Music: The Prima Donna

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Once upon a time a prima donna was opera’s indispensable lady, an unearthly creature who fed on acclaim, dressed in kudos and walked a path strewn with money, jewels and lovers. For her the real world was only an extension of the unlikely world of opera, a world of passionate hate, tempestuous love and outrageous gesture. The prima donna was larger than life, and a law only to her own towering talent. One composer did not dream of objecting when Maria Malibran (1808-36) regally replaced one whole act he had written with music by another composer. Adelina Patti (1843-1919) traveled in a deluxe private railway car of her own, flanked by husband, dogs, birds and servants. Her fees were stupendous, and one agent protested that she was asking more per month than the President of the U.S. got per year. “Well, then,” said Patti stonily, “let him sing.”

Today the title has almost lapsed. In the opera house teamwork is the cry. Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera even forbids solo curtain calls. At home the opera star is often no more glamorous than a suburban housewife. In an age of small-scale talent and matching egos, the one diva who truly deserves the proud title of prima donna, with all its overtones of good and evil, is Maria Meneghini Callas.

The Peak. Last week, like a stormy throwback to another century. Maria Callas swept into New York. She arrived, as is proper for prima donnas, in triumph. Raised in Manhattan’s upper west side, Maria Callas had left it as a fat, unhappy child of 14. She returned svelte, successful, the wife of an Italian millionaire, a diva more widely hated by her colleagues and more wildly acclaimed by her public than any other living singer. She returned to open the season next week in Bellini’s Norma at the Metropolitan-which only eleven years ago just could not seem to find a suitable role for her.

In those years, tawny, big-eyed Maria Callas established herself as undisputed queen of the world’s opera. From London to Naples her presence in even the tiredest old operas packed the house. At Milan’s La Scala she has, almost singlehanded, increased the season’s attendance half again over prewar records. In critical Vienna, 10,000 people clamored for the 2,000 tickets available when she sang Lucia de Lammermoor. In Chicago her presence successfully launched a new opera company in a city which has been death on opera companies for years. Hundreds of ear-hardened operagoers surge around stage doors just for a glimpse of her. Thousands of others have snapped up tens of thousands of the 13 full-length opera recordings that she has made for Italy’s Cetra. Britain’s E.M.I, (the Angel label in the U.S.).

A Sword & a Caress. Few rate the Callas voice as opera’s sweetest or most beautiful. It has its ravishing moments. In quiet passages, it warms and caresses the air. In ensembles, it cuts through the other voices like a Damascus blade, clean and strong. But after the first hour of a performance, it tends to become strident, and late in a hard evening, begins to take on a reverberating quality, as if her mouth were full of saliva. But the special quality of the Callas voice is not tone. It is the extraordinary ability to carry, as can no other, the inflections and nuances of emotion, from mordant intensity to hushed delicacy. Callas’ singing always seems to have a surprise in reserve. With the apparently infinite variety of her vocal inflections, she can keep the listener’s ear constantly on edge for a twist of an emotional phrase, constantly delighted by a new and unexpected flick of vocal excitement.

Quite apart from the quality of her voice, her technique is phenomenal. The product of the relentless discipline that characterizes everything she does, it enables her to ignore the conventional boundaries of soprano, mezzo-soprano and contralto as if they had never been created. She can negotiate the trills and arabesques of coloraturas as easily as she trumpets out a stinging dramatic climax. Like her operatic sisters of a century ago, La Callas can sing anything written for the female voice. Because of her, La Scala has revived some operas (Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, Verdi’s Sicilian Vespers, Cherubini’s Medea) that it had not staged for years because no modern diva could carry them off.

Blood & Tears. As actress. Callas is more exciting than any singer has a right to be. Her acting takes the form of a flashing eye that petrifies an emotion, a sudden rigidity that shouts of a breaking heart, a homicidal wish or a smoldering passion (“It takes nerve to stand still”). Callas’ style of movement on stage strangely resembles the striding and lurching of the hamhearted operatic actress, but she moves so gracefully, so alluringly, with such authority, that even opera’s baroque gestures take on breathtaking conviction.

