Master Class Play Guide

BY TERRENCE McNALLY
DIRECTED BY PETER ROTHSTEIN
MASTER CLASS
PLAY GUIDE
Compiled by Jane Caplow,
Director of New Work Development
OCTOBER 8 – NOVEMBER 2 | MacPHAIL CENTER FOR MUSIC
ANTONELLO HALL, 501 S. 2ND STREET MINNEAPOLIS, MN
TABLE OF CONTENTS
In 1994, Theater Latté Da co-founders
Peter Rothstein and Denise Prosek began
their successful collaboration by privately
producing five original cabarets to showcase
Twin Cities talent. They discovered that
by placing equal emphasis on music and
storytelling, they could weave tapestries of
engaging, challenging, and often surprising
narratives that resonated with people on
many levels. Theater Latté Da incorporated as
a nonprofit organization in 1998. It remains
committed to a rigorous experimentation
with music and story that expands the art
form and speaks to a contemporary audience.
In 1998, Theater Latté Da began performing
at the intimate 120-seat Loring Playhouse.
By 2007, Theater Latté Da productions were
playing to sold out houses. The company
began searching for spaces with different
performance configurations to meet the
unique needs of its productions. Since 2007,
Theater Latté Da has produced shows at the
Guthrie Theater, Ordway Center for the
Performing Arts, Pantages Theatre, Southern
Theater, History Theatre, Fitzgerald Theatre,
the Rarig Center Stoll Thrust Theatre and
The Lab Theater. Matching its productions
to appropriate performance venues has given
Theater Latté Da audiences the opportunity
to experience a wide variety of spaces and
neighborhoods throughout the Twin Cities.
Theater Latté Da is now emerging as a leader
in the musical theater art form. Theater Latté
Da boasts an impressive history of work that
has received significant popular and critical
acclaim (Awards and Recognition). Its world
premieres include Passage of Dreams, All Is
Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914, Steerage
Song, and A Christmas Carole Petersen.
Unique approaches to classics have resulted
in boldly re-imagined productions of La
Bohème, and Susannah, among others.
3
About Maria Callas
8
Remembering La Divina
8
Maria Callas Chronology
10
Five Rumors about Maria Callas
11
Opera 101
12
The Composers
14
Introduction to Callas at Juilliard,
The Master Classes
15
Maria Callas on the Art of Performance
16
Important Figures in Maria Callas’ Life
18
Maria, Not Callas
22
On the Recordings of Maria Callas
24Bibliography, Further Reading
and Online Resources
Master Class is being produced by Theater Latté Da
at MacPhail Center for Music.
Written by TERRENCE McNALLY
Music Direction by ANDREW BOURGOIN
Directed by PETER ROTHSTEIN
October 8 – November 2, 2014
Previews on October 8, 9, & 10
Opening Night on October 11
This activity is made possible by
the voters of Minnesota through
a Minnesota State Arts Board
Operating Support grant, thanks to
a legislative appropriation from the
arts and cultural heritage fund.
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ABOUT MARIA CALLAS
By Raymond Ericson
Maria Callas once said, “Wherever I am,
it is hectic.” This may even have been an
understatement. Controversy, legend and myth
surrounded the soprano throughout the major
part of her career. Those who admired her felt
that she was one of the greatest opera singers
of all time, while others believed that her vocal
inadequacies precluded any such claim.
Disputes and legal action seemed to arise
wherever she sang. Her private life was seldom
out of the limelight. Yet there was no denying
that it was the magic of her personality that
made every move of hers newsworthy.
‘Awesome Stage Projection’
necessary to achieve the best.” Everyone who worked with her
agreed that she was a hard worker, willing to rehearse more than
expected, even when a role or a production was not new. Early
in her career she sang as many as 16 roles in one season, and she
was a quick study. Her own interest in bel canto grew in 1948 in
Venice, when she learned the difficult part of Elvira in Bellini’s “I
Puritani” in five days in order to substitute for an ailing singer.
A balanced reaction to Miss Callas’ artistry was expressed by
Harold C. Schonberg, the music critic of The New York Times,
after her return to the Metropolitan Opera in 1965 in the title
role of Puccini’s “Tosca.”
“If you want brains, an awesome stage projection, intensity and
musicianship, Miss Callas can supply those commodities more
than any soprano around,” Mr. Schonberg wrote. “But if you look
for voice and vocal splendor in your Tosca, Miss Callas is not the
one to make you happy.”
Unhappy Manhattan Childhood
Maria Anna Sofia Cecilia Kalogeropoulos was born Dec. 3, 1923
in Manhattan’s Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospitals. Her Greek
parents had arrived in the United States a few months earlier. Her
father was a pharmacist. Years later, in discounting the rumor
that she had been born in Brooklyn, Miss Callas said that she
remembered living in Upper Manhattan over a drugstore owned
by her father. She attended Public School 164 at Wadsworth
Avenue and 164th Street in Washington Heights, and by the age
of 9 was singing for her schoolmates.
Earlier in the review he had written that “her conception of the role
was electrical. Everything at her command was put into striking
use. She was a woman in love, a tiger cat, a woman possessed by
jealousy … This was supreme acting, unforgettable acting.”
There is no question that Miss Callas sparked new interest in
the largely forgotten bel canto operas of the 19th century. These
were the words of Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini, most of which
had not been heard since the era when they were written. They
were considered too difficult and too uninteresting musically to
be worth reviving. Miss Callas showed that they could be sung,
that the melodies and all the embellishments that were thought
to be for virtuoso display could be turned to genuine dramatic
use. It opened up a whole new repertory for singers such as Joan
Sutherland and Beverly Sills to follow the path set by Miss Callas.
The soprano spoke often of her unhappy childhood, which was
marred by the squabbles between her parents and her jealousy of
her older sister--Maria was squat, while her sister was attractive
and favored by the parents. The family returned to Athens when
Maria was 13. She won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of
Music, where one of her teachers was Elvira de Hidalgo, a famous
Spanish soprano in her day. She remembered Maria as being
“square and fat, but she put such force, such sentiment, such
wonderful interpretation into all she sang. She would want to
sing the most difficult coloraturas, scales and trills. Even as a child
her willpower was terrific.”
When the soprano was told that she was considered
temperamental, her answer was, “I will always be as difficult as
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Before she was 15, the student was singing the dramatic role of
Santuzza in Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana.” Four years later
she made her official debut with the Athens Opera.
At the end of World War II, she went back to New York on her
own. She auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera at the time
that Edward Johnson was the general manager. She was offered
the title roles in Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” and Beethoven’s
“Fidelio.” “Fidelio” was to have been sung in English. Miss Callas
recalled the impossibility of singing Butterfly: “I was then too
fat–210 pounds.” As for “Fidelio”: “Opera in English is so silly.
Nobody takes it seriously.” She turned down the offers.
She came close to making her American debut in Chicago with a
group of Italian singers, but that fell through for financial reasons.
In 1947, she was given a contract to appear in Verona, and she
sailed for Italy. She made her debut in the famous Arena in the
title role of Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda.” Also making his debut in
the opera was the late American tenor, Richard Tucker.
Met Conductor in Verona
In Verona, Miss Callas met one of her most important mentors,
the Italian conductor Tullio Serafin. He took her to Venice,
where she sang roles that required a dramatic voice, Isolde in the
Wagner opera, Turandot in the Puccini opera, even Brunnhilde in
Wagner’s “Die Walkure.” In other cities she sang the name parts
in Verdi’s “Aida” and Bellini’s “Norma.”
Callas as Aminia in La Sonnambula (photo: Carayonk)
would sing only leading roles in major operas and would not
share a percentage of her salary with a powerful artist agency
in Milan.
The natural goal of every opera singer in Italy then, as now, was
La Scala in Milan. Miss Callas sang an Aida there in 1949, but it
was not in the regular season. She would not join the company
officially until 1951, because already independent minded. She
In the early 50’s, Miss Callas sang in a number of rarely heard
operas in Italian houses. These included Haydn’s “Orfeo ed
Euridice,” Gluck’s “Alceste” and Cherubini’s “Medea.” She had a
notable triumph in the last work, which was staged by Luchino
Visconti and conducted by Leonard Bernstein.
She was offered a contract at the Met in 1952 by the general
manager, Rudolf Bing, but this did not work out because she
would not come to New York without her husband, Giovanni
Battista Meneghini, who was unable to get a visa.
In this period, she had gained experience and a large measure of
success not only in Italy, but also in South America, Mexico and
Covent Garden in London. She took off 70 pounds, which left
her at a slim 135 pounds. At 5 feet 8 inches tall and with a face
made striking by her broad cheekbones, she became one of the
handsomest women of the operatic stage.
She finally made her United States debut in 1954, with the
Chicago Lyric Opera, in the role of Norma. Two years later, on
Oct. 29, she sang the same part for her debut at the Metropolitan
Opera. By this time her reputation was such that announcements
of her appearances generated long lines outside the box office of
the houses where she was to sing. Although critical reaction was
usually mixed because of the individual timbre of Miss Callas’
voice and the flaws in her technique, she was ecstatically received
for her musicianship, her personal appeal and the originality of
her characterizations.
Callas with her poodle named “Toy” (Photo: Ruggieri Napoli)
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Valuable Artist and Attraction
In fact, most of the feuds were patched up, and Miss Callas
returned to sing with the various companies again. She was
considered too valuable an artist and too great a box-office
attraction to ignore.
As Mr. Bing said of Miss Callas yesterday after he heard of her
death: “I was privileged to bring her to the Met and I am proud
of that. She was a difficult artist, as many are, but she was one of
the greatest artists of her time. We will not see her like again.”
In fact, Miss Callas was re-engaged by the Met in 1965 to sing
Tosca, and these became her last public opera performances.
In subsequent years, the soprano would make announcements
from time to time that she was considering singing somewhere,
causing a flurry of excitement in the music world. But no
performances materialized. In 1971, she went to the Juilliard
School to give a series of 12 master classes. These were jammed
with auditors, many of them coming from out of New York
City, and Miss Callas was credited with exceptional success in
her teaching.
Miss Callas’ voice, which some critics maintained was man-made
rather than natural, had three sections. At the top it was inclined
to be steely, even shrill, and the highest notes were often little
more than shrieks. The middle voice could have a covered sound
or could be velvety; used at a soft level, it was beautiful. But in
the lowest register it could be edgy again.
Went on Worldwide tour in ’73
In 1973, she and her close friend, the tenor Giuseppe di Stefano,
tried their hand at staging opera. They directed a production of
Verdi’s “I Vespri Siciliani” in Turin, but in the view of the critics,
the results were disastrous.
Technically, the soprano often did thrilling things with the tonal
coloration and with the fioriture, and she could sing a descending
chromatic scale dazzlingly. But sometimes, too, the voice would
not respond smoothly to the demands she made on it.
