You may remember that I posted twice (post one and post two) about the new CD by Angela Gheorghiu, Homage to Maria Callas, noting that the CD had almost nothing to do with Callas.

When the CD arrived, I was surprised to find that the infamous Carmen “duet” with Callas was not in fact among the tracks. The fine print in the booklet indicated that one had to follow a link to “the exclusive EMI Classics album site” to see and hear it. I felt a twinge of respect for the marketing weasels who had devised this nonsense. Ah, so they are capable of feeling shame. They realized that they need to bury this abortion of a “duet.” Good for them.

Well, I spoke too soon. The duet has been released, and you can view it, if you must, via the Guardian website. (I do not intend to post or link directly to it here, and I warn you that it is excruciating.)

Once again I ask: Why? Angela Gheorghiu is an artist of substance. Witness her performance in Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur (an opera, incidentally, that I loathe). I have never seen the poisoned-posy bit performed credibly, let alone with the pathos and, yes, grandeur that Gheorghiu brings to it. (The audio seems slightly out of synch, but hang in there: Gheorghiu invests every syllable she sings with meaning and beauty. Making lots of corna, I very much hope to hear her in this rôle next week.)

Why do the marketing weasels at EMI think that Gheorghiu needs this kind of tripe? (And why on earth did she and her handlers acquiesce to it?) Why can’t EMI accept that much of their Callas catalogue is now in the public domain, that they’ve had a very good ride, and that the slicing and dicing and splicing, like all things, must come to an end?

This entire caper seems, in the end, to come down to the most cynical calculation: that any publicity is good publicity. And maybe I’ve fallen into the trap. It’s a shame that weasels have power over Callas’s legacy and Gheorghiu’s presentation and (while we’re at it) major opera houses, too. Dixit Baudrillard:

Today what we are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of advertising. All original cultural forms, all determined languages are absorbed in advertising because it has no depth, it is instantaneous and instantaneously forgotten. Triumph of superficial form, of the smallest common denominator of all signification, degree zero of meaning, triumph of entropy over all possible tropes. The lowest form of energy of the sign.

The Lisbon Traviata (EMI).

Male voices can be reproduced better than female voices. The female voice easily sounds shrill—but not because the gramophone is incapable of conveying high tones, as is demonstrated by its adequate reproduction of the flute. Rather, in order to become unfettered, the female voice requires the physical appearance of the body that carries it. But it is just this body that the gramophone eliminates, thereby giving every female voice a sound that is needy and incomplete. Only there where the body itself resonates, where the self to which the gramophone refers is identical with its sound, only there does the gramophone have its legitimate realm of validity: thus Caruso’s uncontested dominance. Wherever sound is separated from the body—as with instruments—or wherever it requires the body as a complement—as is the case with the female voice—gramophonic reproduction becomes problematic.

What an interesting quotation from “The curves of the needle” by Theodor W. Adorno and Thomas Y. Levin. The male self is identical with its sound; the female voice requires the body “as a complement” Without the body, its sound is “needy and incomplete.” It is fettered without “the physical appearance of the body that carries it.”

And yet everyone picks on French thinkers!

Callas is Carmen.

Happy Hallowe’en!

Like all strong and accomplished women, Maria Callas was branded a witch. Some of her most famous portrayals—Medea, Lady Macbeth—reinforced this image.

Nadia Stancioff wrote of Callas’s fame as a “strega”:

Italians have a strange fear of speaking negatively of the dead. Before embarking on a conversation regarding Callas, a number of people crossed themselves; others muttered “May she rest in peace” or made the “horns” gesture to ward off evil, as an extra precaution. Maybe they were afraid that Callas the strega—the witch, as she called herself—Callas the demigoddess might strike back!

In Bizet’s opera, Carmen is labelled a “sorcière” and a “diable” by her weak and bitter lover, Don José. Hear Callas in the card scene from her 1964 EMI recording of Carmen. (Sorry to make you click through; embedding is disabled for that clip.) From the archives: other selections from Carmen sung by Callas.