In her first Aida at La Scala in 1950, she startled the crowd by stalking about like a hungry leopard instead of taking the usual stately stance for her Act III duet. In the death scene of Fedora, in which sopranos tend to expire stiffly on a divan, Callas staggers from it, sags to her knees, drags herself up, crawls towards her lover’s room, collapses again before she finally rolls down and dies. In Norma she has cried real tears. Operagoers. long reconciled to the classic, three-gesture range of other prima donnas, are astounded and delighted.

Hissing Snakes. Maria Callas clawed her way to her present eminence with a ruthless ferocity that awes her enemies and has left her few professional friends. Some have helped her on her way. But from the first the lonely, fat girl from Manhattan saw herself pitted single-handed against a world of enemies. In her triumph, she takes fierce pride in her defiant self-reliance. At La Scala supporters of a rival diva hiss her regularly. It only arouses Callas to cold fury.

Once, her enemies began to heckle as she got to the high notes of her second aria in Traviata. Callas tore off her shawl, stepped to the front of the stage, glared directly at her tormentors. With reckless ferocity, she lit into one of opera’s most perilous arias. If she had made a mistake, it would have been fatal. Instead, she sang with immaculate and unearthly beauty. Five times she was called back by the deliriously happy audience, five times she stood, stony and arrogant, before turning away. On the sixth call, she relented, bowed to everybody except the hecklers. Then she faced them, suddenly flung up her arms in a gesture of spitting contempt. Says she, with savage satisfaction: “As long as I hear them stirring and hissing like snakes out there, I know I’m on top. If I heard nothing from my enemies, I’d know I was slipping. I’d know they’re not afraid of me any more.”

La Callas asks nothing better. “I hate to be pitied, and I never pitied anyone,” she says.

Shrieking Leap. The woman Milan critics now call Goddess Callas was born Maria Anna Sofia Cecilia Kalogeropoulos at dawn on Dec. 3, 1923 in Manhattan’s Flower Hospital, four months after her parents arrived from Athens. In Greece her father had been a successful pharmacist. But in the U.S. he drifted from job to job. The family moved from one cheap apartment to another, the parents always squabbling, often on the verge of breaking up. Maria remembers her childhood with bitterness: “My sister was slim and beautiful and friendly, and my mother always preferred her. I was the ugly duckling, fat and clumsy and unpopular. It is a cruel thing to make a child feel ugly and unwanted.” Forced to wear heavy spectacles for her myopic eyes, little Maria avoided schoolmates, ate compulsively (sometimes a whole pound of cheese at breakfast). “I hated school, I hated everybody. I got fatter and fatter.” But when she was eight, she took up music. She saved money to buy opera librettos, and sang at school. Her mother drove her on, arranged for voice lessons. Maria began to win radio amateur contests. She made an important discovery: “When I sang, I was really loved.”

When she was 14, her mother took the girls for a visit to Athens. They were caught there by the beginning of World War II. But Maria was undeterred. She won a scholarship at the old National Conservatory, where for the next four years she arrived early, left late, learned a libretto in a week (usual time: two months). She sang for Italian and German soldiers, who gave her bags of sugar and macaroni to help feed her family. She weighed 200 Ibs. “She never flirted. Nobody courted her. She was awkward and ashamed,” says her teacher. “She had a real inferiority complex except about one thing: her voice.”

One day in 1942, a leading singer in Athens’ National Opera Company became ill. Maria was invited to take over the role of Tosca on 24 hours’ notice. Backstage before the show, she overheard a male voice saying: “That fat bitch will never carry it off.” With a shriek of rage, she leaped at the speaker, tore his shirt and bloodied his nose. Maria sang that night with a puffy eye. But she got raves from Athens critics.

Midnight Polish. The war over, Maria returned to New York. The Met offered her the role of Madame Butterfly, but she did not dare try it at her weight. A chance to sing in Chicago blew up when the company went broke. For two years she remained in New York, studying, practicing and eating, but never singing in public. Discouraged and despondent, she sailed for Italy, where she got a job in Verona (at $63 a performance), an audition but no job at La Scala (the director told her that she had lots of faults).

“I knew I had failed,” she says. “All that work and all those years were for nothing. I understood why people kill themselves. One thing I learned-don’t ask anybody for favors. You won’t get anything anyway.”