That same year, they decided to make a worldwide concert tour.
It began in Hamburg, West Germany, in October, and the singers
appeared at Carnegie Hall in two programs in February 1974.
The audience was almost hysterical in its adulation, but the critics
Having conquered many of the great opera companies of the
world, the soprano began to have trouble with them. In Chicago
she was served with a lawsuit backstage during a performance,
and she said she would never sing there again. She was accused of
breaking a contract with the Vienna State Opera over a question
of fees. She canceled an engagement with the San Francisco
Opera just before the season opened, pleading illness, and the
company preferred charges against her with the American Guild
of Musical Artists, the singers’ union.
At the gala opening of one season in Rome, she sang the opening
act of “Norma” and then refused to go on after that, because of
laryngitis. At the Met, she quarreled with Mr. Bing over a matter
of dates and repertory, and he canceled their contract. She did not
show up for scheduled performances at the Edinburgh Festival
and at Athens.
All these actions made headlines, and Miss Callas earned a
reputation for temperamental behavior. She had an answer to
these charges, in most cases explaining that she would not sing
unless she or performing conditions were at their best, and this
was the reason for her walking out on performances or contracts.
“To me, the art of music is magnificent, and I cannot bear to see
it treated in a shabby way,” she said in a Life magazine interview
in 1959. “When it is respected and when the artists who serve it
are respected, I will work hard and always give my best … I do
not want to be associated with inferior staging, taste, conducting
or singing.”
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lamented that there was not much left of Miss Callas’ voice,
even if her interpretations remained unexcelled. When the tour
ended, it represented the soprano’s last singing in public. She did,
however, continue to add to her extensive list of recordings.
When she married Mr. Meneghini, 20 years her senior, in 1949,
the Italian building- materials tycoon gave her security and,
it was said at first, affection. She called herself professionally
Maria Meneghini Callas, and he became her manager and agent.
They were separated in 1959 after she had become romantically
involved with Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate. The
marriage with Mr. Meneghini was annulled six years later.
The public eagerly followed the relationship between the singer
and the entrepreneur, particularly after it was learned that Mr.
Onassis had given her controlling stock in a $3 million freighter.
They had apartments near each other in Paris. When Mr. Onassis
married Jacqueline Kennedy, attempts were made to have Miss
Callas comment on a supposed rebuff. The singer said little about
it except that she and Mr. Onassis were still good friends.
performances, while Miss Callas went, with some ostentation, to
those of the other soprano. Gossip writers hinted that she did so
in order to make Miss Tebaldi nervous.
The singer was also known for the bitterness with which she spoke
of her family. “There is no communication between my family
and me,” she said in 1971. “I know my mother wrote a book
about me, but I never read it.”
In 1968, Miss Callas attended the Met’s opening performance, in
which Miss Tebaldi was singing the title role of Cilea’s “Adriana
Lecouvreur.” Afterward, the two singers met backstage and this
time embraced each other.
She also broke with her musical mentor, Mr. Serafin, ostensibly
because the conductor chose another soprano for a recording that
she had expected to make with him.
In recent years, Miss Callas’ name had been steadily linked with
that of Mr. di Stefano. They had frequently sung on stage and in
recordings together in the earlier stages of their careers.
A celebrated feud between Miss Callas and Renata Tebaldi, who
was her contemporary, was kept alive in the press and by the
fans of the respective sopranos. They were rival singers at La
Scala at one time, and it was reported that they avoided each
other backstage. Miss Tebaldi refused to attend Miss Callas’
Miss Callas made a film based on Euripides’ “Medea,” which was
released here in 1971. It was written and directed by the late Pier
Paolo Pasolini.
Leonard Bernstein, the conductor, on being informed of Miss
Callas’ death, said yesterday, “Besides being a cherished friend,
she was for me the uniquely great singer of bel canto in the mid20th century and has for some years been irreplaceable.”
Dario Soria, former head of Angel Records, the label on which
Miss Callas’ recordings have been issued in this country, and
now director of the Metropolitan Opera Guild, had remained a
steadfast friend. He said yesterday that he had talked by phone to
the singer last summer, and that she sounded remote in spirit. In
response to a query as to what she was doing, she told him in a
flat voice, “Nothing.” “Without being able to perform,” Mr. Soria
said, “she apparently had nothing left to live for.”
Mr. Soria also summed up Miss Callas’ career succinctly: “As
a singer she was responsible for the revival of bel canto. As an
actress, she made the stage exciting theater. As a personality,
she had the kind of magic that makes news. I think she’ll be
remembered as one of the greatest opera singers of all times.”
Maria Callas died of a heart attack at her home in Paris on
September 16th, 1977. She was 53 years old.
Raymond Ericson: On This Day (New York Times, 1977)
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Praise From Colleagues
Mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, whose long career included
several Rossini roles and a San Francisco Opera run of the mezzo
version of one of Callas’ most famous roles, “Amina” in Bellini’s
La Sonnambula, shared this about Callas:
Callas’ magnificence lay in both her natural gift and her
incredible commitment to mastering the correct style with
the great conductors that she worked with. All the things
that you think are happening spontaneously are planned and
organized. They’re part of the style. Her stylistic mastery,
as well as her personality and voice, still make people talk
today. It’s that magic thing that happens.
Whatever genius is, I think there’s a strong element of genius
in [Callas].
Callas as sings the title role in Verdi’s Aida
I didn’t dare study her phrasing, but of all the singers I listen
to, it’s Callas I love most. I always have. And I was lucky
enough to be at the Met[ropolitan Opera] when she did the
master classes at Juilliard [School]. I saw them, and saw how
she worked with people and what her knowledge was. There
was no mystery to it. It was very tangible. The grounding
was sort of like a ballerina’s footing in barre exercises. To
get to the point where you get your feet to leap into the
air, you have to begin very close to the floor. That’s what
I think a lot of her musicianship represents to me: It’s her
extraordinary devotion.
Coloratura soprano June Anderson, whose San Francisco recital
for “Lieder Alive!” included a model performance of Bellini’s
“Casta Diva” from Norma, was unstinting in her praise for Callas:
I happen to think that Callas was the greatest singer of the
20th century. I feel that so many people have learned the
wrong things from her, rather than the right things. She was
a fabulous musician. When you listened to her, you could
almost take dictation. All the dots were there. Anything
that was wrong was because of the deterioration of the
instrument over time. But usually musical things were not
wrong. She has pitch problems and wobbles that came in
later.
Callas was such an example of professionalism. One thinks
of her as a flighty diva, which is the wrong thing to learn
from her, and she wasn’t at all.
From Callas, I learned to respect the music. It’s part of the
attention to detail. Today, everything seems to me a bit
homogenized. Puccini sounds like Handel which sounds like
Bellini. Callas had this sense of style, whether it was learned
or just innate.
Callas was superhuman. She was on a whole other plane. She
really was a Diva — the goddess — and the rest of us are
basically her handmaidens.
Maria Callas as Turandot (photo: EMI Classics)
Another admirer, and an intimate, Franco Zeffirelli, who created
some of Callas’ most famous productions and continues to bolster
her legend, spoke to John Ardoin and Gerald Fitzgerald for their
invaluable, lavishly illustrated book Callas:
The magic of a Callas is a quality few artists have: something
special, something different. There are many very good
artists, but very few who have that sixth sense, the
additional, the plus quality. It is something which lifts them
from the ground, they become like semigods. She had it.
Serinus, Jason Victor: The Enduring Legacy of Maria Callas (San Francisco Classical
Voice, 2012)
Maria Callas as Norma, Paris, 1964 (photo: AFP/Getty Images)
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MARIA CALLAS
CHRONOLOGY
REMEMBERING
LA DIVINA
By Placido Domingo
1923 December 2 Maria Anna Sophie Cecilia Kalogeropoulos
is born in New York. Her parents, George and Evangelia
Kalogeropoulos had emigrated from Greece to Long Island, New
York in August 1923.
1929 George Kalogeropoulos sets up a pharmacy in a Greek
quarter of Manhattan and changes the family name to Callas.
1932 Maria is given her fist piano lessons. Later in life she is
able to study all her roles at the piano without the help of a
“repetiteur.”
1937 The Callas parents separate. Evangelia returns to Greece
with her two daughters and changes the family name back to
Kalogeropoulos.
1938 Maria Kalogeropoulos is admitted to the National
Conservatoire in Athens despite being younger than the
minimum age requirement of 16, and begins her studies under
Maria Trivella.
April 11 Appears with fellow students in first public recital.
1939 April 2 Maria makes her stage debut as Santuzza in a
student production of Cavalleria Rusticana and wins the
Conservatoire’s prize.
Elvira de Hidalgo becomes Maria’s teacher at the Conservatoire
and concentrates on coloratura training.
1940 October 21 First engagement with the Lyric Theatre
company, singing songs in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice at the
Royal Theatre in Athens.
1941 January 21 Makes her professional operatic debut as Beatrice
in Boccaccio at the Palas Cinema with the Lyric Theatre company
with whom she will sing in Tosca, Tiefland, Cavalleria Rusticana,
Fidelio and Der Bettelstudent during the next four years.
1942 August 27 Sings Tosca for the first time in Greek at an openair performance at the Park Summer Theatre Kaftmonos Square.
1944 The occupying forces lose control over Greece and the
British fleet arrives in Piraeus. Maria Kalogeropoulos decides to
return to the U.S.
1945 August 3 Gives a “farewell” concert in Athens, her first solo
recital, to raise money for her journey to the U.S.
September Returns to New York and takes up the name of
Callas again.
December Auditions for the Metropolitan Opera, but fails to
secure an engagement.
1946 Tries unsuccessfully to find work, but continues strenuous
vocal practice to perfect her technique. Meets agent Eddie
Bagarozy. Accepts engagement to sing in Turandot in Chicago
in January 1947 with a cast of celebrated European singers in a
new company to be founded by Bagarozy and Ottavio Scotto, an
Italian impresario.
1947 January The Chicago company goes bankrupt a few days
before its scheduled opening performance. Nicola Rossi Lemeni,
the Italian bass, is also a member of the company and introduces
Callas to Giovanni Zanatello, who is in the U.S. to find singers
for the 1947 Verona Opera Festival of which he is the Artistic
Director. He engages Callas to sing in La Gioconda.
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I met Maria Callas through a friend of my wife’s who worked
for Angel Records; we were thinking then of recording
Traviata together. Of course, we spoke a great deal, but I
realized then that Maria was her own worst enemy: she did
not in fact want to sing anymore after having been so great.
Nevertheless, if in 1970 I had been in the position that I am
now, perhaps I could have managed to persuade her.
