Music: A Smoky Voice, A Fiery Lady

Maria Callas: 1923-1977

“Have no doubt about who you are,” Maria Callas once counseled a student soprano. La Divina, as she was called, was talking about the art of portraying an operatic heroine onstage. But she might have been offering her philosophy of life. She came out of an unhappy childhood—appallingly fat and resentful and lonely—and clawed her way to success and greatness with a singlehearted ferocity that awed even her enemies. Conductor Tullio Serafin, her indispensable mentor in the crucial early days, was tossed aside temporarily—for daring to record La Traviata with another soprano. Enraged at the Callas ego, La Scala Tenor Giuseppe di Stefano declared, “I’m never going to sing opera with her again.” Later he changed his mind about Callas, but then so did a lot of people.

Who was Callas, the subject of such ire and much admiration? She was a woman for whom the term prima donna could have been invented. Tempestuous, unpredictable, charming, ruthless, overwhelmingly talented, capable of canceling a performance halfway through (as she did once in Rome) even with a King in the audience. In her long face a kind of gypsy coarseness struggled with and failed to dominate a classic beauty. She could act with her voice and sing with her body, like a great tragedienne. Especially in her later years, that voice could be edgy and even ugly. But that did not matter.

The smoky, hooded voice seemed to come from some atomic source within her. It floated dramatic feeling to the audience in ways that sometimes seemed inappropriate to the part but were compelling beyond measure. In Callas’ lifetime, only Beverly Sills came close to matching her ability to command and convey emotion, from sizzling rage to intimate tenderness.

In her prime, Callas sang dramatic, lyric and coloratura roles with equal ease. Almost singlehanded she created the revival of bel canto. It was because of her voice and presence that Norma and I Puritani are now popular after decades of neglect. For this one accomplishment, hordes of opera lovers, as well as Sopranos Joan Sutherland, Montserrat Caballe and Sills herself, owe Callas a lasting debt. And she acted these roles with a devouring intensity that might do justice to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Her greatest practical contribution to opera, though, as Sills noted when she heard of Callas’ death, lay in “erasing the image that all opera singers are fat with horns growing out of their heads.” Callas had no horns—except in the eyes of rival singers and every impresario who happened to cross her. But if the world remembers her as tigerish and svelte, it was only because she dieted away 70 Ibs. fairly early in her career—losing with them, perhaps, some of the richness of her voice. Shortly after World War II, when she was on the verge of fame as a singer in Verona and Venice and finally Milan, she weighed so much (more than 200 Ibs. at one point) that she refused to sing Madama Butterfly simply because she felt she looked ridiculous for the part.

Her real name was Maria Kalogeropoulos. Born in Manhattan in 1923 of Greek parents, she studied music in Greece—she and her mother were trapped there by the outbreak of World War II. In 1949 she married Giovanni Battista Meneghini, an Italian construction tycoon twice her age. Meneghini sold his business, put Maria on her famous diet and became her manager. He showered her with clusters of jewelry for each new role she sang. But at the Metropolitan Opera, he insisted on receiving her salary in cash before each night’s performance. This so enraged Met General Manager Rudolf Bing that he paid in five-dollar bills, “to make a wad uncomfortably large for him to carry.”

Bing and Callas sparred continually over her roles and her schedules. In 1959, after she refused to sing Traviata and Macbeth in the same week, Bing fired her. Callas snarled publicly about “those lousy Traviatas that he wanted me to do.” Bing riposted: “Mme. Callas is constitutionally unable to fit into any organization not tailored to her own personality.” By 1965 almost all was forgiven. Bing brought her back for two Toscas. Justly they became the hottest tickets of the season, for Callas’ Tosca was revelatory, not so much a posturing, jealous bitch, as a woman unsettled by fear and made crafty by the desire to save her lover.

She had divorced Meneghini in 1959 to live with Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate. The society columns buzzed regularly for years with accounts of their parties and travels aboard an assortment of yachts. If she was hurt when he abandoned her to marry Jacqueline Kennedy in 1968, she never showed it. As Callas liked to say, “I hate to be pitied, and I never pitied anyone.”

Maria Callas died last week at 53 of a heart attack in Paris. She had been living privately and comfortably in retirement. Not since 1965 had she appeared on an opera stage, nor had she given a recital since 1974. But 16th arrondissement neighbors often heard her in her apartment, singing arias to herself.