In the Re-visioning Callas archives there are two other renditions of the letter scene from Verdi’s Macbeth: Callas’s 1958 studio recording, and her 1959 Hamburg performance (complete with Will Crutchfield’s marvelous insights).

This recording from Los Angeles, a relatively recent addition to the Callas canon, is from November 1958 and features a remarkably ugly “concert ending” to the cavatina, as in the Hamburg performance.

Listening to it, I find myself for once in agreement with Michael Scott, or at least with a writer whom Michael Scott quotes approvingly—that the effect of Callas’s voice was less that of a dramatic soprano than it was of “a huge soprano leggero with great variety of colour and practically unlimited dynamics.” (The quote comes from a review of Callas in Chicago, c. 1955.) The first acuto (a C?) is a nasty flap, but no one, not even the great Shirley Verrett, digs into Lady Macbeth’s music as fiercely and fearlessly as Callas.

This ends our Verdi birthday week celebrations. Bon week-end à tous, and see you next week!

Like Verdi’s Macbeth, his Don Carlos seems to have been something of an unlucky opera for Maria Callas. She portrayed Elisabeth de Valois five times at La Scala in April 1954. She was supposed to have sung the rôle twice (two runs in two cities) in 1950–1951, but ill health (as I recall, an attack of jaundice) forced her to withdraw.

That said, Don Carlos was clearly an opera close to her heart. She sang music from Don Carlos more than thirty times in concert—“Tu che le vanità” frequently in the late 1950s (and during her “comeback” tour); Eboli’s “O don fatale” in the early 1960s; and a duet with Giuseppe di Stefano also during the “comeback” tour. Selections from Don Carlos figured in her Juilliard master classes as well.

Today’s “O don fatale” was recorded for EMI in 1962 under Antonio Tonino. Callas’s highest notes are painfully unsteady, but her performance otherwise ranks among the very finest of this aria: unfussy, impassioned, womanly, with the words articulated in a crisp and thrilling manner.

Hear Callas in other music by Verdi.

The 1958 Lisbon performance of Verdi’s La traviata is famous and widely available. Today’s YouTube clip, though, offers perhaps the cleanest and most precise sound quality I’ve heard among Lisbon Traviate. The selection takes us from the beginning of Act I through the brindisi, and the incomparable Alfredo Kraus portrays Alfredo Germont.

(Confession: I am not a “collector.” I live in a tiny apartment and am perfectly happy to own one version of a given recording—the version that I already own! I do know that there are individuals and companies doing wonderful work locating new, improved sources for many “live” Callas sets, or cleaning up existing sources, but I claim no expertise whatsoever in these matters.)

I find that Callas’s voice is heard to its best advantage here. And you?

Last year I posted video footage from the Lisbon Traviata.

It’s Verdi’s birthday week! Have you visited Verdi Duecento?

Verdi il gran vecchio!

Friends, this week it’s all about Giuseppe Verdi, who turned 198 years young today. Please visit Verdi Duecento and listen to Callas in Verdi both at this blog and in the Re-visioning Callas archives.

At Verdi Duecento, you will find (for starters) lists of favorite links, books, and recordings.

See you later this week! Viva Verdi !

P.S. Please follow @revisioncallas, @verdi2013, and @peppinaverdi on Twitter.

Gosh, judging by my referrer logs, there are LOTS of peeps out there who are keen to see Amy Winehouse reincarnated !

Perhaps if this many people had cared about her previous incarnation, she would still be among us.

(I have known several addicts in my time, and I do know that addiction is the most baffling and devilish of diseases. Nonetheless, I’m still having a hard time getting over the fact that this immensely talented young woman is gone. I guess if I believed in reincarnation I would have an easier time of it.)

Giuseppe Verdi was born on 9 or 10 October 1813.

“La luce langue,” the scena for Lady Macbeth, comes from the 1867 version of Macbeth. Callas recorded it and two other Macbeth excerpts under Nicola Rescigno in 1958.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth is supposed to bring misfortune in the spoken theatre, and Macbeth the opera seems to have been unlucky for Callas, too. She had a brilliant success with it at La Scala in 1952, and she was to have sung it in San Francisco and New York, but both times, the local impresarios angrily cancelled her contract. There was also talk of her singing Macbeth under Arturo Toscanini in Busseto, but that never came to be. Though she portrayed Lady Macbeth on stage only five times, she left an indelible impression in the rôle.

Callas’s 1958 Verdi recital is, for me, one of her finest EMI recordings. This particular clip has very good sound (good for YouTube and the Internet, I mean). Callas sang music from Macbeth some twenty times in concert between 1952 and 1962.

Hear Maria Callas in other music by Verdi.

I will admit that, back in the day, I hated this spot—because the slogan is illiterate and because I was offended by the idea of Maria Callas’s image used to hawk consumer goods.

Time marches on, though, and even I have mellowed over the years! (LOL)

There is a “making of” clip about the Apple spot in which the advertising agency executive (at about 1:19) implies that the Callas footage comes from “Maria Callas’s home movies.” She says that the “home movies” came to her from Greece in a dusty tin.

Anyway, rest in peace, Mr. Jobs, and thank you for making computers that are both powerful and elegant. (I am of two minds about the iPod because of the rise in hearing loss among young people.)

John Steane, the distinguished music critic who died earlier this year, holds forth on Maria Callas, comparing and contrasting her with Rosa Ponselle, Claudia Muzio, and Lilli Lehmann.

More than anything else, it seems to me that he establishes that Callas was sui generis. He hypothesizes that she might have had qualities in common with Giuditta Pasta, but who among us has heard Pasta? Though written descriptions of the two singers are strikingly similar, I suspect that nineteenth-century singing was radically different from what we hear today.

I’ve posted video of Callas in Cherubini’s Medea before, but this particular clip possibly includes a few additional snippets—or at least is a lengthier compilation of existing clips. I believe that the footage is from both La Scala and Epidaurus in 1961.

If anyone has information to the contrary, please let me know.

See earlier posts about Callas as Cherubini’s and Pasolini’s Medea.

Here in New York, we have passed in a flash from sticky summery heat to winter, and the subway seems a sick ward, filled with full-fledged tisici.

Clearly, then, it’s time for Puccini’s La bohème! Callas recorded the complete opera under Antonino Votto in 1956, and Mimì was one of four rôles (the others being Nedda, Manon Lescaut, and Carmen) that she portrayed on disc but not on stage.

This scene from Act III, featuring Rolando Panerai as Marcello, finds Callas in penetrating form. John Ardoin notes: “We are taken into Mimì’s innermost fears and longings, and Callas not only conveys a sense of waning strength, but of the embarrassment of laying bare private feelings to a third person.”

Hear Callas (and others) singing music by Puccini. P.S. That link will take you, as well, to footage of Giacomo Puccini himself.