Later I asked her many times, “Maria, why don’t we sing
Cavalleria Rusticana, for instance?” People even dreamed of
giving it at Covent Garden. But every time she found a pretext
for shying away: No, I must sing Norma or Traviata this year.”
But I knew well, and she did too, that unlike Cavalleria, those
roles were no longer for her.
We continued to see each other, we were good friends, and
we often had dinner together. But it became very difficult
to communicate, because she lived from then on in another
world, one from which opera was banished. When she
stopped singing, she thought that everything was finished in
that domain, that there were no longer any stage directors,
any conductors, and especially singers. She had drawn a line
through her career and avoided discussing that period, and it
was almost impossible to talk about music with her.
I believe that Maria allowed herself to die of sadness.
One really can die if one wants, even without suicide, by
abandoning life. Just like that.
As for her voice, of which people have spoken a great deal,
it was not “beautiful” in the current meaning—but the most
beautiful voices are not necessarily the most touching ones.
It was fascinating, in its timbre in the first place, but also
because of the way she used it, bringing each note of the
music to life.
In the Hamburg concert that was shown on television,
for example, in Don Carlos, even during the orchestral
introduction, she is already Elisabetta, in the first notes. And,
from the way that she feels that introduction, whose music is
inscribed on her face even before she sings, one can already
understand everything. And every note that she then sings
is thus transfigured, as though brought by a breath of wind
coming from afar, from deep down inside her.
In thinking about Maria Callas, I in fact have only one regret:
that of having been too late to the experience of singing with her.
Placido Domingo, “Singing after Callas” (remarks collected by Isabelle Patriot),
L’Avant-scene, 1982
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November 6 Rudolf Bing director of the Metropolitan Opera, fires
Callas after failing to reach agreement on performances for the
next season.
December 19 She makes a sensational debut in Paris in a gala
concert at the Paris Opera. Celebrities in the audience include
Onassis who begins to take interest in Callas.
1959 By this time Callas has fewer professional engagements. She
and Meneghini are invited for a cruise in July on the Christina,
Onassis’s yacht, with several other guests including Churchill.
By the end of the cruise Callas and Onassis are lovers and the
Meneghini marriage is over.
1960/1961 Callas gives up the stage altogether and devotes
herself to the international high life with Onassis. By 1962 she is
performing only a few concerts.
1964 January Zeffirelli persuades Callas to return to opera at
Covent Garden in a memorable new production of Tosca that is
highly praised on all counts.
May Callas appears in Paris in Norma, directed by Zeffirelli, in a
spectacular staging that is to be her last new production. Despite
some vocal problems, the performances are successful overall.
1965 February She sings nine performances of Tosca in Paris.
March She makes a triumphant return to the Metropolitan in New
York in two performances of Tosca.
May She undertakes a further series of five performances of Norma
in Paris.
July She is scheduled to sing four performances of Tosca at Covent
Garden. She is advised on medical grounds to withdraw but she
decides to sing just one, choosing the Royal Gala on July 5. This
is the final operatic performance of her career.
1966 Callas relinquishes her American citizenship and takes
Greek nationality. Thereby technically annulling her marriage to
Meneghini. She expects Onassis to marry her but he does not.
1968 October 20 Onassis marries Jacqueline Kennedy, widow of
assassinated U.S. president John F. Kennedy, after having cooled
his relationship with Callas.
1969 June–July Callas plays Medea in non-operatic film of the
play by Euripides directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. It is not a
commercial success.
1971/1972 Callas gives a series of master classes at the Juilliard
School of Music in New York. She meets up again with her old
colleague, the tenor Giuseppe di Stefano, and the two become
close friends.
1973 Di Stefano persuades Maria Callas to undertake an
extensive international recitals tour with him to raise money for
medical treatment for his daughter. The tour, a personal triumph
but an artistic failure, begins in Hamburg on October 25 and
continues into 1974.
1974 November 11 The final concert of the tour with Di Stefano
takes place in Sapporo, Japan. This is Callas’s last public
performance. The liaison with Di Stefano finishes.
1975 Onassis dies, following a gall bladder operation. Callas is by
now a virtual recluse in Paris.
1977 September 16 Callas, died in Paris – but the cause of her
death still remains unclear.
June 27 Callas arrives in Naples and goes the next day to Verona
to begin rehearsals for La Gioconda. A few days later she meets
Giovanni Battista Meneghini, a wealthy Italian industrialist and
opera lover.
August 2 Makes her Italian debut in the Arena at Verona as La
Gioconda conducted by Tullio Serafin.
December 30 Sings Isolde in Italian under Serafin at La Fenice in
Venice and this leads to further engagements in Italy, mainly in
Turandot.
1948 November 30 In Florence, Callas sings Norma for the first
time- an opera she will eventually perform more than any other
during her career.
1949 January 19 Having just sung her first Brunhilde in Die
Walkure 11 days earlier. Callas, at the insistence of Serafin,
replaces the indisposed Margherita Carosio as Elvira in I Puritani
at La Fenice. This is the turning point in Callas’s career and the
start of her involvement in rehabilitation of the Italian bel canto
repertoire.
April 21 Marries Meneghini in Verona and sails that night for
Argentina to sing at the “Teatro Colon” in Buenos Aires.
Helped by Meneghini as both husband and manager, Callas
develops her career in Italy and abroad during the next two years.
1951 December 7 Callas opens the seasons at La Scala, Milan in
I Vespri Siciliani to great acclaim. During the next seven years La
Scala will be the scene of her greatest triumphs in a wide range
of roles.
1952 July 29 Callas signs a recording contract with EMI
and in August makes a test recording of “Non mi dir” from
Don Giovanni.
1953 February First commercial recording for EMI as Lucia di
Lammermoor recorded in Florence. Later in the year Callas begins
a series of complete opera recordings at La Scala starting with I
Puritani and Cavalleria Rusticana with Serafin, and famous Tosca
conducted by Victor de Sabata.
1954 In a short space of time Callas loses 30 kilos and her figure
changes dramatically. She records a further four complete operas
at La Scala and her first two recital discs in London.
November She returns to the U.S. to sing Norma, La Traviata and
Lucia di Lammermoor in Chicago.
December She opens the season at La Scala in La Vestale, working
for the first time with theatre and film director Luchino Visconti.
1956 October 29 Sings for the first time at the Metropolitan in
New York in Norma, followed by Tosca and Lucia.
1957 Elsa Maxwell, the American society hostess, introduces, the
Meneghinis to the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis at a
party in Venice.
1958 January 2 Claiming illness, Callas walks out after the first
act of a gala performance of Norma in Rome attended by the
President of Italy and all Rome society. She is harshly criticized in
the media.
May At La Scala during performances of Il Pirata she quarrels with
the general director Antonio Ghiringhelli, and decides not to
appear again at La Scala while he remains in charge.
THEATER LATTÉ DA
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MASTER CLASS
FIVE RUMORS ABOUT
MARIA CALLAS
By David Ng
Hard as it is to believe that
an opera singer can make
gossip headlines, Maria
Callas was, in her prime, a
media phenomenon whose
personal life was fodder for
journalists and chroniclers
of high society.
A symbol of jet-set elegance, Callas was
a temperamental celebrity who had a
fiery love life. Her diva-hood on and off
the stage was legendary.
Though her bel canto voice is considered
as one of the most dynamic in operatic
history, Callas' stormy personal life
often eclipsed her professional one. She
clashed with opera companies, fellow
singers and numerous lovers. She died in
1977 in Paris at age 53 following a heart
attack. Her career had been in decline
long before then, but her persona
remained as entrenched in the public
mind as ever.
In the decades since her death, rumors
continue to persist about Callas’ colorful
career and personal life. Here are five
of the most famous anecdotes, their
veracity never confirmed nor completely
discounted.
1
2
3
4
5
Callas once swallowed a tapeworm to lose weight. A rotund child who battled
the bulge well into adulthood, Callas was deeply insecure about her weight – at
one point, the 5-foot-8 singer was believed to have weighed more than 200
pounds. Urban legend has it that the soprano ingested a live tapeworm in an
attempt to shed fat. Another rumor has her experimenting with a special kind of
pasta. Callas rejected the gossip, claiming that she lost weight naturally.
She bore a son with Aristotle Onassis, but the child died soon after birth.
Though she is believed to have been infertile, Callas was rumored to have had
a love child with Onassis, the shipping tycoon and a Greek compatriot. The
son was born in 1960, the rumor has it, and died hours later. Other rumors
state that she had at least one abortion while she was with Onassis. Her
relationship with the multimillionaire was stormy, as he is believed to have been
compulsively unfaithful.
Callas continued her affair with Onassis during his marriage to Jacqueline
Kennedy. Onassis left Callas to marry the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy in
1968. But it was widely believed that Callas continued her liaison with Onassis
well into his marriage with the former first lady. “Greek Fire,” Nicholas Gage’s
2000 book about their love affair, portrays Onassis banging on Callas’ door,
begging to be let back in.
Richard Burton rejected her entreaties to costar in “Medea.” Callas’ one foray
into the movies came in a 1969 big-screen adaptation of “Medea,” directed by
Italian provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini. The singer wanted Burton to portray
Jason, her lover in the tragic story. But the Welsh actor, who was then involved
with Elizabeth Taylor, is believed to have rejected the offer. In the actor’s
published diaries, he wrote that Callas came calling once and “and since I was in
a reading mood she was not welcome.”
Callas insulted her biggest operatic rival by comparing
her to Coca-Cola. Among Callas’ many rivals was
Renata Tebaldi, the Italian soprano. The women’s mutual
hatred was widely reported in the media, with the two
exchanging insults and barbed criticisms. One account
has Callas saying that comparing Tebaldi’s voice to hers
was like “comparing Champagne with cognac. No, with
Coca-Cola.” Some accounts have downplayed the rivalry,
claiming that Callas had profound respect for Tebaldi’s
vocal talent.
Renata Tibaldi 1961
(photo: Umberto Borso)
Ng, David: Maria Callas: Five Great Rumors on the Soprano’s 90th Birthday (LA Times, 2013)
THEATER LATTÉ DA
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MASTER CLASS
OPERA 101
Joyce DiDonato at Carnegie Hall (photo: Brian Harkin/The New York Times)
O
pera is the Italian word for “work,” “action,” “deed”
(and also the plural of the Latin opus meaning “a
work”). Opera is a dramatic work set to music, and is
really short for opera in musica, a dramatic work in
which the music is integral. The sung drama may be interrupted by
dialogue, known as recitative (Italian=recitativo, often abbreviated
to recit.), and this may or may not be accompanied by one or
more instruments, so it can be recitativo secco (dry recitative, i.e.
unaccompanied) or recitativo accompagnato.
