20 August 2024
If one sets aside the tragic life that Maria Callas lived, then the majesty of her artistry can be appreciated. If one considers the tragic life over which she prevailed through her instrument, The Voice, then that majesty of her artistry can only be approximated, in the hope of fully appreciating it.
Callas was basically an actress who sang, or, to put it more elegantly, she was a dramatist in the expression of her music. She was also a musician who used her instrument as the primary means by which to translate the pain-filled particulars of her life into a glorious tone of voice. Her genius was innate, her grandeur acquired. Her power came from within, but also from without. She was classical and precise in style, in movement, in image, in utterance. Her face was made for the 19th century, yet she revolutionized operatic performance in the 20th century.
She was supremely stylized through an unrealistic persona that clashed with any verismo, or realistic, role. She was thus destined to carve her own niche in the rarified and cruel world of opera. Her carving of that niche harmonized with the making of myth: musical myths, private myths, publicized myths, heartfelt myths, heartless myths.
Whether she chose to emphasize the myth-making of her life, and of her work, is a matter only she knew. And the single-minded possession of that intimate knowledge was, at the very least, her due, in exchange for the noble mission that she undertook to revive the dying art form known as Opera.
The world of post-World War II Europe offered the final, flickering embers in that cauldron of overwrought melodic tragedy on-stage. Really, when one thinks about it, after the horrors, the Holocaust, and the inhuman savagery of that world war (the follow-up to the Great War), catharsis and expiation were much-needed on a global scale — for a finite time.
Opera, as a true art form, is now dead. It needs a proper burial, in much the same way that journalism needs a formal interment. The stench of the fraudulence is getting to me!
Any old, traditional form that fails to perform its function, its duty, its raison d’être — dies. The parasites move in on it, and it soon becomes a dried-out husk of its former self.
The opera performances of today are almost tragic, were it not for the comedic crassness masquerading as Art. Costumes and stage sets, those money-sucking elements formerly crafted by artisans, seamstresses, and builders — they’ve been deemed non-essential in a theatre world from which investors have fled.
The current crop of vocalizers massacres the music, heaving sighs between syllables of lyrics, creating cleavages (of body and of melodic lines) that are ghastly spectacles of narcissism where, once upon a time, passionate but talented egotism revealed magnificent exaltation through voice. The modern-day attention-whores, caught up in their own throes of self-passion, growl, snarl, whine, shriek, and emote, all to say: LOOK AT ME!!
Casta diva means “chaste goddess”. I’m wondering where in the world we find one of those today on the boards?
The composer’s all but forgotten!
Callas discovered all that she needed to express her art in the notes of the composer. Her respect for, and devotion to, the creator of this transcendent music were sublime. She thereby allowed to come forth, from her battered heart and soul, the aura of a higher plane of existence, a regal, yet humble, realm that she inhabited, on the stage. Opera is the least realistic of theatre forms, but Callas triumphed in creating a most believable reality among the most other-worldly of characters, such as Medea!
I’m thankful to have witnessed and experienced, albeit as a child, the last, final and furious years of The Opera, in America — because the crazy métier of operatic music in the United States had its hey-day in the 1950s and the 1960s. By the late 1970s, the concert halls and music halls in the recession-ridden States were going down, down, down. Ergo, the nasty big secrets of the “sexual harassment” by famous tenors have come to light, decades after those repulsive power-plays took place behind the curtain that dimmed the lights of many a would-be soprano, mezzo, alto, even other tenors.
In the long ago, the composer created the best arias for his lady love-of-late. Infidelity was the rule, not an exception, for composers, impresarios, musicians, hot-shot singers. The lingo itself — the Italian lingua franca — expressed the tempestuous, if not incestuous, strains and straining for supremacy among sopranos aiming for the role of Diva, which means “goddess” in Italian; and Prima Donna, which means “First Woman of the Orchestra.”
The aria, Vissi d’arte, was dashed off by Puccini at the last minute for his lead soprano in Tosca. It remains, for me, the only worthwhile melody from that highly problematic play.