But she had met Giovanni Battista Meneghini, a millionaire building-materials tycoon and bon vivant more than twice her age. He wooed her in courtly fashion, and in the white-haired Meneghini, fat, unloved Maria found love for the first time. In 1949 they were married.

Meneghini sold out his business, invested the proceeds in real estate, and became Maria’s private impresario and only agent. “Why should I give those damned agencies 10% or 20% of what I make?” she asked. Meneghini coaxed old Conductor Tullio Serafin, now 77, to coach her, and the two went to work. In Turin, before she was to appear as Aida, a curious critic wandered into the theater at 9 a.m. to find her onstage, going over every passage again and again. while Serafin interrupted, corrected, polished tirelessly. They worked until midnight, were at it again early next day. Callas’ Aida became Turin’s biggest postwar success.

First-Night Vespers. For the next four years, Serafin whipped her through one role after another, and Maria Callas began to find her niche. She blanketed Italy with her performances, made two tours to Latin America, getting wilder receptions at every appearance. In Genoa cheering fans carried her on their shoulders through the streets. In Trieste she was hailed as the “greatest Norma in history.” But Maria decided that she was miserable. “I hated singing,” she says. “I was terribly in love. It took me away from my husband.” A shipboard companion remembers her on a trip to Latin America:

“All she did was eat, sleep, sprawl in her bunk, and talk about her husband: how tender he was, how he spread flowers around their bed.”

But when Meneghini suggested that she give up singing, her demon drove her on. Success was in sight. La Scala asked her to do a guest performance of Aida. She accepted, but professed to scoff at the honor: “Sure, it’s a magnificent theater. But me, I’m myopic. For me, theaters all look alike. La Scala is La Scala, but I’m Callas. and I’m myopic. Ecco!”

Her performance was a fair success, and La Scala offered her another guest appearance. But Callas had the scent of triumph in her nostrils. Haughtily, she refused. They would hire her as a full-fledged member of the company, or they would not get her at all. “They expected me to beg for a role. I would rather have died,” she told friends. In 1951 La Scala capitulated. At the age of 28, she opened the Scala season in Sicilian Vespers.

Someone Possessed. Maria Callas was still fat and half sick. She was inclined to break out in rashes and blotches; she was often feverish; her legs became painfully swollen. She took her resentments out on the people around her. Her first victim was another soprano, Renata Tebaldi, long-standing favorite of Scala audiences, possessor of a voice of creamy softness, musicianship of delicate sensibility, and a temperament to match. She was no match for Callas. From the beginning the two women glowered. Tebaldi stayed away from Callas’ performances; Callas, on the warpath, sat in a prominent box at Tebaldi’s, ostentatiously cheered, and watched her rival start to tremble. Callas sensibly -if a little too innocently-points out that there are plenty of operas for two top sopranos in La Scala’s big repertory. The fact is, Callas thrives on opposition. “When I’m angry, I carr do no wrong,” she says. “I sing and act like someone possessed.” But Tebaldi wilts. “She’s got no backbone. She’s not like Callas.” Year by year Tebaldi reduced her appearances, until last year she was absent entirely from La Scala, and Callas held the field with 37 performances.

Terrible Wrath. Callas had also turned bitterly against her mother. “I’ll never forgive her,” she says, “for taking my childhood away. During all the years I should have been playing and growing up, I was singing or making money. Everything I did for them was mostly good and everything they did to me was mostly bad.” Mrs. Callas had moved back to Athens, was living there with Jackie, and very little money. In 1951 she wrote Maria to ask for $100, “for my daily bread.” Answered Maria: “Don’t come to us with your troubles. I had to work for my money, and you are young enough to work, too. If you can’t make enough money to live on, you can jump out of the window or drown yourself.”

Maria justifies her behavior firmly. “They say my family is very short of money. Before God, I say why should they blame me? I feel no guilt and I feel no gratitude. I like to show kindness, but you mustn’t expect thanks, because you won’t get any. That’s the way life is. If some day I need help, I wouldn’t expect anything from anybody. When I’m old. nobody is going to worry about me.”