Callas’ range in performance (highest and lowest notes both shown in red): from
F-sharp below the Middle C (green) to E-natural above the High C (blue). The Green
square is the Middle C (C4) and the Blue square is the High C (C6), which is the typical
vocal range for a soprano. The Red squares show Callas’ vocal range in performance,
going from F-sharp (F#3) below Middle C to E-natural (E6) above High C. (photo: Amit6)
leading roles in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier—Sophie, Octavian,
and the Marschallin. The name most easily recognized in the
dramatic soprano category is surely Maria Callas. Many believe
that her Norma (Belllini), Anna Bolena (Donizetti), Violetta (La
Traviata), and Medea (Cherubini) will rarely be equaled.
Some of the earliest examples of opera are those written in
Florence towards the end of the 16th century by a group of poets
and musicians known as the Camerata (“society”). These included
the musicians Jacopo Peri (1561–1633) and Giulio Caccini
(1551–1618), both of whom had been associated with the Medici
court in Florence. The Camerata met in the palace homes of the
Florentine aristocrats. The earliest known opera (or dramma per
musica) is thought to be Peri’s Dafne (1594–8), in a prologue and
six scenes, but the music is now lost. In the works of this period
the “spoken word,” the recitativo, was the dominant feature.
Bourne, Joyce: Opera; The Great Composers and Their Masterworks (Octopus
Publishing Group, London, 2008)
Bel Canto
It’s easy for opera fans to toss around the term “bel canto.” It’s much
harder to actually define it. Literally, bel canto means “beautiful
singing” in Italian, but it’s so open-ended that it’s come to mean
anything from the lyrical trend in Roman cantatas from the 1640s to
any particularly lovely snippet of vocalizing from any era. And then
there’s the inverse of bel canto — “can belto” — a handy put-down
to be flung at any singer who just stands and barks.
Soprano
The highest female voice is the soprano, with a range of 2 to 2 ½
octaves from about middle C (c’) upwards to b” or even higher,
up to f ” in some voices. There are different types of soprano
voice. The one most easily recognized is the coloratura soprano,
a high voice of great agility that can run up and down scales
without apparent effort. One of the earliest coloratura sopranos
was Henriette Sontag, a German soprano (1806–54) who made
her opera debut at the age of 15 and created the title-role in
Weber’s Euryanthe.
But another important reference point for bel canto leads to a
particular trend in Italian opera that was responsible for this
so-called “beautiful singing.” The style bloomed in the first few
decades of the 19th century, starting with Gioacchino Rossini,
moving through Gaetano Donizetti andVincenzo Bellini, and
winding up in the early operas of Giuseppe Verdi.
Possibly the most common form of the soprano voice is the lyric
soprano, singing such roles as Pamina in Mozart’s Die Zauberflote,
Massenet’s Manon, and Agathe in Weber’s Der Freischutz. A
good example of this type of voice early in the 20th century
was the Czech soprano Emmy Destinn (1878–1930). She was
Senta in the first Bayreuth performance of Wagner’s Der fliegende
Hollander in 1901 and created Minnie in Puccini’s La fanciulla
del West in 1910.
As opera orchestras (and opera houses) began to grow in size,
composers shifted toward a slightly heavier vocal tone. No longer
relying solely on the old-fashioned flurries of notes and roller
coaster runs to wow audiences, they emphasized long, flowing
melodies, where carefully placed (even disguised) breaths from
the singer would preserve the unbroken quality of the lines. And
yet, not all the pyrotechnics disappeared. Rossini included both
the old florid style and new bel canto expressions in his operas,
sometimes both within the same aria. His operas positively
sparkled, yet his musical characterization could be shallow. Bellini
was far more poetic in setting text, but it would take Verdi, after
emerging from his early, self-described “galley years” to uncover
an even deeper musical realization of characters.
The dramatic soprano had to develop with the advent of the
heavier roles and larger orchestras of the mid-19th century
composers—Wagner and Verdi prominent among them—the
lighter lyric or coloratura voices being unsuitable. The German
soprano Lotte Lehmann (1888–1976) started out singing lyric
roles but over the years her voice became more dramatic and,
as her voice changed, she was the first soprano to sing all three
THEATER LATTÉ DA
Huizenga, Tom: Talk Like an Opera Geek: Savoring the Bel Canto Sound (NPR, 2012)
11
MASTER CLASS
COMPOSERS AND OPERAS
OF MASTER CLASS
Vincenzo Bellini
Composer of Norma, Il Pirata and La Sonnambula
Sicily’s most famous composer was born in Catania in 1801
to a family of professional musicians. He was something of a
prodigy, composing already in his pre-teens. In 1819 he was sent
to the Naples Conservatoire where, in addition to conventional
academic exercises and study of Mozart and Haydn, he was
encouraged by his mentor Niccolò Zingarelli to immerse
himself in the folk music of Sicily and develop his characteristic
song style.
Bellini’s first opera, Adelson e Salvini, was written for the
Conservatoire in 1825 and its success led to the San Carlo
management commissioning his next, Bianca e Fernando,
premiered the following year (when it was renamed Bianca e
Gernando out of respect for the late King Ferdinando).This in
turn led to a commission from La Scala, Milan, for Il Pirata
(1827), another signal success, and one that spread his fame
abroad. Thereafter Bellini led a charmed life as a composer,
working only to commission, seldom hurrying (unlike Donizetti)
and commanding generous fees. As a person he was liked by
contemporaries for his charm, but he was also quick to take
offence, jealous of such potential rivals as Donizetti, and a
somewhat calculating womanizer.
to separate set numbers, which pointed far ahead to throughcomposed opera.
Given what he had already achieved, Bellini’s early death from
gastro-enteritis and liver infection, at the age of only 33, was as
tragic a waste as that of Mozart.
Milnes, Rodney: BBC Artist Profile, 2004
Giuseppe Verdi
Composer of Don Carlos and Macbeth
The librettist of Il Pirata was Felice Romani, who became a
lifelong collaborator, supplying the texts for La Straniera (Milan,
1829), Zaira (Parma, also 1829), I Capuleti e i Montecchi (Venice,
1830), La sonnambula (Milan, 1831) and Norma (Milan, also
1831). The two fell out over Beatrice di Tenda (Venice, 1833),
one of Bellini’s rare – at the time – failures, but the composer’s
view of Beatrice as ‘not unworthy of her sisters’ has been proved
right. Romani was sorely missed in what was to be Bellini’s last
opera, I Puritani (Paris, 1835), to a well-meaning but somewhat
amateurish libretto by Count Carlo Pepoli. The star tenor in Il
Pirata was Rubini, with whom Bellini also forged a professional
relationship: he had sung in Bianca, and created the tenor roles in
Sonnambula and Puritani. Pasta was another star with whom he
worked regularly, in Sonnambula, Norma and Beatrice.
Giuseppe Verdi was born in 1813, in the community of Le
Roncole, in Parma, Italy. Verdi first developed musical talents
at a young age, after moving with his family to the neighboring
town of Busseto, where he began studying musical composition.
In 1832, Verdi began studying under Vincenzo Lavigna, a famous
composer from Milan. Verdi got his start in Italy’s music industry
in 1833, when he was hired as a conductor at the Philharmonic
Society in Busseto.
In 1838, at age 25, Verdi returned to Milan, where he completed
his first opera, Oberto, in 1839, with the help of fellow musician
Giulio Ricordi; the opera’s debut production was held at La Scala,
an opera house in Milan. While working on Oberto, the composer
suffered what would be the first of many personal tragedies: His
and his wife Margherita’s first child, daughter Virginia Maria
Luigia Verdi (born in March 1837), died in infancy on August
12, 1838; just one year later, in October 1839, the couple’s
second child, son Verdi Icilio Romano Verdi (born in July 1838),
died, also as an infant.
The most immediately striking aspect of Bellini’s style is his
command of long-breathed melody, much admired by Verdi, and
his fusion of melody with text, just as much admired by Wagner,
and indeed emulated, not just in Das Liebesverbot but as far ahead
as Tristan. But there was more to Bellini than elegiac melos: the
full-frontal Romanticism and musical violence of Pirata was
enormously influential, and at the time the martial duet ‘Suoni
la tromba’ in Puritani appealed to audiences more than Elvira’s
Mad Scene. Perhaps most important was his development of
very carefully orchestrated accompanied recitative, or arioso,
THEATER LATTÉ DA
Verdi followed Oberto with the comic opera Un giorno di regno,
which premiered in Milan in 1840, at Teatro alla Scala. Unlike
Oberto, Verdi’s second opera was not well-received by audiences
or critics. Making the experience worse for the young musician,
12
MASTER CLASS
impact on him that he decided to follow his instinct for operatic
composition. With a scholarship and financial support from an
uncle, he was able to enter the Milan Conservatory in 1880.
While still a student, Puccini entered a competition for a oneact opera announced in 1882. He failed to win, but his opera
“Le villi” came to the attention of the publisher Giulio Ricordi,
who arranged a successful production at the Teatro del Verme in
Milan, commissioned a second opera and set the seal on what was
to be Puccini’s lifelong association with the house of Ricordi.
The first opera for which Puccini himself chose the subject was
“Manon Lescaut.” Produced at Turin in 1893, it achieved a
success such as Puccini was never to repeat and made him known
outside Italy. Among the writers who worked on its libretto were
Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, who provided the librettos
for Puccini’s next three operas. The first of these, “La bohème,”
widely considered Puccini’s masterpiece, but with its mixture of
lighthearted and sentimental scenes and its largely conversational
style was not a success when produced at Turin in 1896. “Tosca,”
Puccini’s first excursion into “verismo,” was more enthusiastically
received by the Roman audience at the Teatro Costanzi in 1900.
Un giorno di regno’s debut was painfully overshadowed by the
death of his wife, Margherita, in 1840, at age 26.
Dispirited by the loss of his family, Verdi entered the 1840s
disheartened, struggling to find inspiration to continue creating
music. He soon found solace in his work, however, by composing
two new, four-part operas in 1842 and ‘43, Nabucco and I
Lombardi alla Prima Crociata (best known simply as I Lombardi),
respectively. Both pieces earned the composer a great amount of
success. He became known for his skill in creating melody and his
profound use of theatrical effect. His rejection of the traditional
Italian opera for integrated scenes and unified acts only added to
his fame.
Later that year Puccini visited London and saw David Belasco’s
one-act play “Madam Butterfly.” This he took as the basis for
his next collaboration with Illica and Giacosa; he considered it
the best and technically most advanced opera he had written.
In his early 60s Puccini was determined to “strike out on new
paths” and started work on “Turandot,” based on a Gozzi play
which satisfied his desire for a subject with a fantastic, fairytale atmosphere, but flesh-and-blood characters. During its
composition he moved to Viareggio and in 1923 developed
cancer of the throat. Treatment at a Brussels clinic seemed
successful, but his heart could not stand the strain and he died,
leaving “Turandot” unfinished. (It is usually played today with
Franco Alfano’s ending.)