Last week, I listened to, and watched, a lengthy interview of Maria Callas, conducted in 1968, by George Henry Hubert Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harwood. This cousin of Queen Elizabeth II was a devoted opera scholar and impresario, as well as a highly specialized journalist. The late Lord Harwood was the type of interviewer that has become almost non-existent: he permitted his subject to speak, uninterrupted, for lengthy periods of time. He did not interject, opine, pontificate or otherwise attempt to show the wealth of his knowledge of the opera, which was vast.
Maria Callas was thus given free rein to reign supreme about the love of her life: opera.
I transcribed major portions of this interview onto digital pages. That task brought back memories of my work as a transcriber of The Dictaphone, in the early 1980s, in the Word Processing Center of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Sacramento District. I was chosen by the Chief Transcriber, a lovely gal named Marjorie, to fill in for her during vacation and sick time.
I was a natural at it, with my keen ear, that only became more trained as I sat at the typewriter, listening through earphones to the spoken words of the engineers. I feverishly typed the verbalisms into digital text. It was a lot of work, and a lot of fun. Marge was very quick on the finger-draw, but she didn’t always have the technical knowledge needed to automatically “hear” the correct word. She once typed “Cadillac convertible” instead of “catalytic converter” !!
On my laptop, the cursor kept going AWOL-wonky on my screen, so the process took twice as long. It was worth it, though. I decided to present a book-report-of-sorts, based upon the wealth of knowledge of The Opera that Callas possessed — and expressed in that interview. This treasure trove of professional material proved to outweigh that of Lord Harwood. Never let it be said that Callas was not a competitor of the first order!
Some visual aids come courtesy of my book, The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera, by Robert Parker. It was published in 1994, with a foreword by Mr. Parker. I typically move very fast past The Foreword of any book, in a somewhat vain attempt to ignore this post-it-note mode of literary and historical revisionism. Usually, The Foreword consists of taking a stab, and a blatantly gauche one at that, to cash in on the success of The Book, years after the fact, with sycophantic shlock that, at times, re-writes the original intent of The Book.
In this instance, the foreword conveys the impetus of the author’s intent: Opera as Social Event, intermixed with Historical Fact. It’s a dubious duo to underscore any history book, but 1994 was a dubious year, in a dubious era, wherein cashing-in on the Classics became one big, bloated cash-cow.
The picture of those Three Tenors says it all. I therefore acknowledge those three tenors who oppressively succeeded where Maria Callas did not deign to go: Opera for the Masses.
Yes, I am a purist, especially where highfalutin anything is concerned. The motive for those maestros of music wasn’t to spread the histrionic singing among the masses: it was to grab as much cash as possible from the rabble.
Maria Callas knew all too well that she’d come from the rabble, and had reached for the most celestial of stars to escape a childhood that was a Greek tragedy. Operatic Music, and a voice that surrendered itself to that music, were her lifelines. Along the way to her death in 1977, at the age of 53, she held onto those lifelines, not for dear life, but for dear art. She is quoted as having said to one man who sought, in every way, to control her: “You may kill me, but you’ll never break me.”
Brava!
Here then are selected portions of the interview of this Prima Donna, with whom I concur on the level of a High-C fortissimo!
You must put your feet on the ground and be very matter-of-fact in the beginning. You read a role from start to finish. The last act is the most important. No matter how much and how well you’ve sung in the first, second, third, and fourth acts, if the last act is not superior to all the rest, you might as well not at all sing it.
I essentially choose an opera where at the end, the last impression is the best.
You go through the score. Once you say, yes, [to accept the role] then you take it act by act. You first of all say, What is she? Does the person agree with the music? You put the music with the personage, and you try to make them agree. And frequently they do agree.
Then you take the music and you learn it, as you were, in the Conservatoire. In other words, exactly as it is written, nothing more and nothing less. Which is the phrase that I call “strait-jacketing”. You sing the role strictly as the composer wrote it.
The conductor gives you his cuts, gives you his possibilities; if you have cadenzas, he gives you ideas about what his cadenzas would be. And his cadenzas are never his, if he’s a conscientious conductor. He always builds his cadenzas according to the taste and the liking and the particular makings of the composer. Because Bellini is quite different from Donizetti; Donizetti is quite different from Rossini, and so forth and so on.