Professionally, Callas is just as ruthless. This year she broke with the maestro who helped her first and most, Conductor Serafin. Her complaint: he recorded Traviata with another soprano. Her decision automatically eliminates Serafin from his old job as conductor for her opera recordings and the old man is finding that other singers are now mysteriously unable to sing under him. Says he: “She is like a devil with evil instincts.” Says La Callas: “I understand hate; I respect revenge. You have to defend yourself. You have to be strong, very, very strong. That’s what makes you have fights.”

Onstage, Callas’ thirst for personal acclaim is insatiable. She grabs solo curtain calls whenever she can, even after another singer’s big scene. Backstage in Rome. Basso Boris Christoff once seized her with one big paw, forced her to stand still. “Now. Maria,” he decreed, “either we all go out there together, or nobody goes out.” Tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano says: “I’m never going to sing opera with her again, and that’s final.” Said a close acquaintance: “The day will come when Maria will have to sing by herself.”

Absolutely Luscious. Between rehearsals and curtain calls. Callas is one of the least troublesome of stars. Impresarios who have broken their hearts and their pocketbooks getting her signature do not have to worry about further dickering, and rarely about temperamental outbursts. Callas arrives on time at rehearsals ; at recording sessions she doggedly repeats passages until they are as perfect as possible, gives freely of her full voice and never seems to require any warmup time.

After her success at La Scala, Callas began to lose weight. In three years she dropped from 202 Ibs. to a sleek 135 Ibs. “She got what she wanted, so she stopped overeating,” explained an interested doctor. In Milan she began to live the life of the prima donna and to look the part. Milan fondly encouraged her, wined and dined her whenever possible. Her life took on a sybaritic pattern. In the morning she usually sang at the piano on a glassed-in terrace outside her bedroom, polishing current roles. Afternoons, she visited her dressmaker or her beautician, taking treatments worthy of a courtesan: cream, oil and electric massages and rubdowns, face packs and facials of every kind. When shopping, she added to a wardrobe that already included 25 fur coats, 40 suits, 150 pairs of shoes, 200 dresses, at least 300 hats. She never has gloves washed, just tosses them away after a few wearings. For her New York trip, she ordered more than 30 new major items, including five new furs, hired a model to save her the nuisance of fittings. Also on order is a new diamond necklace to add to a collection that includes a magnificent, 150-year-old Venetian collar of diamonds and emeralds, besides more ordinary pieces. At night Callas’ favorite rite is to soak leisurely in the bath, steep herself in buckets of cologne, and then (after a careful weigh-in on the bathroom scale) to go to bed “feeling absolutely luscious.” Perfumed, glowing and gowned in slinky silk, she lies awake late into the night-studying scores while husband

Meneghini sleeps. Says Callas: “My best hours are in bed, and my best work too, with my dog cuddling beside me and my husband asleep.”

Bitter Experience. Meneghini has spent a fortune on her career, but without regrets (“After all, my wife is the greatest singer in the world”). Whenever she goes onstage, he kisses her, utters the customary European good-luck wish, “Merde.” He presents her with a bright cluster of expensive jewelry every time she sings a new role, gave her an Alfa Romeo (“If an ordinary artist has a Cadillac, how can I own a Cadillac?”), and a four-storied, $100,000 town house in Milan.

In return, she coats him with 24-carat affection, holds hands with him on the street. “I know what people say,” she says. “I don’t care. I’ve been a good wife, and he’s made me very happy. Even women with young husbands are less happy than I am.”

To a world laboring under the impression that a prima donna must be corpulent to be operatic, Callas’ sensational slimming has caused much shaking of heads and predictions of vocal perdition. But the newly glamorous Maria, thin, relaxed and even daring to taste the pleasures of the idle rich (she sang all night in a Vienna cafe last summer, for sheer pleasure), has lost not a decibel of power, a note of range, a mote of sweetness.

Soprano Callas has yet to face the ordeal of her Metropolitan debut next week. It is an ordeal that has yielded severe criticisms for such famed prima donnas as Melba. Sembrich, Nordica and Farrar, and conceivably could be a bitter experience for her as well. But Callas has faced bitter experiences before and triumphantly survived them. “People would like to see me flop, just once,” she admits. “Well, I can’t and I won’t. I will never give any satisfaction to my enemies.”