For the rest of the 1840s, and through the 1850s, ’60s and
’70s, Verdi continued to garner success and fame. Comprising
a popular operatic series throughout the decades were Rigoletto
(1851), Il Trovatore (1853), La Traviata (1853), Don Carlos
(1867) and Aida, which premiered at the Cairo Opera House
in 1871. Four years later, in 1874, Verdi completed Messa da
Requiem (best known simply as Requiem), which was meant to be
his final composition.
His melodic gift and harmonic sensibility, his consummate skill
in orchestration and unerring sense of theatre combined to create
a style that was wholly original, homogeneous and compelling.
He represents Verdi’s only true successor, and his greatest
masterpiece and swansong, “Turandot,” belongs among the last
20th-century stage works to remain in the regular repertory of the
world’s opera houses.
Despite his retirement plans, in the mid-1880s Verdi collaborated
with composer and novelist Arrigo Boito to complete Otello,
which was performed at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala in 1887. The
opera—based on William Shakespeare’s play Othello—continues
to be regarded as one of the greatest operas of all time.
Giuseppe Verdi died on January 27, 1901, in Milan, Italy.
The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music, Macmillan Publishers Ltd, 2014
Composing over 25 operas throughout his career, Verdi continues
to be regarded today as one of the greatest composers in history.
Furthermore, his works have reportedly been performed more
than any other composer’s worldwide.
Biography.com, 2014
Giacomo Puccini
Composer of Tosca
Born in 1858 in Lucca, Tuscany, Puccini started his career
at the age of 14 as an organist in local churches. However, a
performance of Verdi’s “Aida” at Pisa in 1876 made such an
THEATER LATTÉ DA
13
MASTER CLASS
Maria Callas at Julliard (photo: The New York Times)
INTRODUCTION TO CALLAS AT JULLIARD,
THE MASTER CLASSES
By John Ardoin
M
doing so, she gave not only her views but possible alternatives as
well. She adamantly insisted, however, that her students remain
faithful to the style of a given piece, and she carefully explained of
what this style consisted. She did this by delving into the text and
its emotions, usually correlating the drama to an aria’s musical
substance. Callas rarely said “Do this” but rather said “Do this
because…,” giving musical, theatrical, and historical reasons for
her approach to the music.
ore than any other singer of this century,
Maria Callas (1923–1977) exerted a dominant
influence on the Italian operatic repertory and
style of performance in our time. Even the most
vehement detractors of her voice acknowledged this influence and
the awesome range of her musicality. Indeed, Callas was not just a
singer but a musician whose instrument was the voice.
After over fifteen years of appearances in the major opera houses
of the world, Callas went into voluntary retirement in 1965 to
work on her voice (beginning anew like a student) and reflect
on questions of interpretation. A few years later, eager to share
her feelings and findings, she accepted an invitation from Peter
Mennin, then president of the Juillard School of Music in New
York City, to work with a select group of young professionals in a
series of master classes in “The Lyric Tradition.”
In the extensive press coverage given the classes, one writer
described the singer as “presiding like Delphic oracle” before
sold-out audiences of other students, fans, the musical press,
and luminaries from the world of performing arts who included
Franco Zeffirelli, Lillian Gish, Ben Gazzara, Tito Gobbi, Elisabeth
Schwarzkopf, and Bidu Sayao. Other artists, such as Patricia
Brooks of the New York City Opera, were seen, scores in hand,
paying rapt attention to the discussion.
Out of three hundred applicants, twenty-five singers were chosen
by audition to profit from Callas’s instruction. For twelve weeks,
two sessions a week, between October 1971 and March 1972, the
singers took turns performing music from the standard repertory
for Callas. Scenes and arias were heard ranging from Mozart’s Die
Zauberflote to excerpts from all three periods of Verdi’s writing,
through romantic French composers into such twentieth century
operas as Puccini’s Turandot and Cilea’s L’Arlesiana. Under her
probing direction, scores were often dissected bar by bar in order
to establish their dramatic premise and how best a sense of the
music’s drama could be achieved within a musical framework.
Not only were Callas’s comments extraordinary insights into her
training ad thinking, but they were a virtual summing up of a
grand-line operatic tradition reaching back to Donizetti, Verdi,
and beyond, which she had learned and practiced under such
conducting giants as Tullio Serafin and Victor de Sabata. It is
tradition of which Callas was not only a principal exponent but
one of the last of the breed.
“When it comes to music, we are all
students, all our lives.”
Callas labored not to produce a series of ‘mini Callases” but to
bring out the individual personalities and gifts of each singer. In
THEATER LATTÉ DA
Maria Callas
14
MASTER CLASS
MARIA CALLAS
ON THE ART
OF PERFORMANCE
I
concerned music fascinated me. In Athens, I used to listen to all
of de Hidalgo’s pupils singing all sorts of repertory: light operas,
heavy operas, arias for mezzo-sopranos, tenors. I was at the
conservatory at ten in the morning and left with the last students.
Even de Hidalgo was amazed at this. She frequently asked me,
‘Why do you stay here?’ My answer was that there was something
to learn from even the least talented pupil, just as a great ballet
dancer might learn from a cabaret artist.
started my vocal training early, as did my teacher Elvira
de Hidalgo. De Hildago had the real bel canto schooling;
perhaps hers was the last of this great training. As a young
girl, only thirteen, I was thrown into her arms to learn
the secrets, the manner of bel canto. This training is not just
‘beautiful singing’; that is a literal translation. Rather, bel canto
is a method of singing, a sort of straitjacket you must put on.
You learn how to approach a note, how to attack it, how to form
a legato, how to create a mood, how to breathe so that there is a
feeling of only a beginning and ending. In between it must seem
as if you have taken only one big breath, though in actuality there
will be many phrases with many little breaths.
In my opinion, opera is the most difficult of all the arts. To
succeed, you must not only be a first-rate musician but a first-rate
actor. It goes without saying that you must also be able to cope
with your colleagues—first with the conductor, then with the
other singers, with the stage director—for opera is a vast unit
where everyone plays a vital role.
Above all, bel canto is expression. A beautiful sound alone is not
enough. For example, to make pasta you must have flour; that
is the basic thing. Afterwards, you add other ingredients, plus
knowhow, and shape the whole into something delicious. With a
singer, we go to the conservatory for our basics. The training one
receives there is crucial. If you start right, you are right for life.
But if you start wrong, it is hard later to correct bad habits.
I accepted the classes at Juilliard in order to help singers start off
on the right foot. Of course, the trouble for some young singers
is that they accept engagements before they are ready, and once
they’ve experienced being on an operatic stage, it’s very difficult
for them to come back and study. Humility is not one of our
best traits. I would like to pass on to the young ones what I have
learned from great conductors, from my teachers, and especially
from my own research, which has not stopped to this day. I
suppose I have a natural insight into music, but I take the trouble
to see what lies beneath a composer’s work. We must never forget
that we are interpreters, that we are there to serve the composer
and to discharge a very delicate task.
After the conservatory, you make music with what you have
learned. So, I repeat, it is not enough to have only a beautiful
voice. You must take that voice and break it up into a thousand
pieces so that it can be made to serve the needs of music, of
expression. A composer has written the notes for you, but a singer
must read music into them. Actually, we go by very little. Aren’t
there certain books that must be read between the lines in order
to have their full meaning? Singer must do the same with their
scores; we must add what the composer would have wanted, a
thousand colors and expressions.
Also, great stages with great traditions out to be respected. You
must know your way around; part of this is not using your vocal
capital, only the interest. If you serve art well, everything will
come automatically: you will be great, you will have money, there
will be fame. But the work is hard, in the beginning, during, and
afterwards.
Imagine how boring Jascha Heifetz would have been if he were
only a wonderful technician. He is a great violinist because he
goes beyond the notes. For a singer, this is even more important,
because we have words as well as notes. We must do everything
an instrumentalist does, plus more. It is very serious and difficult
work, and it is not done out of our bravura or by willpower
alone, but out of love, a devotion to what you adore. That is the
strongest reason for anything.
But it is a privilege. I consider myself privileged because I have
been able to bring truth from the soul and the mind, give it to
the public, and have it accepted. Not everyone can do that. It is
one of the greatest powers one can put at the service of one of the
greatest arts—music.
I must say that for me it was not really hard work. I suppose I was
always a solitary girl; music was the main thing I loved. Whatever
THEATER LATTÉ DA
Ardoin, John: Callas at Julliard; The Master Classes (Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1987)
15
MASTER CLASS
IMPORTANT FIGURES
IN MARIA CALLAS’ LIFE
an unforgettable and superlative Rosina and as a splendid
interpreter of other important roles, it is to this illustrious
artist, I repeat, with a moved, devoted, and grateful heart,
that I owe all my preparation and my artistic formation as an
actress and musician. This elect woman, who, besides giving
me her precious teaching, gave me her whole heart as well....
Wikipedia, 2014
The Director
Luchino Visconti, (born Nov. 2, 1906, Milan – died March
17, 1976, Rome), Italian motion-picture director whose realistic
treatment of individuals caught in the conflicts of modern society
contributed significantly to the post-World War II revolution in
Italian filmmaking and earned him the title of father of Neorealism.
He also established himself as an innovative theatrical and opera
director in the years immediately after World War II.
Maria Callas with Elvira de Hidalgo, 1954 (photo: Maria Callas Museum, Athens)
The Teacher
Born into an aristocratic family, Visconti was well acquainted
with the arts: his mother was a talented musician, and throughout
his childhood his father engaged performers to appear at their
private theatre. He studied cello for 10 years and spent a short
time as a theatrical set designer. In 1935 Visconti was hired as an
assistant to the French motion-picture director Jean Renoir, who
developed his sensitivity to social and political issues.
Elvira de Hidalgo (December 28, 1891 – January 21, 1980)
was a prominent Spanish coloratura soprano, who later became a
pedagogue. She was born in Valderrobres, Teruel Province (Spain),
as Elvira Juana Rodríguez Roglán. She made her debut at the age
of sixteen, at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, as Rosina in The
Barber of Seville, which would become her best-known role.
Ossessione (1942; “Obsession”), an adaptation of James M. Cain’s
novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, established his reputation
as a director. In it he used natural settings, combined professional
Following her debut, de Hidalgo was quickly engaged for Paris,
where she sang Rosina opposite Feodor Chaliapin as Don Basilio.
