| Listening to these
three Callas preservations has been like homecoming for Ulysses. Between
November 1, 1954 -- her American debut in Norma with the newly
formed Lyric Theatre of Chicago -- and Tosca at the Met on March
19, 1965, I heard at least one performance of every role she created on
North American opera stages. In addition to Norma and Tosca, there were Lucia
di Lammermoor, Violetta in La traviata, Elvira in I
puritani, Leonora in Il trovatore, Madama Butterfly, and
Medea. Plus, sadly, one of those globe-circling “farewell”
recitals with Giuseppe di Stefano, mine on March 2, 1974, in the Chicago
Civic Opera House.
Back in 1953, anonymously,
without recompense pro bono opera, I wrote the press releases that
ignited a stateside firestorm until the Lyric was obliged to hire a union
publicitor, the now-legendary Danny Newman. (He was my nominee, by the
way, rather than a local hack-flack who played Spoletta to veteran
colleague Claudia Cassidy, the dominatrix of Chicago music, theater, dance, and
sometimes even film as chief critic of the Tribune for a
dozen years).
By the time Maria made her 1954
debut (we knew one another well enough to be on a first-name basis,
although hardly as well as John Ardoin knew her later on in Dallas), she’d
slimmed down, reportedly from 210 to 140 lbs., and implemented a glamorous
makeover. As Norma, however, both in dress rehearsal and on opening night,
her voice hadn’t the amplitude or bravura heard on the early Cetra LPs
that were my introduction to her singing a year earlier, or on EMI/Angel’s
Lucia di Lammermoor, I puritani, and mono Tosca conducted by
Victor de Sabata - all recorded and released before her arrival in
Chicago. There was already a “beat” in altissimo that became a
tremolo later on, and before the end a wobble. There were register shifts,
too, although she could sing a chromatic scale from chest to top without a
break, without shifting gears.
Her vocal artistry was unique
from that first moment in Lawrence Kelly’s living room: it really was
he, as one of the Lyric’s founding triumvirate, who lobbied for Callas
to be their debut-season diva, whereas Renata Tebaldi was Cassidy’s
candidate (“why” is a long story that’s never been printed, too long
for here). Callas’ vocal artistry has remained unique in my experience
ever since, not that it was always beautiful - indeed the sound could be
outright ugly on numerous later occasions - but because it projected a
glowing and infallible musicianship by the most instinctive actress seen
onstage in more than 60 years of theater-going (25 of them as a paid
theater critic) -- or for that matter on film, any film.
Her characterizations were so
vivid that, after we’d visited a few times, I came to believe she was
reincarnated without much time-off between lives. One-on-one, her private
persona was middle-class, haphazardly educated (although penmanship was as
beautiful as her characterization of Violetta in Act 2). She was nasally
plain-spoken - at one moment an almost giggly teenager, then suddenly a
cut-to-the-chase gossip. She mistrusted most persons outside of music, but
the one she let herself trust most, and love - Aristotle Onassis -
betrayed her as cruelly as Pinkerton abandoned Butterfly. I owe the woman’s
memory a chapter in a book that persons keep nudging me to write, but I
keep putting off, sometimes to reminisce here.
Which brings me to these three
releases, all seriously flawed in one respect or other, beginning with an
incomplete Norma from Trieste on November 19, 1953 (93 minutes that
have survived, assembled on an Argentinian disc that combines CD-audio
with CD-ROM graphics). This was her 51st
performance in a role she would sing 88 times before a final performance
at Paris in May 1965. It was the first of four Trieste Normas conducted
by Toscanini’s one-time assistant, Antonino Votto, a kind of Italian
Karl Böhm, which is to say able, but missing the lyrical thrust of Tullio
Serafin, who led Callas’ first recording of the role for EMI the
following spring, when La Scala’s choral and orchestral forces were
crowded into the Cinema Metropol (and you wondered why the acoustic
sounded boxy).
Her Trieste colleagues included
two costars of Callas caliber - the Bulgarian basso Boris Christoff as her
Druid father, Oroveso, and Franco Corelli as Pollione, her two-timing
Roman paramour (only his second performance in the role, but the most
elegant Pollione who ever partnered her Norma). Elena Nikolaidi was
vocally matronly as Adalgisa, Norma’s errant handmaiden, yet
serviceable, with two par-for-the-provinces comprimari. Sound is
primitive -- often distorted to the extent of sounding pre-electric, with
sudden drop-outs -- assembled from sources obviously private, most likely
off the air (and believe me, postwar RAI was no BBC, Swedish Radio,
Deutsches Rundfunk, or even Radio France). Eventually you get an idea of
what the entire performance may have sounded like, if you’re old enough
to have heard these artists in person. But I shudder to think what young,
unindoctrinated, digitially zombified listeners will think, listening to a
Norma that has body-parts as well as teeth missing.
