Music: Soprano Triumphant

One of the world’s great sopranos, La Scala’s U.S.-born Maria Meneghini Callas, made her U.S. debut in Chicago last week. It was a rouser. recalling Chicago’s greatest operatic days with Mary Garden and Galli-Curci.

Opening in Norma, Bellini’s old and faded drama of the Druids. 30-year-old Soprano Callas lived up to her reputation. With her lissome figure handsomely clad in white and crimson, she looked almost too young and beautiful to be a pagan high priestess. She made a minimum of movement onstage, achieved precise dramatic effects by the tilt of her head or the angle of her body, but also electrified the crowd with slashing moments of violence, as when she confronted her faithless lover in Act II. Her voice ranged from flutely pianissimos that penetrated to the last row of the distant balcony to mezzo-fortes of melting sweetness to fortes of trumpeting and often edgy fierceness. She may not have the most beautiful voice in the world (a credit often reserved for Italy’s Renata Tebaldi or the Metropolitan Opera’s Zinka Milanov), but she is certainly the most exciting singer.

The other performers, notably Mezzo-Soprano Giulietta Simionato, backed her superbly, gave old Norma the kind of urgency it has not known in decades. The orchestra, trained and brilliantly conducted by New York’s young (37) Nicola Rescigno, gave every note the vividness of Technicolor. Chicago’s top-hatted, diamond-sprinkled audience enveloped Soprano Callas in a hailstorm of applause. To land such a diva was a major operatic coup for Chicago. Maria had left her native Manhattan to live in Greece when she was 13, by 1948 was engaged by La Scala. Married to an Italian millionaire (building materials), she has unabashedly let it be known that she would not sing in a company where another artist was higher paid. The Metropolitan Opera, with its $1,000-a-performance limit, cannot afford her. But two young Chicago music lovers decided that Chicago had to have her.

Carol Fox and Lawrence V. Kelly, both in their 20s, were determined to break the jinx which has blighted Chicago opera ever since Sam Insull’s gilt-edged company folded in 1932. They formed a new company called the Lyric Theater, got free use of the old costumes and scenery, scrounged funds. Says Soprano Callas, whose fee is a strictly guarded secret: “I liked the way they did things. Helping to do opera in Chicago gives me so much more pleasure than singing in the old. stuffy opera houses. Of course I am well paid. Why shouldn’t I while I can? We ask our fee, and whoever is crazy enough to give it to us will give it to us.”

After hearing Norma, Chicagoans were all set to go on being crazy.