Her debut with the New York Metropolitan Opera occurred in
1910, as Rosina. With that company, de Hidalgo sang in Rigoletto
(with Enrico Caruso) and La Sonnambula (with Alessandro
Bonci) in the same season. She would return to the Met in
1924–25, for The Barber of Seville (directed by Armando Agnini),
Rigoletto (conducted by Tullio Serafin), and Lucia di Lammermoor
(with Beniamino Gigli). Following that New York debut, she
sang in Florence, in Linda di Chamounix and Don Giovanni (as
Zerlina, opposite Mattia Battistini).
In 1916, she made her debut at La Scala, Milan, as Rosina, and
returned there in 1921. The following year, de Hidalgo appeared
in Buenos Aires at the Teatro Colón, in Rigoletto, La Traviata, and
The Barber of Seville. In 1924, she appeared in London with the
British National Opera Company, at Covent Garden, in Rigoletto.
Elvira de Hidalgo began teaching in 1933, and later held a
position at the Athens Conservatoire, where the young soprano
Maria Callas became her student. In 1957, Callas wrote of the
woman who had an “essential role” in her artistic formation:
It is to this illustrious Spanish artist, whom the public
and the old subscribers at La Scala will certainly recall as
Maria Callas and Luchino Visconti (photo: Press Office (Italian Vogue)
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MASTER CLASS
actors with local residents, experimented with long-travelling
camera shots, and incorporated sequences taken with hidden
cameras to enhance authenticity. A masterpiece of realism,
this film foreshadowed the postwar Neorealist work of such
internationally important filmmakers as Roberto Rossellini and
Vittorio De Sica. Six years later La Terra Trema (1948; The Earth
Trembles), a documentary-style study of Sicilian fishermen filmed
entirely on location and without actors, won the Grand Prize at
the Venice Film Festival. Visconti’s other widely acclaimed films
include Bellissima (1951; The Most Beautiful) and Siamo Donne
(1953; We the Women), both starring Anna Magnani; Rocco e i
Suoi Fratelli (1960; Rocco and His Brothers); and Il Gattopardo
(1963; The Leopard), based on the novel by Giuseppe di
Lampedusa about a traditional aristocrat with liberal convictions,
a character with whom Visconti strongly identified; Lo Straniero
(1967; The Stranger); La Caduta Degli Dei (1969; The Damned);
and Morte a Venezia (1971; Death in Venice).
the world and the leading Italian house.
Built in 1776–78 by the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria (whose
country then ruled Milan), it replaced an earlier theatre that had
burned. In 1872 it became the property of the city of Milan. The
house was closed during World War I. In 1920 the conductor
Arturo Toscanini led a council that raised money to reopen it,
organizing it as an autonomous corporation. Bombed during
World War II, the theatre reopened in 1946, partly through funds
raised by benefit concerts given by Toscanini. In late 2001 La
Scala closed for extensive renovations. Mario Botta served as the
architect of the project, estimated to have cost some $67 million,
and the theatre reopened in December 2004 with a performance
of Antonio Salieri’s Europa riconosciuta, which had been
performed at La Scala’s opening on August 3, 1778.
La Scala’s repertory is more varied than that of the other
four or five leading opera houses. It tends to include a large
number of unfamiliar works balanced by a limited number of
popular favorites. Conductors are given control of casting and
rehearsals. The composer Giuseppe Verdi was closely associated
with the house during the 19th century. Toscanini’s tenure
as artistic director marked one of the finest periods in the
theatre’s existence.
During the 1950s Visconti produced internationally recognized
operas starring the soprano Maria Callas. Combining realism
and spectacle, he scored artistic successes with productions of La
Traviata (1955), La Sonnambula (1955), and Don Carlos (1958,
Covent Garden, London). He has been quoted as saying, “I
started to direct Opera because of, no, not because of, but for
Maria Callas”.
Associated with the theatre are a ballet company, a ballet school,
and a singing school. The expenses of La Scala are met by a
combination of ticket sales, a municipal tax, and an Italian
governmental subsidy.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2013
The Opera House
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2014
La Scala, in full Teatro alla Scala (Italian: “Theatre at the
Stairway”), theatre in Milan, one of the principal opera houses of
The cast of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida acknowledging applause at the end of their performance at La Scala, Milan, 2006. Marco Brescia—Teatro alla Scala/AP
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MASTER CLASS
MARIA, NOT CALLAS
Terrence McNally’s Master Class deliberately plays fast and loose with historical fact in search of artistic truth
By Matthew Gurewitsch
“ART is domination. It’s making people
think that for that precise moment in time
there is only one way, one voice. Yours.”
S
o says Maria Callas in Terrence McNally’s play Master
Class, exposing the bold hoax that none but the most
exceptional practitioners are able to pull off. When Zoe
Caldwell introduced the play on Broadway in 1995, she
herself perpetrated that hoax, for which she was rewarded, quite
deservedly, with the fourth Tony Award of her career. Whatever
one’s view of the play (and lasting sentiment for and against the
late diva ensured that judgments would be fierce), the role of
Maria was Caldwell’s property. She was a python, humorless and
stern, mesmerizing in her refusal to countenance any form of
compromise. Her reading was definitive, pre-emptive, exhausting
all possibilities. When she departed the vehicle, it would surely
fall apart.
Or so it seemed, which is exactly what would spur an ambitious
actress to try to impose her own way. What is performance
history, after all, but the endlessly self-renewing saga of
dethronement? Caldwell left Master Class on June 29, 1996, at
just the time of year when all but the hardiest Broadway shows
wither and die, yet the New York production continued to play to
good houses, chalking up more than 600 performances. Beyond
Broadway the play has had more than forty productions abroad,
as far afield as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Croatia, Estonia,
France, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New
Zealand, Scandinavia, Turkey, and Yugoslavia, not to mention
nine in Germany alone. Never mind the slew of productions by
American regional, stock, and amateur companies, which could
soon number in the dozens.
Zoe Caldwell and Audra McDonald. Photo by Jay Thompson for Playbill
creeping in: St. Patrick’s is bumped for Notre Dame, Pavarotti
anachronistically for Richard Tucker. No harm is done. This is the
process by which classics are born.
Of the many second-generation Marias I have seen five: Patti
LuPone, who took over from Caldwell on Broadway; Dixie
Carter, who succeeded LuPone; Faye Dunaway, making the
national tour with the movie rights in her pocket, hitting
Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, Dayton, Houston, Fort
Lauderdale, Palm Beach, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and
a score of other cities; the Fellini protégée Rossella Falk, in Milan;
and Truffaut’s muse Fanny Ardant, in Paris. Of all the actresses
it is Ardant who yields not an inch to Caldwell, and she has the
added advantage of Roman Polanski’s stylish, psychologically
richer production. Patti LuPone runs Caldwell and Ardant a close
second, with Carter a respectable third. Falk and Dunaway are
nowhere in sight, yet even they have light to shed on the role’s
multifarious – though not unlimited – possibilities.
Since Caldwell, stars true and false have been stalking Master
Class the way ballerinas do Swan Lake, and what at first
seemed fixed now proves to be fluid. Textual variants have been
“Art is domination.” As the example of the historic Callas
teaches us, great performers do not inherit. They take charge;
therein lies whatever authority they have. Known to legions of
Patti LuPone as Maria Callas. Photo by Joan Marcus for Playbill
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MASTER CLASS
SINCE Aeschylus dreamed up The Persians, playwrights beyond
worshippers as La Divina, Callas embodied an astonishing variety
of tragic heroines, from the bel canto period through verismo,
with such conviction that her readings remain touchstones
even now – twenty years after her death, more than thirty years
since her last theatrical appearance, and forty years since her
heyday. Remastered and repackaged over and over (currently in
a commemorative twenty-volume set from EMI), her albums
remain best sellers while those of other divas, contemporary
and past, come and go. Many listeners recognize her timbre and
intensity of expression from a single recorded note; at least one
critic asserts, perfectly credibly, that in certain cases Callas can be
identified by a single intake of breath. Her charisma, onstage and
off, blazes in photographs, too, as exhibits and books have proved
time and again. And we should not discount the buzz of her
tempestuous personal life – crowned by an adulterous romance
with Aristotle Onassis, who entertained her, her husband, the
Winston Churchills, and the Gianni Agnellis on his yacht in the
presence of the apparently unruffled first Mrs. Onassis. When
Jacqueline Kennedy became the second Mrs. Onassis, Callas
was cut loose. The recent coffee-table volume Callas: Images of a
Legend is chockablock with photographs as deeply branded in the
memory of music lovers as those of the Kennedy assassination,
the first landing on the moon, and the little Vietnamese girl
burned by napalm.
number have spun fantasies about historic figures. Why should
performers be exempt? On stage and at the movies we have
seen actors play Edith Piaf, Billie Holiday, Lon Chaney, Charlie
Chaplin, Isadora Duncan, and Vaslav Nijinsky, to name just a
few. The resurrection usually incorporates an anthology of the
artist’s greatest moments – frequently the whole point of the
exercise, affording the actor a shortcut to an ersatz glory. McNally
gives the actress playing Maria no such break. “No one can sing
like Maria Callas,” Maria declares, speaking for her creator.
McNally drives the point home with authentic Callas recordings,
using the inimitable voice as a soundscape for two bravura
monologues. In these passages the actress gets to show what
she can do, impersonating a raft of absent characters: Callas’s
unromantic, doggedly devoted husband, the brick-factory owner
Giovanni Battista Meneghini, nearly thirty years her senior; her
coarse, sensualist lover, Aristotle Onassis; Elvira de Hidalgo, the
teacher whose approval she craved; and assorted snotty backstage
personnel.
McNally gives Maria a single line to sing, and that with strategic,
destructive intent. The opera scene she is demonstrating to a
student begins, strikingly and quite exceptionally, with speech: it
is the entrance of Verdi’s Lady Macbeth, who reads her husband’s
letter about the witches before launching into song, as Maria does
in the heat of the moment. “Ambizioso spirto tu sei, Macbetto” is
the line: “Ambitious thou art, Macbeth.” “What comes out is a
cracked and broken thing,” McNally writes in the stage direction.
“A voice in ruins. It is a terrible moment.” Yes – though a
spectator in the theater, not privy to the editorializing, might well
think it terrible for a different reason. In the original production
Caldwell’s voice was flatly incredible as the cracked and broken
instrument of someone who had at any time been a singer.
Can such a personality, so much larger than life, be encompassed
in a play? By some lights McNally is riding on the real-life
diva’s notoriety, and should more properly have invented a diva
whose place in the firmament he would have been at liberty to
define. But can one invent the North Star? No less a judge than
Leonard Bernstein pronounced Callas the world’s greatest artist.
The reality of her achievement is a point of reference impossible
to make up. The character that McNally calls Maria (as shall
I) shares most biographical particulars with the historical diva
(whom I shall continue to call Callas). But McNally’s purposes
in Master Class are only incidentally documentary. Above all the
play is a highly personal, deeply perceptive meditation on the
wellsprings and the consequences of supremacy in art. Without
the real-life example McNally would in effect have been writing
science fiction.