Callas studied the text, the meaning of the words, and as a result, she became a diva. She became the Great Callas. Because she studied the character, she entered the mind of the character, and she brought the character to life onstage. Today, young singers don’t have this mindset. They don’t have the kind of technique that Callas had… Price, Milanov and Tebaldi had stupendous voices and great careers. [But] Callas, as a performer, as someone who expressed the real meaning of the words, was the best. The best. There is no doubt about this—not only for her sound, but because she studied so much. Callas is the diva.
—Carlo Bergonzi

Today’s performance of “Ritorna vincitor!” from Verdi’s Aida is from Maria Callas’s August 1955 EMI recording of the opera led by Tullio Serafin.

Hear Callas in another excerpt from this recording and in other music by Verdi from the archives.

La Callas à Paris.

Dr. Alessandro Duranti of Florence (not the anthropologist) is, to quote Dante, “lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore.” His teaching and writing fostered the two great intellectual loves of my life, opera and cinquecento epic poetry.

He wrote a beautiful article about Maria Callas back in 2007 for the Italian journal  Paragone. I offer you an excerpt here, to go along with Maria Callas’s performance of “Casta diva” and “Bello a me ritorna” from Bellini’s Norma at her Paris début concert in 1958.

(The best iterations of this performance that I found on YouTube all had embedding disabled. Sorry for the need to click through.)

How does she sing? Extremely well, in my view, especially when she manages to free herself from the dead wood of a chorus that seems a band of killers sent to Paris by Ghiringhelli and Bing working together to spoil their great enemy’s party. But if you insist on making an issue of notes that are more or less steady, then I dare you to find me in the present, past, or prehistory a celebrated singer, one of those who can rest on their laurels and earn their keep with popular songs and arena appearances, capable of putting herself on the line with a similar program under the most blinding spotlights. You won’t find one, because Callas was unique for many reasons, including her impudent courage. Even when her strength began to decline, Callas never took refuge in easy programs. She always spared us the sadness of hearing her sing “Mamma” or “Bela madunina” at La Scala, and this alone would suffice to launch a process of beatification.

Hear Maria Callas in other music by Bellini.

1960, you say? From Cinzia Rocca marketing drivel.

One of the saddest things about contemporary Italy (an extremely sad place to begin with!) is the degradation of the Italian language, the knee-jerk, abject, and mindless use of anglicisms by the people who gave the world Dante, Machiavelli, Oriana Fallaci, and so many other great writers.

(To be sure, contemporary Italy is by no means the saddest place there is.)

Whenever I, a straniera, raise this issue, I am immediately labelled a racist, which in some ways illustrates my point: number one, because I am anything but a racist (demonstrating that the people who label me such no longer even know what “racist” means); and number two, because once someone is labelled a racist, reason and discussion (remember them?) fly straight out the window, and we all remain prisoners of the fetid, degrading echolalia that is multinational capitalist “culture.”

Oh, such nasty words for a blog about Maria Callas! Maybe you’re right; so go finish listening to yesterday’s selections.

Anyway, I was amused by several aspects of a recent collection by the Cinzia Rocca brand. First (witness the image in this post), they invoke Maria Callas as an inspiration, but they know so little about Callas AND ABOUT FASHION (for Pete’s sake!) that they misdate the photo! (I don’t know precisely when the photo was taken [1956?], but it was before 1960. And I’m not being pedantic, either, because post-war fashion evolved very quickly, so a difference of three or four years is significant.)

Second, the people who write about Cinzia Rocca can’t string together ten words without recourse to anglicisms. And, third, you would think with all the bloody anglicisms flying around that Cinzia Rocca would be able to write coherent English! BUT NO!

All collections Cinzia Rocca have had and still have, as a central element of inspiration, the interest in research in the forms of femininity. We speak of a female, never cries, clean lines that can, without too many frills to make each garment rich, but at the same time soberly elegant. The search for a simple but extremely effective appeal could not have the muse inspiring four women differently in different environments were able to combine this spirit to perfection: Audrey Hepburn, Jacqueline Kennedy, Grace Kelly and Maria Callas.

Anyway, Cinzia Rocca are not the worst but only the latest buffoons to insult the memory of Maria Callas.

The next post will be “normal,” don’t worry!

“Dolce e calmo”: Maria Callas sings Wagner

Following the lead of dear @JanettMR, today I point you to a wonderful website, the Maria Callas Museum.

The site is chock-full of fascinating materials in many media, including recordings. One screen is devoted to Maria Callas’s 1949 Cetra recordings—or rather, to some of them, because I believe that there is an alternate take of “Qui la voce” from Bellini’s I Puritani (and perhaps also a test recording of “Casta diva”).