Those with gimmicks on their PCs
(Adobe Acrobat is an essential), or home-theater paraphernalia, can see
relevant pictures and read pages of data. But a better introduction to
Callas is Tony Walton’s biovid (one of several shown from time to time
on PBS). Callas in Trieste was still a hefty, full-voiced dramatic soprano
as well as a seasoned artist, a Norma to be reckoned with historically.
But one who later on surpassed herself interpretively, if never again with
the full vocal armaments she commanded before losing weight precariously.
Eleven days after Divina CDs’ Norma, Callas sang her first
Medea at La Scala - a five-performance run
between December 10, 1953, and January 6, 1954 (plus three Trovatore
Leonoras in Rome, December 16-23). Starting at the Florence May Festival
in 1953, she sang Medea 31 times, the last two at La Scala in May 1962.
Her Milan debut in the role was the third time she had opened a new season
there, an honor grudgingly granted by her nemesis, the intendant Antonio
Ghiringhelli. The previous ones -- I vespri Siciliani in 1951 and Macbeth
in 1952 -- had been conducted by de Sabata, postwar La Scala’s stellar
music director. He suffered agonizingly from arthritis, however, and 10
days before Medea had to withdraw.
On short notice Leonard Bernstein
(then guest-conducting in Italy) took over, fascinated by the challenge
although he too was ailing. He suggested cuts in Luigi Cherubini’s 1797
score, originally a French opéra-comique (meaning spoken dialog in this
Grand Guignol transformation of Euripides’ tragedy). Franz Lachner had
orchestrated the dialog as recitative in 1854 (as Ernest Guiraud did for
Bizet’s Carmen later on), but because of its musico-dramatic demands
Médée remained pretty much a mystery-novelty until Callas was persuaded
to take up the role in Italian. Medea is actually a gory forerunner of
Norma, wherein Bellini substituted Druids and Romans for Euripides’
abandoned Colchean princess and faithless Argonaut husband. Bellini’s
libretto, however, ultimately tenderized a heroine both traduced and
abandoned. While each protagonist has two children, Norma spares hers;
Medea kills them as the ultimate revenge, after first incinerating Jason’s
new bride Glaucis in a magic cape.
Five years later, on November
6,1958, she re-created the role in a new production at Dallas (where Kelly
and conductor Nicola Rescigno retreated, after the Chicago Lyric’s
ruling triumvirate splintered). Callas’ first Texas Medea, costarring
Jon Vickers as Jason, remains the most indelible in my memory-book. A
pirated recording exists if you can find it (I have a three-cassette
edition on Legends, going back a while, in fact a long while); so does at
least one from Covent Garden, where the production was transferred for
seven performances in June 1959. Somewhere, I’ll risk a guess, both of
Callas’ two Dallas repetitions in November 1959 were preserved, by which
time such piracies had been polished to a high degree by Texans.
Unfortunately, Medea had been boxily recorded at La Scala in September
1957 -- not a good Callas year -- with a mediocre supporting cast
(although Renata Scotto sang Glaucis), and a very tired Tullio Serafin
conducting in place of Nicola Rescigno, who led her finest ones at Dallas
and London. Mercury released it in the U.S.; EMI/Columbia did the
disservice abroad. Along with Cetra’s La traviata of 1953 (to complete a
contractual obligation), Medea is the poorest of Callas’ commercially
recorded complete operas.
In partial atonement, Golden
Melodram’s “Callas Edition Live” from La Scala on December 10, 1953,
is
the best-sounding of the three CD omaggi in the headnote above.
Indubitably it is the RAI broadcast, cleaned up and for the most part
noiseless, although a couple of climaxes distort, especially Medea’s
final scream of vengeance. Even so, I haven’t heard this particular
performance sound better, with Fedora Barbieri in verismo voice as Medea’s
handmaiden Neris. Gino Penno, enjoying one of the 10 good years in a
career cut short by illness, sang a stalwart Jason; Maria Luisa Nache was
properly maidenly as Glaucis, and Giuseppe Morelli contributed a
utilitarian King Creon, who errs in letting Medea remain 24 hours to visit
with her children (and make a torch of his daughter before killing the
kids).
What’s surprising is the degree
to which Medea was depicted as merely shrewish by director Luchino
Visconti and conductor Bernstein. Callas, although vocally unsteady during
the first act, was blood-curdling in a slasher-film way, but several of
her opening-act outbursts sounded tigerish rather than sinister. Coming from
Bernstein I can’t say this surprised me; his career-long appetite for
overstatement, for melodramatic gestures, produced a gripping but
musically anachronistic performance. Visconti’s options, however, remain
dismaying even today. The later Medea that director Alexis
Minotis created for Callas in Dallas -- repeated in London, and
re-directed in a subsequent “new production” at La Scala --
transported one to the realm of tragedy. Chills and horror were indigenous,
but Minotis alchemized them with Rescigno’s complete cooperation.