CALLAS, of course, actually did conduct a famous series of
twenty-three master classes, with twenty-five students, at Juilliard
in 1971. People who were there (I was not) remember the classes
as the sensation of the musical season, though they cannot
possibly have been of much interest to readers of gossip columns.
Unlike Maria, who is constantly wallowing in self-serving
reminiscence and resentfully spilling beans, Callas was thoroughly
prepared, rigorously technical, demanding, and relentlessly
focused on the job at hand. Her concerns were breath control,
diction, accents, phrasing, tempo, scales, trills. Anyone who went
hoping for dish would soon have fled.
The classes were taped, and Maria Callas at Juilliard (EMI), a
three-CD compilation (interspersed with arias culled from the
extensive Callas discography), is available. The scholar John
Ardoin published a more inclusive, expertly assembled book of
transcripts, Callas at Juilliard, which is rich in musical examples.
Neither source is anything like the play. On the tapes we hear
a lot of singing, both from the students and from Callas; hers
is seldom dulcet but always authoritative. There is not much
talking, and Callas does most of that, limiting herself in the main
to concise technical corrections. In the book the students vanish
almost completely.
Tyne Daly as Maria Callas (The New York Times)
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MASTER CLASS
McNally is in search of a seamless imaginative truth. On the face
of it, not much “happens” in Master Class. Maria arrives, vamps
the audience (we have a role to play as auditors), and eventually
settles down to the business at hand. There is some byplay with
the rehearsal pianist and with a stagehand. Otherwise, for the
entire first act Maria torments a timid soprano who tries her luck
with Amina’s heartbroken lament from Bellini’s La Sonnambula, a
celebrated Callas vehicle. The second act is split between a cocky
tenor, who after a clownish beginning unexpectedly touches
a chord in Maria with “Recondita armonia,” from Puccini’s
Tosca; and a second soprano, this one bold and overdressed, who
comes in with the letter scene from Verdi’s Macbeth, another
Callas specialty. Between volleys of sarcasm, condescension,
and criticism, very seldom leavened with encouragement, Maria
frequently digresses, revisiting her life and career. Toward the end
of each act she has a tremendous monologue; the room vanishes
as the music plunges her into a violent maelstrom of memory.
The failure of Maria’s first victim to bring a pencil to class
prompts a reminiscence of all but epiphanic force.
Maria: At the conservatory Madame de Hidalgo never once
had to ask me if I had a pencil. And this was during the war,
when a pencil wasn’t something you just picked up at the five
and ten. Oh no, no, no, no. A pencil meant something. It
was a choice over something else. You either had a pencil or
an orange. I always had a pencil. I never had an orange. And
I love oranges. I knew one day I would have all the oranges I
could want, but that didn’t make the wanting them any less.
Dixie Carter as Maria Callas. Photo by Joan Marcus for Playbill
The displays of temperament, personal revelations, and lordly
putdowns of the students that make McNally’s script so playable
are mostly pure invention. So, actually, are the musical and
dramatic analyses. Of Maria’s three “victims” only the tenor
comes in with an aria represented on the Juilliard syllabus. Callas
was especially brief and clinical on the subject of this aria, but
it moves Maria to the brink of tears. With the Callas specialties
brought in by the play’s two sopranos, McNally is working on a
clean slate.
Have you ever been hungry?
Soprano: Not like that.
Master Class, then, is virtually pure fabrication, for all its harping
on the theme of authenticity – and purposely so. McNally might
have included, but did not, Callas’s frequent injunction to let
emotion register on the face while singing a phrase, and even
before; i this is hard-won theatrical wisdom that audiences would
instantly understand. But giving an aesthetic education of this
sort is not McNally’s concern. One rare passage in which Maria
does quote Callas is perfectly in character: she is telling a student
to wear a longer skirt, or slacks, because “the public that looks
at you from down there sees a little more of you than you might
want.” “Eh?” she continues. “It’s no use now. You should have
thought of it before.” On a more solemn note, Callas’s spare
farewell to the students is also preserved essentially intact.
Maria: It’s. It’s something you remember. Always. In some
part of you.
Whether I continue singing or not doesn’t matter. Besides,
it’s all there in the recordings. What matters is that you use
whatever you have learned wisely. Think of the expression of
the words, of good diction, and of your own deep feelings.
The only thanks I ask is that you sing properly and honestly.
If you do this, I will feel repaid. Well, that’s that.
Except for the two sentences in italics, this passage from the play
matches Ardoin’s transcript word for word. The remark about the
recordings is also authentic, although interpolated. As for the exit
line, untranscribed by Ardoin, it is heard on the CD, followed by
explosive applause.
Gary Green, Faye Dunaway and Suzan Hanson. Photo by Joan Marcus for Playbill
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MASTER CLASS
In the second act, in the context of Macbeth, Maria asks the other
soprano, “Is there anything you would kill for, Sharon? … A man,
a career?” (Sharon doesn’t think so.) Hunger and willingness to
kill: these are what make Maria who she is. Hunger, for more
than oranges, fueled her art. What has destroyed her life is a love
great enough to kill for. As the second grand monologue reveals,
Maria has killed, not for her career but for a man: for Onassis, the
love of her life, who has rebuffed her tenderness, saying he gives
love only to his children. “Have a child of mine,” he scoffs, “and
I will love him.” When she conceives, Onassis tells her to have an
abortion. To keep him, she complies. He dumps her anyway.
The importance of the pregnancy in McNally’s scheme is
paramount, forging the link to the character with whom Maria
most identifies, both as a woman and as an artist: Medea.
“Ho dato tutto a te.” Medea sings that to Jason when she learns
he’s abandoning her for another woman. A younger woman. A
woman of importance. A princess. “Ho dato tutto a te.” “I gave
everything for you. Everything.” That’s what we artists do for
people.
Sierra Boggess and Tyne Daly in the 2011 Broadway revival. Photo by Joan Marcus for Playbill
Carter, best known as Julia Sugarbaker in the CBS Series
Designing Women, was the most girlish of the five Marias I saw,
mischievously aware of her power to entertain and gratified
when her jokes got a laugh. In the main, though, her moods
seemed affected rather than spontaneous. In Milan, Rossella Falk
portrayed a star-struck, little-me Cinderella, back at the fireplace
reminiscing about a night at the ball that didn’t pan out. It wasn’t
a viable choice.
Though not exact, the parallels are close enough. Medea, we
recall, murdered her brother for love of Jason, and later killed
her own children for revenge on Jason. The princess, of course,
is Jacqueline Kennedy. And Maria’s climactic line in her second
monologue, following her desperate cry to Onassis to marry
her, is none other than Medea’s: “Ho dato tutto a te.” Earlier in
Master Class, Maria has used those words to make another point:
“Anyone’s feelings can be hurt. Only an artist can say ‘Ho dato
tutto a te’ center stage at La Scala and even Leonard Bernstein
forgets he’s Leonard Bernstein and listens to you.” Unconditional
devotion, unconditional sacrifice: these are the core of her life and
her art. How hard it is to distinguish the two.
But Falk’s failure pales in significance beside Dunaway’s, since
Dunaway’s Maria is the one destined to achieve immortality of
sorts on the screen. Dunaway has a movie star’s ability to turn on
pathos as one switches on a light, and the effect when she does
so as the heartbroken sleepwalker Amina is fairly breathtaking.
Otherwise she is still playing Bonnie Parker: winsome, hungry
for life, cheerful, insecure, and more than a little dim. With the
students Dunaway’s Maria pulls punches, which renders especially
false the awkward scene toward the end when the Macbeth
soprano rounds on Maria and tells her off. (In my experience,
only Polanski’s cast makes this believable.)
“HO dato tutto a te.” Few plays hinge on a line as Master Class
does on this one. Indeed, it is in the trajectory to the final
utterance of this line, and in the reading of the line when it
comes, that every actress I have seen in the part of Maria has
proved (or not) her worth. Leonard Foglia, who has directed all
the Broadway casts and Dunaway’s touring ensemble as well,
has given his actresses considerable latitude to succeed or fail on
their own terms. The keynote of Caldwell’s performance, struck
ringingly in that line, was towering, contemptuous, ice-cold rage.
LuPone, Broadway’s original Evita, came to Maria a diva burned
by her ouster from Sunset Boulevard – a real-life humiliation that
may have accounted in part for her pervasive attitude of plucky
defiance. A younger, more flirtatious Maria, she brought forth
in the climactic cry a blaze of despair and loss. Ardant’s reading
was at once the most enigmatic and the most haunting: she shed
tears, yet her features were open, beaming, with the same lonely,
Vestal-like rapture that suffused her both when her Maria spoke
of her art and also – to unexpected yet utterly convincing effect
– in her assessments of colleagues and students. She was crushing
in her kindness. To Ardant’s advantage, Polanski conceived of the
students as real people rather than cartoonish foils for the star.
(Foglia’s inadequacy in this regard grows more glaring with each
change of cast.)
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Maybe by the time Dunaway takes her performance into the film
studio, she, too, will have succeeded in making the role her own.
Maybe she will team up with a director who can help her find
the way. Word is that she was hoping for Franco Zeffirelli – an
intimate of Callas’s who directed the diva in historic productions
of La Traviata, Tosca, and Norma – but that he, citing loyalty,
declined. Maybe Polanski will prove amenable. It will be a pity if
the movie puts an end to the burgeoning gallery of Marias.
“You must try to characterize the person you will play, decide
what sort of individual she is, what her background is, what
her attitudes must be,” Callas said at Juilliard. “This you will
get from the music, not from history. History has its Anne
Boleyn, for instance, and she is quite different from the Anna
Bolena of Donizetti.” Whatever clues future actresses may glean
from Callas’s life and recordings, the text they must master is
McNally’s.
Gurewitsch, Matthew: Maria, Not Callas (The Atlantic Monthly Company, 1997)
21
MASTER CLASS
ON THE RECORDINGS OF MARIA CALLAS
By Terrence McNally
Like most people, I first heard the
voice of Maria Callas on a record. It
was an appropriate introduction to
a singer whose career was relatively
brief and whose actual performances
in this country were few.
The years was 1953, the recording was Lucia de Lammermoor and
I was a high school student in Corpus Christi, Texas, who bussed
tables at the Robin Hood Cafeteria in order to buy opera records.
I was fifteen, a dreamer, and I thought she was singing just for
me. I still do.
Listening to Callas is not a passive experience. It is a conversation
with her and, finally, ourselves. Callas speaks to us when she
sings. She tells us her secrets—her pains, her joys—and we tell
her ours right back. “I have felt such despair, such happiness,”
Callas confesses. “So have I, so have I!” we answer. It is ourselves
we recognize in Violetta or Norma or Lucia when we listen to
Callas sing them.
