Maria Callas as Abigaille in Verdi’s Nabucco al Teatro San Carlo, Napoli 1949. (excerpt below)
In a genuinely brilliant 1995 New Yorker essay, musicologist Will Crutchfield describes her career and explicates why Maria Callas occupies an essentially unique position in the history of musical performance.
Callas performed vocal feats practically no soprano has equaled and single-handedly revived an entire operatic genre.
In the season of 1951-52, after triumphs up and down the peninsula, Callas established herself as prima donna at Milan’s La Scala, and made it her home theatre. For seven seasons, the house surrounded her with illustrious colleagues, conductors, directors, and designers, in revivals that were the news of the musical world. In familiar and unknown operas alike, Callas’s work almost always became the focus of the world’s thoughts about that role, and Callas herself became a celebrity. Then, in 1959, she went into sudden near-retirement, took up with Aristotle Onassis, and began the long professional and personal decline that still occasions deep regret and furious debate. Callas had been averaging fifty appearances a year; between her thirty-sixth and fortieth birthdays she sang in public only twenty-eight times. There was a flurry of troubled performances in 1964-65, and then silence until a disastrous concert tour in 1973-74.
Only one good decade, really. Callas’s entire stage career (excluding the Greek years) comprised just five hundred and thirty-nine performances. Enrico Caruso, who died at forty-eight, gave nearly two thousand. Chaliapin, one of the various singers who “invented” acting in opera before Callas “invented” it, made his début in 1890, and was still touring, recording, and singing gorgeously in 1937, just months before his death. The only other musician in this century to make anything like Callas’s impact in so few appearances was the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. Both of them—like Chaliapin, Caruso, Arturo Toscanini, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau—permanently changed the way their successors understood the music they were most closely associated with. But Callas brought this about largely by conservative means, through the affirmation of tradition. Gould and the others were revolutionaries; she never was. …
What Callas was helping to restore was once the most popular music in the world: the operatic repertory of Italy in the first half of the nineteenth century—the primo ottocento, as the Italians call it. This was the heady moment when Classical virtuosity, inherited from the brilliant vocal rhetoricians of the eighteenth century, coexisted with high Romanticism. The novels of Walter Scott, the poetry of Byron, the music of Beethoven: the younger Italian poets and composers took all these like drugs, and the operas they created swept back over Europe and the world. Callas’s core repertory came from this school, which reaches from the serious operas of Rossini (she sang one, “Armida”) through Bellini and Donizetti, to “Il Trovatore” and “La Traviata,” where Verdi, already striking out on new paths, drew for the last time on the full expressive vocabulary of his predecessors. Bellini’s Norma was Callas’s most frequent role, followed by Verdi’s Violetta and Donizetti’s Lucia; more than half her stage career was devoted to music composed in the narrow span from 1830 to 1853.
With opera moving on in symphonic and naturalistic directions, the decline of the Classical bel-canto skills was inevitable, and by 1900 most of the great operas of the primo ottocento were forgotten. The few that remained in repertory tended to be treated as tired relics, or as surefire comedies and romances that would play themselves (in shamelessly cut and edited versions), while serious artistic effort was focussed elsewhere. Some of the light sopranos kept the bel-canto skills flickeringly alive. But there had been nothing like Callas’s alacrity and speed since about 1910, and what there had been then came with the haphazardness of a discipline no longer valued and slipping into disuse.
Callas had all the exactitude and purpose of a valiant restorer. She had mastered more fully than almost any of her Italian contemporaries the art of legato and portamento (“carrying” the voice smoothly from note to note), and she had an extraordinarily lambent projection, which allowed every word to tell without overpronunciation. Her concentrated focus of tone allowed every gradation of softness to carry through the hall, every minute manipulation of rhythm to register. In every role, on practically every page, there were phrases that Callas was able to trace with a calligrapher’s pen where audiences had become accustomed to a carpenter’s pencil.
In Mozart’s 1787 opera, Don Giovanni rejects the Commendatore’s Ghost’s demand that he repent, and singing “Vivan le femmine, Viva il buon vino! Sostegno e gloria d’umanità!,” the Don descends defiantly into Hell.
Like a lot of us upwardly-mobile types, Dana Gioia grew up in working-class ethnic America where high culture, Opera, Classical Music, and the Arts in general were a foreign country. He describes very well, in the latest Hudson Review, the frustrations of being possessed by passions one can find no one to share and just how much the intellectual in those circumstances was inevitably the alienated outsider.
It burned my cork as a boy to recognize that if Beethoven were to rise from the tomb to premiere his 10th Symphony in the auditorium of J.W. Cooper High School, I’d be part of an audience of roughly twelve and most of the others would be teachers who were obliged to attend.
I thought back then that members of the better-educated, culturally-aware elite were better, finer beings and I yearned to relocate as soon as possible to their neighborhood. Imagine my surprise and chagrin, when I found that exposure to, and familiarity with, the high points of musical and artistic culture did not make all that much of a difference. The national elite was really composed of the same flawed human beings as the dumb yonkos in my Appalachian hometown and that national elite was actually even more systematically delusional in certain prominent ways as a direct result of its members’ sheltered life experiences.