The composers felt that if you are dealing with sentiments, with characters, with music, let us deal with less florid things, or rather let us use embellishments to the service of expressions. In fact, in the later years of Verdi, even Bellini, shall we even say Donizetti, if you care that much for the composers, and not for your own private success, if you really care to look into the music, you will always find a trill, or an embellishment, or a scale, that justifies an expression of feeling, of happiness, or of unhappiness, of unease and anxiety— there is always a reason for such things.
Then you learn the role exactly as A, B, C, D. When you’ve learned that, then you try to speak it to yourself, as you have the recitative (speaking the introductions to the arias).
Once upon a time, 150 years ago, the public just used to walk out, eat, laugh, they did not stay eternally in the theatre. They would come in for the Big Pieces. Nowadays, thank heavens, they don’t. The composers are much more respected now, than once upon a time.
The recitatives are frequently very attractive, and very difficult to give a, shall we say, a rhythm, cause all music has a certain rhythm. By rhythm, I don’t mean the way it is written exactly; because once you learn how it is written, and the exact value of each note and each phrase —
then, and this I have learned from Serafin, in occasion of my Norma, when I auditioned, so he said, very well, you know the music perfectly well. Now you go home, my dear Miss Callas, and you speak it to yourself. Keep on speaking, and let’s see if with what proportions, with what rhythm you come back to me tomorrow.
Because if you speak it to yourself, how would you do it in music?
Forget that you’re singing, and these are the values. Respect the values, but try to be free for a minute. If you spoke these phrases, how would you speak them, according to Bellini’s style, and this and that. And on that, you cultivated yourself, which is so true — because the recitative must have a flowing rhythm. What you give at a certain point, you give back, you take here, you give back there. And the characterization of Italian music is always a flowing movement. No matter how slow things go, no matter how slow a rhythm.
So once you get that done, in your mind, and it’s not done in one day; it’s not done in one week, and, in fact, I don’t think it’s ever finished. Because an interpreter grows, each year. Your subconscious has matured it. And has made it its own, so it helps you out, and has managed to mature the role.
Having broken this down completely, then you can take wings. And by take wings, I mean, from down-to-earth, 2 and 2 makes 4, everything must be logical in opera. Cause you can’t persuade the public of a preposterous thing.
Of course, what is the main thing that a musician should do, is give it the most credibility possible. And to persuade the public of its reality, and to take then over. As I say, opera is something that has been dead, quite a while ago. So if we really don’t try our very best, to give it much seriousness and much persuasiveness, and dignity, it’s not taken in with pleasure.
When music fails to agree to the ear, to soothe the ear, and the heart, and the senses, then it has missed its point. That is why I don’t agree with modern music; because whatever bothers the nervous system, especially music that was, and is, I’m sure, created for soothing purposes, you’ve missed your point.
Music should be essentially simple; and upon simplicity, and beauty of line, it can become great. I think that it’s very difficult to top a Verdi, a Bellini, a Rossini, a Donizetti, though intellectuals can say, Oh, but they’re so old-fashioned. There is nothing old-fashioned, other than performers.
The first duty of a singer, of a musician, is to create, or to try to feel what the composer wanted. I have two minds; one, the mind that creates, or has to do what she/it’s supposed to; and then I try to detach myself, to become the audience, or somebody that looks upon this other person, creating.
It goes along, hand-in-hand, the person, the creator, shall we say, or rather the performer, because we are not creators, we are performers. We try to be faithful, and where we think that the composer may have failed, we can then give it a bit of fresh air, a bit of life, which is what I mean by opera being dead. So we give it a breath of life, even if the composer maybe didn’t feel it then, because as life goes on, time has changed; life has become more modern.
Cutting out long stretches, the boring portions of opera: I believe that repetition of a melody is usually never good. The sooner you come to the point, the better it is, if you have any point to come to, and you must always [have a point to come to].
You begin, even a phrase, when you speak, once you start, there will be, of course, a legato, even in speaking, then the phrase will end; you will breathe. This is continuous movement of breathing also, and of singing. What do we do, when we sing, we speak in a music form: this is opera.
The first time is the only time. Never risk a second time. So mainly music also must be an instrument of theatre.