Greetings, my venticinque lettori! I hope that all of you in the States had a wonderful Thanksgiving. (Mine was grand.)

Turandot: I have another trip coming up, and I think that Callas’s 1957 EMI recording will come along with me. Why have I not spent more time with this set? Well, for one thing, my favorite Puccini opera (by far) is Fanciulla. And there are so many operas by other composers that I prefer to Turandot. And, yes, Schwarzkopf as Liù is a bitter pill, to say the least.

Still, Callas is wondrous as Turandot. In today’s selection, the riddle scene, listen to her growing panic: she taunts Calaf before he answers the final enigma, but her anxiety is palpable, and we can feel the butterflies in her gut. And the sense of mystery and vulnerability she brings to the first riddle echoes what we heard in her evocation of Lou-Ling’s rape and what we will hear after Calaf’s kiss.

Eugenio Fernandi is Calaf and Giuseppe Nessi is the emperor; Tullio Serafin conducts.

The finale of Pucccini’s Turandot is problematic, to say the least. I have never had the opportunity to hear in the theatre Alfano’s complete completion or the finale by Luciano Berio. Truth be told, I long for someone to commission a Turandot finale from a woman. (Kaija Saariaho? Why, yes, she would do quite nicely, thank you.)

The EMI Turandot from 1957 is not considered one of Callas’s finest efforts. She recorded it shortly before she set down Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, and that set was withheld until 1960 because of her poor vocal form. The months following these recording sessions would bring two Callas “scandals”—her failure to sing a final Sonnambula at the Edinburgh Festival (for which she may or may not have signed a contract); and the Rome Norma hullabaloo.

Now, all of that said, 1957 also brought some of Callas’s greatest performances: the Cologne Sonnambula, the La Scala Ballo, the Dallas rehearsal and concert, and her EMI Barbiere.

I revisited the finale from the 1957 recording of Turandot expecting to hear middling Callas and was surprised at her fierce and authoritative form. I don’t much care for the Calaf, Eugenio Fernandi, and Turandot needs better sound quality than EMI could deliver half a century ago, but… tutto sommato… wow.

Turandot was only 33 years old (counting from Puccini’s death in 1924) when this recording was made. How about that?

Hear Callas in other music by Puccini here and in the blog archives.

How is it that I have never posted about Callas in Puccini’s Turandot? The blog search engines are surely misfiring.

Turandot was an important rôle in the early years of Callas’s career in Italy and South America. She sang it some twenty-five times in 1948 and 1949 (at one point, four times in eight days), then dropped the rôle, revisiting it only for two EMI recordings and one 1957 concert in Chicago.

In 1954, she recorded Liù’s arias and “In questa reggia” for her Puccini recital, and in 1957 she set down the complete opera.

This “In questa reggia” is from 1954, and it is one of my favorite Callas performances. Many have commented on the sense of mystery and pudore that pervades Callas’s voice when Turandot evokes the memory of Princess Lou-Ling, her raped and murdered ancestor. Along with those knife-like thrusts at “Quel grido e quella morte,” it always makes me shiver.

Hear Callas in other music by Puccini here and in the blog archives. (The latter link takes you to another remarkable performance of “In questa reggia,” by Dame Joan Sutherland.)

A superb recording.

A quick note to let you know that I reviewed Handel’s Rodelinda at the Metropolitan Opera for The Classical Review.

Prior to Monday’s Rodelinda, I had heard the countertenor Andreas Scholl in concert but not in opera. Oh, heavens, what an artist! Yes, his voice is on the small side for the Met, but who cares? Consider what Victor Maurel (the creator of Verdi’s Iago and Falstaff, among other rôles) wrote (emphasis in the original):

Within ten minutes, an audience becomes accustomed to a vocal tone (tonalité sonore), however powerful it may be. What never fails to astonish and captivate the public is rightness, energy, and variety of accent.

YES. Do not miss the broadcast and high-definition transmission of Rodelinda on 3 December. And I commend to you Mr. Scholl’s beautiful new Decca recording of Bach cantatas.

P.S. I was exceedingly impressed by Iestyn Davies, as well.

Maria Callas, c. 1954.

“The ghost of Maria Callas” is a lovely piece composed by Matt Elliott. You can hear it, and read remarks by Mr. Elliott, in the blog archives.

Mr. Elliott knows more about Maria Callas than many people who write about her. Today’s gem comes from the Giornale di Brescia. The designer Roberto Capucci has created a new dress in honor of the famous “Winged Victory” statue in Brescia and is exhibiting it along with older creations, including

the sculpture-gown “Vestale,” Capucci’s personal homage to Maria Callas, which the celebrated opera singer wore in 1986 at the Arena di Verona.

Nine years after her death! Maria Callas never ceases to amaze.

As I write, Capucci’s own website is not fully launched. It may offer more plausible information in time.

Hear music (and watch videos) related to Spontini’s La vestale in the blog archives.

Callas’s stereo “Lucia.”

Last week, EMI Group, who own (or used to own) Maria Callas’s recordings, were split in two and sold to Universal Music Group (Vivendi) and a consortium led by Sony.

What effect, if any, this will have on Callas’s catalogue remains to be seen. I am thoroughly confused by copyright law, but I believe that nearly all of Callas’s EMI recordings are now in the public domain in Europe.

Is “different” a substantive?

