worked on herself is demonstrated in exceptional detail by two recent CDs. Back in 1985, EMI released the test recording she made in 1953 of Donna Anna's “Non mi dir" in “Don Giovanni”, and its staggering achievement has nothing to do with dramatic intensity, everything to do with a technique and musicality so prodigious that her astonishingly long, relaxed and fluent lines change the entire landscape of Mozart's aria. This year, however, EMI has released - on tracks 1 and 2 of “Maria Callas: the EMI Rarities” (EMI Classics 7243 5 66468 2 7) - both that and Callas's first test-recording of the same aria, made earlier the same day. The first, never released before, is technically even more amazing, with one twenty-second breath (many singers cannot sustain a phrase longer than ten seconds) linking together usually separate phrases into a single skein of dignified pleading. Interpretatively, she seems almost to be sight-reading; the second account - responding to suggestions by the recording director, Walter Legge - shows the emergence of several new details.

The other is a "pirate", “Le 4 Pazzie di Lucia di Lammermoor” (Memories, HR v

4581), made up of no less than four successive performances of the Mad Scene from “Lucia di Lammermoor” in Mexico City in 1952, Callas's first-ever performances of the role. She sometimes muddles her words, but her grasp of the music is always an awesome object-lesson in overall architecture and in illuminating detail. The CD shows in particular how she kept changing details of accentuation, and kept searching for a style that would satisfy her. A phrase that is blithe at one performance becames tragically laden at the next; she is still negotiating whether Lucia needs a light or dark voice. Meanwhile, she always knows musico-dramatic truths that no other Lucia C of our century has known: the psychological fragmentation of Lucia's condition in the wordless cadenza with flute, the plaintive pathos within the vaulting virtuosity of her final cabaletta.

   Callas began to record for EMI in 1953, and her arrival set the seal on the new LP era as surely as Caruso's had on that of 78s. The greatest Callas, however, is seldom to be heard in her studio recordings. That EMI has remastered an increasing number of her live recordings is very welcome. And 1953 saw the end of her vocal prime, for it was the year in which she began to slim. As Michael Scott demonstrates in “Maria Meneghini Callas” (Simon & Schuster, 1991), this didn't make her lose her technique; but it did make her lose her voice.

   It is in the live recordings from 1949-53 that the fullest miracle of Callas is radiantly apparent. They show her often working with great conductors - such as Serafin, Gui, Erich Kleiber, de Sabata, Barbirolli, Bernstein - and her range (from Wagner's Kundry to Rossini's Armida) is at its most extreme. She stretches out the most taxing phrases in “Turandot” at far greater length than other singers would attempt, and at the same time goes straight to the core of the role's defensive sexual frigidity; she preserves her standards even when working without good conductors or (more often) good tenors; she unfolds a hysteria and a legato within Wagner's Kundry that galvanise the role into a new tragic glory; and she finds a greater range of colour within “Lucia” and “Traviata” than would later be available to her.

   Callas often struck sparks from dramatic interplay with colleagues. But she struck the best sparks from herself. Remember who and what she was: myopic, overweight until her 30s, a Greek American who seems always to have been speaking in a language that was not her first. Music was the only serious outlet her psyche knew. And musical psychodrama is nowhere more supreme than those extended scenes in which Callas is lost amid her character's thoughts. Maybe it was sensationalist of EMI to present one Callas LP just called "Mad Scenes" (1958), but it was also brilliant.

The heightened psychological condition of operatic madness released profound instincts within her.

   Yet perhaps all she really needed, to be most herself, was music that expressed contrast and tension within classical form. I have often thought that the greatest single recorded item of her entire career is of the aria “D'amor sull' ali rosee" during a live performance of Il Trovatore at La Scala in 1953. In the opera's first three acts, ironically, she is at her least committed. Then, suddenly, she is at her grandest in this scene. True, she is not in her clearest voice, nor can she essay the highest options she so soaringly brought off in her 1950 debut in the role. Here, however, she is fully awake to the music’s dark, tragic nobility. There is no dramatic conflict here, but the aria’s constantly self-renewing sweep, its swelling long-lined lyrical expansiveness, and the contrasting trills and portamenti that contribute to its texture; these are enough to make Callas sublime.

<Financial Times, December, 1997>