All of these recordings are among Maria Callas’s very best: Isolde’s Tranfiguration, Part I and Part II, from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde; “Casta diva” Part I and Part II plus “Bello a me ritorna” from Bellini’s Norma; and “Qui la voce” and “Vien diletto” from I Puritani.

When Maria Callas made these recordings in November 1949, she was not yet 26 years old.

In her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Susan Sontag listed Bellini’s operas as an example of camp. One definition of the phenomenon that Sontag offered was: “Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much.’”

Wasn’t one of Callas’s greatest and most striking achievements that she took seriously music that had been considered not altogether serious? That she showed us that depths are there for those with ears to hear and eyes to see?

Today’s offering, in two parts: Callas in 1959 singing the final scene from Bellini’s Il pirata. Callas sang the opera five times at La Scala in May 1958; they were her last performances at the house until the 1961 Poliuto. She also recorded this scene for EMI in 1958 and sang it frequently during her 1959 concert tour.

These clips, I think, are some of the most important footage of Callas that we have, showing how much she could communicate without even singing.

Callas also sang Pirata in concert in both New York and Washington, DC in early 1959. Some say that she was thumbing her nose at Rudolf Bing and showing him and opera lovers what they were missing after her “firing” from the Metropolitan Opera and Bing’s refusal to stage early ottocento operas, which he deemed “old bores.”

Hear Maria Callas in other music by Bellini from the archives.

I have posted material from Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera before, but not the great love duet that is at the score’s center, in both position and spirit. This performance is from the opening night of La Scala’s 1957-58 season, on 7 December 1957. Callas as Amelia is partnered with Giuseppe di Stefano as Riccardo. (The production was set in Boston.) Gianandrea Gavazzeni conducts.

I just became aware (duh!) that this is the only duet in Ballo. We know that Verdi described Rigoletto as a long string of duets, and so many of his greatest scenes (Philippe II-Posa, Violetta-Germont, Amelia-Boccanegra) show humans in colloquy, a tu per tu, as social beings. This scene, set among gallows and in the darkness, is unique in his works, very different from the fulfilled love of Desdemona and Otello and even from the frustrated passion of Ernani and Elvira or Manrico and Leonora.

There is much to ponder!

7 December 1957 was a great night, as you can hear, even with the small imperfections in ensemble that almost always occur in the theatre. I am re-reading Gabriele Baldini’s great book The Story of Giuseppe Verdi and thought I would share a quote with you here:

Finally then, in Ballo, when Verdi was nearly fifty-four, we hear a true love duet, carried through almost immodestly to the end… Reference to Tristan, nineteenth-century opera’s greatest erotic work, in connection with Ballo does have some justification: in Ballo Verdi took up once and for all this extraordinary, universal artistic theme and, as if finally vaccinated, then returned to the more sedate (although still turbulent) passions of family, friendship, jealousy, rejection, betrayal, politics, and even plain lust which, because its frankness turns it into a natural mechanism, is actually more chaste.

Baldini’s book is in print here in the States, and I encourage all Verdians to read it.

I think that the myth that has stuck most closely to Maria Callas is the Medea myth. In her hateful and inaccurate telling of her daughter’s life, Evangelia Callas (or her ghostwriter) claimed that Callas was like Medea. (A lovely mother, calling her daughter a murderous witch!) The edition that I own of Mama Callas’s book shows Maria Callas on the cover costumed as Medea.

In one of the interviews he gave after the Callas-Meneghini separation was announced, Callas’s estranged husband called her “a Medea.” The yarn of Omero Lengrini spun by Nicholas Gage amounts to a Medea story, in which Callas causes the death of her unborn child.

Medea was the rôle that occasioned Callas’s weight loss in 1953 (as she told Edward Downes); it was as Medea that Aristotle Onassis first saw Maria Callas in the theatre. (I’m not sure that the Onassis factoid is terribly meaningful, given his supposed dislike for opera, but I mention it per dovere di cronaca.) It was also the last rôle that she sang at La Scala.

Today’s clip is from the 1953 Medea at the Maggio Musicale under Vittorio Gui. In this scene, Medea gives voice to her pain as she contemplates killing her beloved children. Callas is in thrilling, lava-like voice.

Read other posts about Medea here and in the blog archives.