No one before her had “heard” Lucia the way she did. Nor had
they been able to articulate Donizetti’s music with such deep
and specific feeling. Lucia became a recognizable human being.
The Fountain Scene was an expression of both tragic foreboding
and ecstatic first love. The Mad Scene became the cumulative
threnody for that love betrayed when the forebodings had become
reality. All at once it was possible to care about Lucia. She had
become a human being. As she did with almost everything she
sang, Callas changed our very perception of the role and its
possibilities. In so doing, she not only gave us Donizetti’s heroine
but she also changed the face of opera. After Callas, Lucia,
Lucia de Lammermoor and the entire bel-canto repertory would
never be the same. We are still dealing with and reeling from her
revolution.
To say that Callas changed the face of
opera is not an overstatement. It is simply
to acknowledge that she showed us the
meaning in music we either took for
granted or had never really heard.
great singing shark devouring every note in the score, striking
sparks of drama, making the old seem brand new again, and
generally chasing other singers out of “their” repertory.
To say that Callas changed the face of opera is not an
overstatement. It is simply to acknowledge that she showed us the
meaning in music we either took for granted or had never really
heard. Callas did not have to resurrect the unfamiliar bel-canto
operas she did (Anna Bolena, Il Pirata, Poliuto, Il Turco in Italia)
to make her impact on the performing history of opera. She had
already done so with this first recorded Lucia. She raised the ante
for what it means to be a great opera singer. Mechanical singers,
lazy singers, cautious singers must have hated her. Just when
you thought it was safe to get by with another of your chirping
Lucias, flaccid Normas, or pedestrian Violettas, along came this
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Callas sees and hears in the great Romantic repertory of Bellini,
Donizetti, and Verdi what other singers are deaf and blind to: the
poetry of the music. They sing notes, Callas sings meaning. They
sing in phrases, she phrases in paragraphs. They strive to produce
generically pretty sounds, she makes specific noises. Listening to
Callas sing Lucia on that first recording was a revelation. I was
hearing my most intimate feelings expressed in song. No singer
had ever spoken to me so clearly. No wonder I thought she was
singing just for me. It was love at first listen.
22
MASTER CLASS
But to a fifteen-year-old in South Texas, she was necessarily a
voice without a face. She was the Queen of La Scala in Milan,
I was a busboy at the Robin Hood Cafeteria on South Staples
and never, surely, our twain would meet. The records would
have to suffice. And so I loved her as a blind man must come to
love someone: with all my other senses engaged. Her voice was
the face, and I came to know and love almost every feature of
it through her many recordings. It is still the best way to know
Callas. And now it is the only way. To truly “see” Maria Callas,
you only have to put on one of her recordings. Fortunately, it’s all
there: the unforgettable sound of the voice itself, the scrupulous
musicianship, the intensity of the feelings, and the flashes of
genius that still astonish but can never be duplicated.
Callas’ physical beauty was no doubt a part of her allure in the
theater and her stature as a a legend in our collective memory.
It has been preserved in photographs and the handful of video
tapes of her in actual performance that have come down to us.
You owe it to yourself to see them. Her recorded legacy, happily,
is vast, and it is there that her immortal beauty, her art, has been
preserved for the rest of human history.
1955. I said “either”; the truth is I find all three essential and
that’s without discussing the second EMI Norma or the final
Norma from the Paris Opera in 1965. As for Lucia, there is not
only that first EMI recording but the fabled “Berlin” Lucia of
September 29, 1955. The EMI recordings of La Sonnambula and
I Puritani would also have to come along with me. Callas singing
Bellini is close to bliss. Of the Verdi performances, I could not be
without the studio Il Trovatore or Un Ballo in Maschera. The one
Puccini performance I would take along would be La Boheme, an
opera she never sang in the theater but made very much her own
in the studio. And then there are the recital albums. I would insist
on the “Puccini Heroines” and “Coloratura/Lyric” albums, but I
would not really be happy unless I could have all the Verdi recital
albums too. The fact is I want them all and don’t be surprised
if you do, too. (The happy truth is I have them all and I hope I
never end up on a desert island.)
Without her recordings, I wonder if Maria Callas would exist
as forcefully in our hearts and imaginations as she does today.
Indeed, some twenty-five years after her last stage performance
in 1965, and almost fifteen years after her death in 1977, Callas
remains more vivid than most sopranos singing today. Who
was it we heard singing Traviata at the Metropolitan last month
anyway? Callas’ Violetta (I heard two performances at the old
Met in 1958), on the other hand, was simply unforgettable. I
am, I confess, one of the lucky ones: I saw Callas. The busboy at
Ray High School made it to Columbia College in New York. It
was her debut as Norma at the old Met on October 29, 1956. I
waited in line three days for a place in standing room. It was an
unforgettable experience of my youth and I would not trade it for
anything, but I realize now I “saw” her just as clearly on that first
recording of Lucia in 1953 as I did when she actually stood on
that great stage and sang “Casta diva.” As I said, to see Callas you
only have to listen to her records. We see her with our hearts and
minds. Our eyes and ears are only the conduits to that place deep
within us where we experience her.
When I named a play of mine The Lisbon Traviata, the tape of
that performance had not yet surfaced. The title was thus meant
to represent the mythic, the unobtainable. Since I completed the
play, EMI has released the performance and it is readily available.
I wonder if I wrote a play called The Chicago Trovatore, The Venice
Walkure, or The Genoa Tristan—equally legendary performances
of which tapes are rumored to exist—would EMI oblige us again?
If I thought they would, I would begin all three plays today.
Callas’ first recording of Tosca for EMI in 1953 has always been
on everyone’s list of all-time great operatic recordings. I will not
dissent from that consensus, but it would not be a desert island
disc of mine. That collection would have to start with either
the first EMI Norma or the performance from Covent Garden,
November 18, 1952, or the one from La Scala, December 7,
But Callas’ art, fortunately, is inexhaustible, even if her recordings
are not. She has given us a lifetime’s work to be grateful for, learn
from, and wonder at. The proof is tangible. It is on these pages.
It is on her recordings. We are in her debt forever. Opera has new
possibilities thanks to her. It is up to us to embrace them. After
Callas, there is no turning back.
Her recorded legacy, happily, is vast,
and it is there that her immortal
beauty, her art, has been preserved
for the rest of human history.
THEATER LATTÉ DA
Terrence McNally
Ardoin, John: The Callas Legacy, The Complete Guide to her Recordings (Charles
Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1991)
23
MASTER CLASS
B IBLIOGRAPHY, FURTHER READING
AND ONLINE RESOURCES
Bibliography
Online Resources
• Ardoin, John: Callas at Juilliard – The Master Classes (Alfred A
Knopf Inc, New York 1987)
• Ardoin, John: The Callas Legacy (Charles Scribner’s Sons/
Macmillan Publishing Company, New York 1991)
• Ardoin, John and Fitzgerald, Gerald: Callas (Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, New York, 1974)
• Bourne, Joyce: Opera—The Great Composers and their
Masterworks (Octopus Publishing Group, London 2008)
• Galatopoulos, Stelios: Maria Callas—Sacred Monster (Simon &
Schuster, New York 1998)
• Lowe, David A. (Ed): Callas—As They Saw Her (The Ungar
Publishing Company, New York 1986)
• McNally, Terrence: Master Class (Dramatists Play Service Inc.,
New York 1995)
Articles
• Davidson, Justin: The Unruly Genius of Maria Callas
(Wondering Sound, 2006)
http://www.wonderingsound.com/spotlight/the-unruly-geniusof-maria-callas/
• Ericson, Raymond: On This Day (The New York Times, 1977)
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/
bday/1202.html
• Gurewitsch, Matthew: Maria, Not Callas, The Atlantic
Monthly Company, 1997
https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/97oct/maria.htm
• Huizenga, Tom: Talk Like an Opera Geek: Savoring the Bel
Canto Sound (NPR, 2012)
http://www.npr.org/blogs/
deceptivecadence/2012/03/28/149524661/talk-like-an-operageek-savoring-the-bel-canto-sound?autoplay=true
• Nearny, Lynn: Maria Callas: Voice of Perfect Imperfection (NPR,
2010)
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123612228
• David Ng, Maria Callas: Five Great Rumors on the Soprano’s
90th Birthday, LA Times, 2013
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/02/entertainment/la-etcm-maria-callas-20131202
• Serinus, Jason Victor: The Enduring Legacy of Maria Callas, San
Francisco Classical Voice, 2012
https://www.sfcv.org/article/the-enduring-legacy-of-mariacallas
Further Reading
• Bing, Sir Rudolf: 500 Nights at the Opera (Doubleday, New
York, 1972)
• Callas, Evangelia: My Daughter Maria Callas (Fleet, New York,
1960)
• Callas, Jackie: Sisters (Macmillan, London, 1989)
• Frischauer, Willi: Onassis (Bodley Head, London, 1968)
• Galatopoulos, Stelios: Callas—La Divina (Dent, London,
1966)
• Gobbi, Tito: My Life (Macdonald and Jane’s, London, 1979)
• Gobbi, Tito: On his World of Italian Opera (Hamish Hamilton,
London, 1984)
• Jellinek, George: Callas, Portrait of a Prima Donna (Ziff-Davis,
New York, 1960)
• Linakis, Stephen: Diva: Life and Death of Maria Callas
(Prentice-Hall, New York, 1980)
• Meneghini, Giovanni Battista: My Wife Maria Callas (Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, New York, 1982)
• Scifano, Laurence: Luchino Visconti: The Flames of Passion
(Collins, London, 1990)
• Segalini, Sergio: Callas—Portrait of a Diva (Hutchinson,
London, 1981)
• Stancioff, Nadia: Maria Callas Remembered (E.P. Dutton, New
York, 1987)
• Stassinopoulos, Arianna: Maria: Beyond the Callas Legend
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1980)
• Wisneski, Henry: Maria Calls: The Art Behind the Legend
(Doubleday, New York, 1975)
THEATER LATTÉ DA
General Reference
• BBC, Milnes, Rodney: Vincenzo Bellini (2004)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/6f5bfd20-84cc-4879-8a4005631ad576c7
• Biography.com: Giuseppe Verdi (2014)
http://www.biography.com/people/giuseppe-verdi-9517249
• Encyclopaedia Brittanica: La Scala (2014)
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/326535/La-Scala
• Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Luchino Visconti (2013)
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/630405/
Luchino-Visconti
• The Official Maria Callas Website
http://www.callas.it/english/cronologia
• The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music: Giacomo Puccini
(Macmillan Publishers Ltd, 2014)
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/education/puccini.html
• Wikipedia: Elvira de Hidalgo (2014)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvira_de_Hidalgo
24
MASTER CLASS