When Maria Callas died prematurely, 30 years ago this week, she was seen as a forlorn figure whose voice had gone. But her myth has continued to grow ever since, writes Michael Dervan
It's interesting to think about what the world would never have known had the great tenor, Luciano Pavarotti, died as young as the great soprano, Maria Callas. Pavarotti was 71 when he died earlier this month; Callas was 53 when she passed away in Paris on September 16th, 1977. A 53-year-old Pavarotti wouldn't have lived to see, and sing at, the 1990 World Cup, and would have missed out on the extraordinary fame and financial rewards that were to follow from the famous Three Tenors concert in the same year. In fact, his international career would have wound down in the late 1970s.
Callas, known to her fans as "La Divina", died a virtual recluse at a time when she could have been expected to be still dominating the opera stages of the world. But her career took second place when she found herself drawn into the world of the Greek shipping magnate, Aristotle Onassis. Their affair was front-page news and their break-up even more newsworthy, as Onassis abandoned her to take up with Jackie Kennedy, widow of assassinated US president John F Kennedy.
The public's fascination with prima donnas has rarely been so well rewarded. Callas was an ugly duckling who metamorphosed into a beautiful princess, a fat girl born of Greek parents in New York who transformed herself into the most discussed singer of the post-war era, a woman who could hit the headlines as easily for cancelling a performance, creating stormy scenes with opera managements or complaining about other singers, as for her love life.
Her story reads rather like a fairytale. Her childhood was unhappy, and she was taken back from the US to Greece at the age of 14. The images of her youth are hard to reconcile with the slim features of the star she became. Early photographs show a gauche-looking, stocky, heavy-busted figure, and a picture taken at the age of 25 with her husband-to-be, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, even reveals folds of flesh at her ankles. Her fate in the late 1940s has been acidly summarised as having a body nobody would want harbouring a voice nobody yet understood.
Meneghini, an industrialist nearly 30 years her elder, who abandoned business interests to put his time and resources at her disposal, might be regarded as a sort of Svengali to her Trilby. Their relationship lasted for 12 years, from 1947 to 1959, years which cover the period of her greatest triumphs.
Her involvement with Onassis, interpreted by some as the first (and perhaps the only) truly sexual passion she experienced, interfered with her work. The interests of Callas the woman and Callas the artist were not compatible, and while she engaged on what film director Franco Zeffirelli has called her "stupid ambition of becoming a great lady of cafe society", her singing suffered.
Onassis's marriage to Jackie Kennedy was a development she comprehended as little as had Meneghini his loss of Callas.
Her subsequent non-singing activities - she tried being an opera director, she undertook a straight acting part in Pasolini's film Medea, she gave masterclasses in New York - were all seen as failures in one way or another.
She made a brief and fairly successful return to the recording studio in the mid-1960s, but her comeback tour in the 1970s with tenor Giuseppe di Stefano provoked devastating reviews ("It would be silly to pretend that Miss Callas has much voice left"; "If they had not been Callas and di Stefano, the evening would have been truly painful"). Her filmed interviews at this time show a disarming frankness in discussing "the voice", now containing but a pale suggestion of what it once had been.
Thereafter followed hermit-like seclusion in Paris and the unexpected death in 1977 at the age of 53.
ONE OF THE greatest paradoxes of the Callas phenomenon is the fact that on no account had the singer a voice that could be straightforwardly described as beautiful. Its individual, smoky timbre and powerful overtones of dark emotion would not have amounted to much without the guiding dramatic and musical intelligence which made it the voice of "La Callas". And the singer's vocal deficiencies were avidly noted by unsympathetic listeners.
"Her voice is quite imperfect, even dull," suggested Mary Kenny in The Irish Times in 1964. "Sometimes thin, always unsweet, unfragrant, wrongly developed and just insufficient. Everyone knows about her upper register; for me, it can be gruelling, and I happen to be tone deaf."
But even the redoubtable Kenny, hearing Callas the singer past her peak, was impressed with Callas the performer: "There is not an actress in the contemporary theatre, nor an actor that I know of, that can hold the stage as she does, nor wear costume as she does, nor fill the whole gaping world with the power of her person and her passion."
Kenny rationalised the phenomenon. "Callas brings the public something extraordinary, emotional, communicative. What Callas does is felt. Everything she does, she does with magnificence."
More remarkable than Callas's success with listeners unattracted by her voice has been the fact that her peculiar emotional world (so all of a piece, involving movement, gesture and facial expression as well as the gamut of vocal resources) communicates vividly on record. In the recording studio she was fortunate to work often with a man who was her match as a perfectionist, the EMI producer, Walter Legge.
