Some legends never die. I suppose that’s why they’re legends. Maria Anna Cecilia Sofia Kalogerpoulos (shortened to Callas) born 2 December, 1923 was one. Articles, like this one about her have been written – even a documentary film – and she’s been dead for more than 40 years. What fascinates us still about her life? Other better singers have passed away and they’ve almost been forgotten. What’s so different about Maria Callas? People and critics who derided her when she was alive now have nothing but praise. Even her debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York as Bellini’s Norma, and the following six performances, in October 1956 were booed. Of course it didn’t help that preceding her Metropolitan debut, Time magazine wrote scathingly about her temper, her supposed rivalry with Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi and her severed relationship with her mother.
In those heady days – the 1950s and 60s – Callas was just as much followed by the paparazzi as Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift are these days. And yet her voice could not be classified as a thing of beauty. It was deemed uneven and forced.
Walter Legge, her producer when she was recording with EMI, stated that Callas possessed that most essential ingredient for a great singer: “an instantly recognizsble voice”. Yet Legge would send her back home from any recording session if her vibrato began to sound more like a wobble. Alas, she was known for that in her later life. The claques at the Milan La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera in New York would boo her when she wobbled. She was hissed for an entire performance of Medea at La Scala. It was the twilight of her career by then and her vocal resources were running on low. She even wobbled on both of her EMI recordings of Norma. And yet the tickets for her performances were always on the ‘black market’ list which indicates that her detractors paid good money to boo her. An admirer once wrote: ‘I remember Callas being bombarded with vegetables as she took her bows after her second New York Norma, a Saturday matinee. Bunches of carrots and heads of cabbage are not sold at the refreshments bar at the Metropolitan’. The claque had come armed.
Italian critic Rodolfo Celletti once wrote: ‘The timbre of Callas’s voice, considered purely as sound, was essentially ugly: it was a thick sound, which gave the impression of dryness, of aridity. It lacked those elements which, in a singer’s jargon, are described as velvet and varnish… yet I really believe that part of her appeal was precisely due to this fact. Why? Because for all its natural lack of varnish, velvet and richness, this voice could acquire such distinctive colours and timbres as to be unforgettable.’ In addition, in his review of Callas’s 1951 live recording of I Vespri Siciliani, Ira Siff wrote: ‘Accepted wisdom tells us that Callas possessed, even early on, a flawed voice, unattractive by conventional standards – an instrument that signalled from the beginning vocal problems to come. Yet listen to her entrance in this performance and one encounters a rich, spinning sound, ravishing by any standard, capable of delicate dynamic nuance. High notes are free of wobble, chest tones unforced, and the middle register displays none of the ‘bottled’ quality that became more and more pronounced as Callas matured’.
Even Callas herself spoke despairingly about her voice. She said: “I don’t like it. I have to do it, but I don’t like it at all because I don’t like the kind of voice I have. I really hate listening to myself! The first time I listened to a recording of my singing was when we were recording San Giovanni Battista by Stradella in a church in Perugia in 1949. They made me listen to the tape and I cried my eyes out. I wanted to stop everything, to give up singing… Also now even though I don’t like my voice, I’ve become able to accept it and to be detached and objective about it so I can say: Oh, that was really well sung, or it was nearly perfect’.
But she loved British audiences and they loved her in return. In 1952 she made her debut at Covent Garden in Norma, a performance that featured a young Joan Sutherland in the small role of Clotilde. She returned to the Royal Opera House again and again. In 1953,1957, 1958,1959,1964 and she made her last stage appearance there on 5 July 1965 as Tosca in a production designed and directed by Franco Zifirelli and featuring another of her favourites, baritone Tito Gobbi.
Callas’s dominant urge to be loved and be guided led her to two important figures in her life (Onassis was influential as well but he did not interfere in her choice of music, although by then to be fair she’d almost given up singing) – Tullio Serafin, the Italian opera conductor and Giovanni Battista Meneghini whom she married. Serafin, in 1946, was looking for a dramatic soprano to cast as the main lead in La Gioconda. The opera was to be staged at the Arena di Verona, an open-air amphitheatre. It was in this role that Callas made her Italian debut and this led to her meeting with Meneghini. They married in 1949 and henceforth until their marriage was dissolved in 1959, Meneghini controlled her life.