I had reviewed a Callas concert
in Chicago in January 1958, and worried that vocally she was losing it.
After Medea in Dallas I needed to tell her, as well as write, that her
recovery was superhuman. Still in her red wig and blood-smeared costume,
with makeup smudged by perspiration, she called out to everyone within
earshot: “So, Roger, I’m losing my voice, eh?” I assured her
otherwise, and promised to eat crow for the rest of the week. “Crow?”
she asked suspiciously, “What does that mean, crow?”
A year or so later I heard Madga
Olivero sing Medea in the same Dallas production at Kansas City, and she
was heart-wrenching (vocally in control, too, of a taxing and atypical
role, age notwithstanding). But Callas had been unearthly: her rejection
by the man she loved (for whom she betrayed her people to help him steal
the Golden Fleece) was as desperate as the decision to commit crimes of
vengeance when he remained deaf to her entreaties. Not even in the second
act of Tosca was she more poignant, or more trapped in betrayal. Golden
Melodram’s remarkable transformation of 1953 source material is a
documentary treasure, but those Dallas/London versions remain the Golden
Fleece (and furthermore restored part of Medea’s second-act aria that
Bernstein had cut, in a George Abbott moment, one supposes.)
Tosca on July 5, 1965, the other
audio-video CD-ROM from Buenos Aires, was Callas’ farewell not only to
the role (which she claimed not to care for) but to the operatic stage. It
was an opera she’d already sung as a teenager in Athens during the war,
but not as an adult until 1950. After that there were 33 more - 18 of them
in the last two years of her career, at London, Paris, and New York City
(plus a 1964 remake in stereo for EMI - troppo tarde, too late). She was
scheduled to sing four performances at Covent Garden in the early summer
of 1965, but had fainted before she could finish a Paris Norma on May 29,
and was obliged to cancel all but one Tosca - a Royal Opera House
Benevolent Fund benefit, attended by the Queen, Prince Philip, and the Queen Mother.
Divina Records says this is the
only complete recording on CD of Callas’ farewell to the stage -
compiled from pirate-tapes made in the audience. Sound is depressingly
poorish: for example, at Tosca’s entrance in Act 3 (track 12), the pitch
suddenly rises and the acoustic alters. During some stage action in Act 1
(probably shtick by the Sacristan), a man close to the mike chuckles; and
there are bits of conversation preserved along with loud prompter-cues.
But you get a semblance of Callas’ Tosca and Tito Gobbi’s
still-incomparable Scarpia (later on, when his voice got leathery, he
began to overact grotesquely). Most startling is Callas’ “Muori, muori
dannato” after stabbing him - muted rather than snarled (as we’d heard
for more than two decades on the Scala recording), and as such a dozen
times more credible in terms of character. Her singing voice is thinnish,
reedy, desperately screechy on the final B of “Vissi d’arte,” and
mercifully smothered by the orchestra at the end of Act 3 before her leap
from the parapet. George Prêtre conducted idiosyncratically, yet was
tenderly courteous to the diva whispered to be his current affaire (Onassis
by then had set his sights on the Widow Kennedy).
Renato Cioni was a likeably
boyish Cavaradossi, and the comprimari all contributed to Puccini’s
gilding of Sardou’s original melodrama. And while the opera may be
ramshackle, the damn thing sticks in the memory, like celery between one’s
molars hours after eating. Surely Tosca is better stuff than Joseph Kerman’s
dismissal of it as “a tawdry little shocker” (an epithet I’d assign
instead to Cavalleria rusticana, or Salome). But it demands a heroine and
villain of equal voltage, and here you get enough from both to reward the
subtleties that accrued in Callas’ portrait of a jealous diva, and Gobbi’s
lip-smacking police chief who plots to bed her. Still, for all-out
singing, stick with Callas of 1953 with di Stefano, Gobbi, and maybe the
best conductor Tosca has ever had.
By way of wrapping up, there are
no librettos in any of these slim packages. You can buy them if you don’t
already have one or more, but that adds to the price of what are,
I’d say, indefensibly full-priced CDs. Callas, though, makes her fullest
impact when you know every word she is inflecting.
As for that Odysseus simile at
the start, I hadn’t played one of her recordings since I bought the last
batch of concert reissues on Virtuoso, Laserlight and Gala, competently
transferred and bargain-basement priced. I once had everything of hers on
vinyl except Il pirata, but have been satisfied to live with the audiovisual memories of
her great moments. Callas performances on stage from 1954 to 1965 remain
more real to me than persons I see shopping, walking dogs, dining
out...whatever...every day. I am grateful to Melodram and Divina, even with
serious demurrers, for reminding me to be grateful that I lived when I
did, heard what I heard, and have the genes and good luck still to
remember.
R.D.
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