Music: Callas at Covent Garden

Early one Saturday last May, a thin, grim line started forming outside the Royal Opera House at London’s Covent Garden. All through the long Whitsun weekend it sweltered and swelled, until, the following Tuesday, tickets went on sale for the first London performance of Cherubini’s Medea in 89 years. Within three hours every seat in the house was sold out. Last week the lucky ticket holders finally got a look at what they had battled so tenaciously to see: Maria Meneghini Callas in the role of Euripides’ savagely tormented heroine.

The Covent Garden production of Medea was the same one in which Callas triumphed in Dallas last year (TIME, Nov. 17); in an exchange agreement, Dallas will see the Royal Opera Company’s production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor next year. As curtain time approached in London, $5.60 seats were fetching $98 on the black market, and $30 boxes were going for $280. Shipping Magnate Aristotle Onassis, realizing that the occasion was a great night for the Greeks (Callas, Designer John Tsarouchis, Stage Director Alexis Minotis, not to mention Euripides), desperately placed ads in the London Times agony column in an attempt to get 33 seats for himself and guests. When a purposeful posse from Dallas came yipping into town but found itself seatless, Ambassador John Hay Whitney patriotically handed over his own four seats, and black marketeers supplied the rest at oil-well prices.

With the eyes of Texas upon her, Callas suffered spasms of precurtain nerves. “If you cut me with a knife,” said she, “no blood would run out.” But she turned up onstage convincingly gaunt, wild-eyed, almost green with malevolence and makeup. She paced the stage and clawed the air like a caged lioness. Callas took twelve curtain calls, earned, mighty critical bravos (“terrifying,” “elemental,” “chilling”) for a superb dramatic display. As for her voice, critics as usual found it uneven; the Daily Telegraph judged it “disappointingly small and lacking in resonance.” But without the Callas dramatic presence, critics agreed, Medea would have been what Cherubini predicted in 1815: “Too severe for English tastes.”

Smiling as sweetly as a high school valedictorian, Callas graciously received photographers in her dressing room, heaped verbal bouquets on her English hosts: “They behave like gentlemen to me.” Even more gentlemanly were the visiting Texans; they were savoring the announcement that Callas had agreed to help out next season in the Dallas Civic Opera’s Barber of Seville by taking the place of Mezzo-Soprano Teresa Berganza, who is pregnant. It was suggested to one

Texas fan that Callas’ tractability might have something to do with the fact that she has about run out of major operatic stages on which to sing. Said he, in an answer worthy of La Divina herself: “We can build ’em faster.”