The performance in Verona led to Serafin offering Callas the role of Isolde. Callas later recalled that the opportunity of working with Serafin was one of the highlights of her career. ‘He taught me that there must be an expression (sic); that there must be a justification. He taught me the depth of the music, the justification of music. That’s where I really, really drank all I could from this man’.
Perhaps it was not a good thing but Serafin started overtaxing Callas. He persuaded her to sing Elvira in I Puritani and despite Callas’s protestations that she did not know the role she also had to prepare Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Die Walküre at the Teatro la Fenice. The critics went berserk. They were dumbfounded that a singer could pull off singing such divergent music in one season as Wagner and Bellini, but to perform them within days of each other was what one critic described as ‘folie de grandeur’. She pulled it off, of course and even Zeffirelli commented: ‘What she did in Venice was really incredible. It was like asking the great Wagnerian soprano Birgit Nilsson to substitute overnight for Beverley Sills, one of the greatest coloratura sopranos,’ he added.
The so-called feud between Callas and Renata Tebaldi proved a temporary distraction although both singers knew that there was no truth in it and that it was a ‘feud’ generated by both sets of publicists and the attempt to sell more newspapers. They each admired each other with Tebaldi quoted as saying: ‘She was really something unusual….and I stayed near a radio every time that I knew that there was something by Maria.’ Callas echoed Tebaldi’s praise of her with: ‘I admire Tebaldi’s tone; it’s beautiful….sometimes I actually wish I had her voice.’
From 1951 onwards Callas became the mainstay of La Scala. Her Metropolitan Opera debut as Norma took place on 29 October, 1956 but following a feud with the general manager Rudolf Bing, her contract was cancelled. She didn’t return to New York until the mid-1960s.
Meanwhile Calls started in a determined regime to lose weight. During 1953 and early 1954 she lost 36 kgs. She became what some described as moving with elegance and looking as if she was born to ‘that slender and graceful figure.’ Some said she’d achieved the weight loss by eating raw meat which was a breeding ground for tapeworms. But Callas stated that she achieved her weight loss by eating salads and chicken.
One thing is certain – her voice began to decline. Nobody could prove conclusively that the weight loss triggered that vocal decline. Some say that the heavy roles she had sang in her early years led to a weakness in her diaphragm. Some said the opposite; that …her singing of the lighter roles was to blame. Others said that the loss of strength and breath support was the direct result of her rapid and progressive weight loss. Walter Legge stated that Callas: ‘ran into a patch of vocal difficulties as early as 1954’. During the recording of La Forza del Destino, done immediately after the weight loss, the ‘wobble had become so pronounced’ that he told Callas they ‘would have to give away seasickness pills with every side’.
American soprano Deborah Voigt went through a weight reduction in 2006. She lost a colossal 61 kgs. And this is how, she says, she’s adjusted: ‘Much of what I did with my weight was very natural, vocally. Now I’ve got a different body—there’s not as much of me around. My diaphragm function, the way my throat feels, is not compromised in any way. But I do have to think about it more now. I have to remind myself to keep my ribs open. I have to remind myself, if my breath starts to stack. When I took a breath before, the weight would kick in and give it that extra Whhoomf! Now it doesn’t do that. If I don’t remember to get rid of the old air and re-engage the muscles, the breath starts stacking, and that’s when you can’t get your phrase, you crack high notes.’
In 1957, during a party hosted by Elsa Maxwell, Callas met Aristotle Onassis. The affair that followed received plenty of press attention. Callas left her husband in November 1959. Her career was on a downward spiral, made difficult by that loss of vocal power and supposedly endless scandals. When asked why she had not practiced her singing, she replied: ‘I have been trying to fulfil my life as a woman!’ The relationship lasted all of 11 years. In 1968 Onassis left Callas in favour of Jacqueline Kennedy. But some say that Callas still met up with Onassis in Paris, where they resumed what was now a clandestine affair.
Except for a final tour with tenor Giuseppe di Stefano (with whom she had a relationship) she spent the rest of her days isolated in her apartment in Paris and there she died of a heart attack on 16 September 1977. She would have been 96 today.
Some of her final words were: ‘It’s a terrible thing to be Maria Callas, because it’s a question of trying to understand something you can never really understand.’ And to her sister, Jackie: ‘Since I lost my voice I want to die. Without my voice, what am I? Nothing.’