Keith Richards said that working with Mick Jagger is like “working with Maria Callas”: “The diva is right and we’ve got to try and put music together without annoying the diva.”

Tyne Daly takes to London her portrayal of “Maria Callas” in Terrence McNally’s Master Class.

“What David Beckham was to football, Maria Callas was to opera.” NOW WE KNOW.

“Come Maria Callas, anche Carla Bruni ha uno charme tutto particolare.” NOW WE KNOW AGAIN.

An Italian paper notes that Emma Marcegaglia, the head of Confindustria (the Italian employers’ association), “until a few days ago plunged more daggers than Cassius and Brutus into the premier’s back, demanding early elections with the voice of Maria Callas, but now no longer wants them.”

A play by Roberto d’Alessandro depicting the life of Maria Callas as told by her housekeeper Bruna is being performed in Rome.

Eva Mendes, slated to portray Maria Callas in a forthcoming biopic, comments with insight and originality on the relationship between Callas and Aristotle Onassis: “Leur histoire d’amour a tous les ingrédients d’une tragédie grecque !”

Almost forgot: My review of Angela Gheorghiu’s star turn in Adriana Lecouvreur with Opera Orchestra of New York includes a bit of Callas lore.

John Ardoin wrote in The Callas Legacy about the 1955 Berlin Lucia led by Herbert von Karajan, “If I could own but a single Callas set, it would be this one.”

There was a bis of the sextet, and I offer you this bit today. Along with Callas (listen for the amazing diminuendo), you hear Giuseppe di Stefano, Rolando Panerai, Nicola Zaccaria, Giuseppe Zampieri, Luisa Villa, and Mario Carlin.

(Io son vin-to-ho so-hon co-hom-mosso: Forgive me. I have no love for di Stefano. I know that the sound was glorious, but who cares?)

Hear Callas here and in the blog archives in other music led by Herbert von Karajan.

If I could travel back in time and attend a single Verdi premiere, I would choose Macbeth, which was first performed in Florence in 1847. Florence was then (as it is now, and as it had been in centuries past) the Athens of Italy. Verdi mingled with and was fêted by the local intelligentsia, and he was very conscious of having crafted something new and arresting in Macbeth.

You know the anecdotes: how he dedicated Macbeth to his benefactor Antonio Barezzi because he considered it his finest opera; how he made the first Macbeth and Lady Macbeth rehearse the “Fatal mia donna” duet more than 150 times (which was materially impossible but surely seemed true to Marianna Barbieri-Nini, the first Lady Macbeth); and how, when the opera was translated into French, he insisted that the words Follie! Follie! (sung by Lady Macbeth) in this duet remain unchanged, “because from this word, in this inner derision by Lady, derives perhaps the entire secret of this piece’s effect.”

Today’s selection is “Fatal mia donna” from opening night of La Scala’s 1952–53 season. Maria Callas is Lady Macbeth, Enzo Mascherini is Macbeth, and Victor de Sabata conducts. It was a great night, and it makes one bitterly regret that Maria Callas never revisited the rôle of Lady Macbeth on stage.

Hear Maria Callas in other music by Verdi (including selections from Macbeth here and in the blog archives.

“Callas” by Antonella Cinelli.

“Reading” a work of art that one has seen only in a low-resolution, two-dimensional, tiny rendering is both hard and rash. Still, I quite like “Callas” by the Bolognese artist Antonella Cinelli.

It is part of the exhibit “ARTipicità” at the Teatro Filodrammatici in Milan, which runs through 30 November. (“ARTipicità” combines the Italian words for “art” and “atypicalness.”) Apparently the exhibit coincides with the publication of the latest book by an Italian “image guru.” (O tempora! O mores!) Repubblica offers a slideshow of images from the exhibit.

Cinelli’s current show is a cycle called “Doll.” According to her gallery,

the duality between being and appearing probed by the artist in these works is tied to the concept of dress as a social instrument for the communication of one’s own personality.

The idea of creating little dresses, sparkling and metallic… derives from an unusual concept of dress that takes on ambivalent and conflicting meanings. In becoming a rigid and transparent iron structure, the dress is deprived of its practical uses as an object created to cover the body and allow it to move comfortably. It takes on new meanings, as if it were armor in which a woman feels at once constrained and protected.

The absence of a body beneath this unusual dress points to the disappearance of individual identity and the desire to represent a genre, the woman-doll, as a creature both real and unnatural.

First thoughts: that baby-doll dress, suggesting abject helplessness (no arms, no legs) is incongruous in the extreme paired with Callas’s intense gaze and strongly willed self-presentation (the kohl eyes and stylized brows; the Hepburn-esque hair evoking the dramatically slimmed body that is not seen but implied). That said, the portrait (a famous publicity still), is rendered in colors that suggest flesh, whereas we usually see that image in severe black and white. And from what I can see in the .jpg, Cinelli has in some respects toned down the contrasts and exaggerations in the “original” photo.

At the same time, those fleshy colors applied by an artist to a pre-existing artifact are supremely factitious, giving something fake, composed, reproduced and reproducible ad infinitum the illusion of human skin. The frame around the Callas portrait seems to float or have dimensionality; at the same time, it crushes and traps her.

And what to make of the blackness from which Callas emerges? In the publicity still, she is set against a white background. Is the blackness engulfing Callas? Or could her own blackness (the lined eyes, arched brows, artfully artless hair), bleeding into the background, suggest nothingness and insubstantiality?