TO MARK THE 30th anniversary of her death, EMI has collected together all of her studio recordings: complete operas (including ones originally issued on other labels), compilations, and the various bits and pieces that fell through the net during her lifetime and remained unissued until after her death. This comes to 69 CDs, with an extra disc holding the librettos and some photographs.
Callas the penetrating musical actor is there, with Callas the touchingly fragile vocal acrobat and Callas the ravaged singer, markedly so in some of the later recordings. But Callas the supreme musician and Callas the sublime interpreter are almost invariably to be met somewhere along the line, no matter what she sings.
The set is organised chronologically, from the first recital (including a rare venture into Wagner) through the great operatic performances of the early 1950s, then the stereo remakes, and on to the sometimes flaky undertakings of the later 1960s. The workrate is sometimes astonishing.
She recorded five full operas in 1953 (Lucia di Lammermoor, I Puritani, Cavalleria rusticana, Tosca, La traviata) and four in 1954 (Norma, Pagliacci, La forza del destino, Il turco in Italia), plus two discs of arias. The world has long been awash with live Callas recordings, but this set concentrates on what she herself approved for release. EMI offers the lot at a price that will allow you to throw in a couple of copies for your friends for less than the cost of a top-price ticket to last summer's ill-fated Barbra Streisand concert.
Tony Palmer's 1987 documentary biography has also reappeared on DVD, in a 30th anniversary edition. It includes clips from act two of Tosca, taped at Covent Garden in the 1960s, which vividly illustrate the detailed observation that went into her acting and made it unique among opera singers. So direct is her communication that to call her a singing actress, as the phrase is normally used, seems an understatement. Palmer dwelt briefly but tactfully on the pathos of the final years of isolation. Though in general she avoided visitors, in 1976 the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, sent her, at her own request, a repetiteur (Jeffrey Tate, now better known as a conductor) with a view to preparing a concert for London. His assessment of what he encountered was blunt: "I think eventually she died of neglect. She just neglected herself as a person. She abandoned her life."
Controversy pursued her, even after her death. She was cremated, but her ashes were later stolen. After recovery, they were scattered over the Aegean Sea. In 2002 a doctor came forward to challenge the accepted view of her last years. Mario Giacovazzo said he had examined Callas in 1975, and diagnosed dermatomyositis, an incurable muscular disease. He believed it affected her voice, and said her symptoms had been alleviated by his treatment. He also believed that the heart attack which killed her might have been linked to the disease.
Callas the legend, and her legendary recordings, seem set to live on and on.
Off the scale: the Callas legend:
The years since the great singer's death have done nothing to abate the Callas legend.
Book after book has appeared in attempts to add new insights and interpretations.
The range of the titles tells you almost all you need to know - Greek Fire: The Story of Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis; Callas: Her Life, Her Loves, Her Music; Maria Callas: Sacred Monster; Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend; Maria Callas: The Tigress and the Lamb. There's even been Maria Callas and I, Sound Healing, Living A Duet For Mankind (yes, that's just one book), Three Female Myths of the 20th Century: Garbo, Callas, Navratilova, and, I kid you not, The Autobiography of Maria Callas: A Novel.
The engagement between the various authors has sometimes provided a sideshow of its own. "Stassinopoulos," wrote David A Lowe (author of Callas: As They Saw Her) about Arianna Stassinopoulos (author of Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend) "apparently has no genuine interest in Callas's artistry. The result is a popular biography that is somehow obscene in its very conception. One reads the book with fascination and then rushes to the shower afterward."
Callas's effects were distributed between her family and her husband after her death, after which they became dispersed. But they made the headlines when they came up for auction in 2000.
Lot 415, explained Associated Press in advance, included "a pair of seamless black stockings, a pale pink satin slip, a purple and black silk corset, and the much-photographed white mink stole that Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis gave her before he abandoned her for Jacqueline Kennedy.
The corset, trimmed with the most delicate black lace, is expected to fetch between $30,000 and $40,000."
Also on offer were letters addressed simply to "La Divina" (Italian postal workers, apparently, would fill in the right address), the red velvet living-room curtains from her Paris apartment, wigs, gloves, photos, and a small painting, Cignaroli's Holy Family, which travelled with her everywhere and without which she would not perform.
No novelist, surely, could have imagined a more perfect embodiment of a prima donna.
The 70-CD box set, Maria Callas: The Complete Studio Recordings (1949- 1969), is on EMI