There was something shameful about loving opera. Especially for a boy. Opera was pretentious, boring, effete, and effeminate. By the time I was ten, I understood the unsavory reputation of the art. Opera represented everything that my childhood in postwar America asked me not to be.
I had never been to the opera. I had never even seen an opera house, except in old movies. I knew from the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera that rich people went there, but they didn’t much enjoy it. Only Groucho had any fun. The patrons were old and overweight—bejeweled matrons and potbellied bankers stuffed into tuxedos. There was also something sinister about opera’s orgy of opulence. In Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera, the opera house was built over the city sewers. A mad composer emerged from this mephitic underworld to kidnap and kill. He wore elegant clothes, including an opera cape, but without his stylish mask, he was a monster. Opera was somehow both tedious and malevolent.
I wasn’t sure why opera provoked such distaste. It went beyond dislike, class prejudice, or xenophobia. It roused a sort of moral suspicion. There was something weak or unhealthy about an operagoer. What sort of person craves oversized emotions sung in foreign languages? What grown man could be so soft and sensitive? Such a creepy passion wasn’t normal. The Puritans, who colonized America, banned theater as sinful. If plays were emblems of depravity, what would they have thought of opera with its amplification of violent affection and sexual desire? Opera was sheer depravity, witchcraft so strong it crossed language barriers—a foul and foreign vice only Catholics could have devised.
I was raised among Italians and Mexicans, all deeply Catholic, even the atheists. Yet they half agreed with the Puritans. Opera crossed some boundary. It might not be depraved, but it was virulent in its pretention and sentimentality. In 1960, America was still a Puritan country. Everything in a boy’s education focused on making him manly. The official culture of my youth sponsored Cub Scouting, team sports, and church service as altar boys. Street culture provided schoolyard fights, bullying, and neighborhood gangs. There was no escaping manhood, responsible or otherwise, without persecution and disgrace.
I realized the dangers of opera too late to be saved. By ten I had already been corrupted by my parents. Neither of them had ever been to the opera. The notion would have struck them as absurd. But they loved singing, and that included the operatic arias they heard on variety shows. Back then opera stars were frequent guests on radio and television. There were about two dozen operatic standards that everyone knew. Even Bugs Bunny sang them.
Amira Willighagen, age 9, sings “O mio babbino caro” (“Oh My Beloved Father”) an aria from the opera Gianni Schicchi (1918) on television program Holland’s Got Talent.
British newspapers don’t simply all bug people’s phones and publish photographs of naked girls. The Telegraph, for instance, commonly offers slide-shows on interesting subjects, including one on the unconventional and highly imaginative operatic stagings done on a floating stage platform on Lake Constance at the Bregenzer Festpiele.
There are 7000 seats and a Seebühne (a floating stage) on Lake Constance at the Bregenzer Festspiele (Bregenz Festival in Bregenz, Austria). Verdi’s “Un ballo in maschera,” in 1999, was performed on a giant book being read by a skeleton.
A group calling itself L’Ópera para principiantes (“Opera For Beginners”), last November, placed singers among the stall vendors in the Central Market of Valencia, then started the music and astonished and delighted shoppers as professional performers emerged, one after the other, singing first Parigi, o cara, noi lasceremo (“Dearest, we’ll leave Paris”), the moving duet from the final act of Verdi’s La Traviata, then the famous chorus Libiamo ne’ lieti calici (“Brindisi — a drinking song”).
Albert Gore’s life at college was reputedly the inspiration for Erich Segal’s Love Story. One would think that would constitute enough artistic immortality for anyone, but, no! The horror, the horror….
La Scala in Milan has commissioned a musical version of An Inconvenient Truth, the apocalyptic eco-documentary presented by Al Gore, the former American vice-president.
Gore will be replaced on stage by a cast of tenors and at least one soprano as the story of man-made climate change is told. …
The music is being written by Giorgio Battistelli, whose past operas include works based on the Frankenstein story and on the writings of Jules Verne. The composer believes an operatic treament of Gore’s film will allow people to see the dangers facing the world in a new light.
“Opera makes you reflect. Artists make you see things differently,†he said. “When we see a painting by Francis Bacon or a film by Sydney Pollack, we get a very precise idea of the problems of our century.â€
The work is scheduled to be performed in 2011 as part of the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy. “I thought it could be a good idea to deal on this important occasion with a subject that involves not only Italy but the world,†Battistelli, 55, added. “It will be about the tragedy of our present situation. It is a great challenge to write an opera on such an unusual subject. It is certainly not the story of Romeo and Juliet.â€
Even the New York Times’ John Tierney is moved to satire.
Dear Mr. Gore,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on my draft of “Verità Inconveniente.†Rest assured that I and the management of La Scala are committed to a serious presentation of your scientific work. I will try to adopt some of your suggestions, but I hope you appreciate the constraints faced by the composer of an opera that is already five hours long.
