Maria Callas was born in New York on 2 December 1923. She went to rest in the bosom of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob on 16 September 1977.
The Italian Cultural Institute in New York has announced a Maria Callas exhibit, “A Woman, A Voice, A Myth.” The exhibit is scheduled to open on 2 December, Maria Callas’s birthday. Right now, eight days before 2 December, the ICI offers no information on the time or venue.
Quoting from the ICI’s website:
On exhibit shall be the original stage costumes, outfits, jewelry, photographs, and unpublished documents belonging to the unforgettable soprano Maria Callas. The exhibit will be accompanied by archival footage and music.
I will keep you posted as I learn more. I imagine that this is an iteration of one of the travelling exhibits that have been making the rounds in recent years. In some cases, as Nina Foresti has observed, costumes that seem to have little or nothing to do with ones that Callas actually wore have been exhibited as “Callas costumes” (select the link and keep scrolling down). I don’t know whether they will be part of this exhibit.
Today, 22 November, is the feast of Saint Cecilia, the patroness of music in several Christian churches. “Cecilia” was one of Maria Callas’s names. By one account, “Sophia Cecilia” were the names on her birth certificate, and “Maria Anna” or “Anna Maria” were added when she was baptized. In her childhood in New York, Callas was known mostly as “Mary.”
“Ombre légère” from Meyerbeer’s Dinorah, which Callas always sung in Italian, was part of her concert repertoire from 1949 to 1957. She often programmed it in conjunction with dramatic arias, to showcase her versatility. It’s silly music, but Callas sings it with her customary fierce exactitude, and its intricacy and sparkle somehow seem appropriate for a feast day. This version is from Callas’s 1954 Lyric and Coloratura Arias recital for EMI. Tullio Serafin leads the Philharmonia Orchestra.
I shall die, but first grant me the grace of pressing my only son to my breast. And if you deny this last favor to your wife, do not deny it to the pleas of my maternal heart. I shall die, but let his kisses console (the torment) inside me, now that the last of my fleeting hours has come. His hand will reach out over the eyes of his mother, killed by his father, whom he shall never see again!Second, Callas is in splendid voice. Her tone is drenched in sadness, and her phrasing, while eloquent, seems so natural and inevitable.
We learn that she has been damned ever since, in a mythical time, she laughed at Christ’s passage—accursed laughter that she will carry within her until the end of time. She is the feminine counterpart of the Wandering Jew, assigned by Klingsor to the young Parsifal in order to seduce him. She thinks she will succeed in this by speaking the name of his mother, but the other’s chastity prevents their coming together and permits him to “save” Kundry at the moment of the spell of Good Friday… She is the madwoman who names, who names the mother; she is also the laugh that disperses, that is the symbol of sexuality whose act is what is forbidden in this opera. It is also she who wounded Amfortas; her laugh keeps a wide gash bleeding…Have you ever heard a sexier-sounding Kundry?
[S]he flew into London for the dress rehearsal of Sutherland’s Lucia, insisted we sit with her, had herself photographed with the new prima donna, and then took us off to lunch. Seated, she stated: “She will have a great success tomorrow and make a big career if she can keep it up. But only we know how much greater I am.”I think that Callas was correct.
…VIDEO DADA surveys the Internet’s amalgamation of popular culture and art, calling into question the difference between the two.I am drunk with fatigue today and half convinced that this is a hallucination born of too little sleep.
Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia (HI ESTONIA!), Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Italy, Malaysia, Netherlands, the Russian Federation, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, the United States, VenezuelaThank you for your support, and viva la Divina!
Readers of this blague already know that President Barack Obama is a Maria Callas fan.I’m not a big opera buff in terms of going to opera, but there are days where Maria Callas is exactly what I need.The audio selection is the Habañera from Callas’s 1964 recording of Bizet’s Carmen.
For me, her funniest recorded moment… comes about halfway through [Rossini’s] Il turco in Italia when Fiorilla, being upbraided by her furious husband for her outrageous behaviour, uses what can best be described as “fake weeping” in order to bring him back into line (Mia vita, mio tesoro…). She succeeds, of course.Mr. S. is quite right: This is one of Callas’s great moments on disc, often overlooked for several reasons—the (relative) rarity of the opera, the shredded edition used for the recording (unacceptable by today’s standards), and the fact that we tend to associate Callas with tragedy and comedy.
For a poor soul like me, it is hard to find the right words to recall Maria Callas today, on the thirty-third anniversary of her death.A reader by the very interesting name of Nina Foresti kindly brought to my attention the Official Maria Callas International Archive.
Who knows, too, whether poor Callas would have wanted to be recalled by me. I rather doubt it.
On the grounds of manifest incompetence, then, I willingly abstain from swelling the river of words that always overflows on these occasions. Instead, I shall quote her teacher, Elvira de Hidalgo, who described her first meeting with the 15-year-old Sofia Anna Maria Cecilia Kalageropoulos, not yet Maria Callas.
Without a word of warning, Maria began to sing. To speak of this now may bring a smile, because we know now who Maria Callas is, but I discovered it then, at that moment.
I suddenly found myself alert, tense.
For years, in secret, I had been waiting for that voice—no, I had been seeking it.
It was a meeting destined to happen. I closed my eyes. I heard a violent, riotous cascade of sounds, uncontrolled, but dramatic and moving.
And I close with beautiful remarks by Leonardo Bragaglia from the preface of the most recent edition of his book on Maria Callas, L’arte dello stupore.
Maria Callas’s destiny was unique. Audiences showered praise upon her. She was put on a pedestal by critics both qualified and censorious. The greatest conductors and stage directors respected her, but she was insulted by the charlatans of the illustrated magazines, by pens-for-hire!
All of us, music lovers and musicologists, performers and spectators, remain bewildered and embittered by this. We, too, are insulted.
I adore this photo, because I see in it so much humanity and so little rhetoric.
Bellini, it is true, was poor in harmony and instrumentation, but rich in sentiment and in that melancholy tint that was his alone! Even in his lesser known operas, Straniera and Pirata, there are long, long, long melodies (melodie lunghe lunghe lunghe) that no one wrought before he did… Note, my dear Bellaigue, that I do not intend (G-d forbid!) to pass judgment, only to offer my impressions. You speak with the greatest indulgence of Otello and Falstaff. The author is not complaining…On this anniversary of Belllini’s passage into eternal life, let us hear his music sung by one of its greatest interpreters.
Admirers of Maria Callas love to play “what if.” What if she had never gone on the July 1959 cruise with Aristotle Onassis? What if Elsa Maxwell, that bird of ill omen, had never arrived on the scene? What if Callas had agreed to sing Carmen, Poppea, Charlotte—all rôles that were offered to her after her withdrawal from the stage?
Today is the birthday into eternal life of Maria Callas. She left this earthly realm on September 16, 1977.
During the trips and vacations that they took together, Pier Paolo Pasolini made several portraits of Maria Callas, sometimes using sea water, stones, sand, and other natural elements.Allow the little girl to be queen,Please read other posts about Maria Callas and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
to open and close windows as if in a ritual
respected by guests, servants, faraway spectators.
And yet she, she, the little girl—
if she is neglected for only one moment,
she feels lost forever;
ah, not upon motionless islands
but upon the terror of not being,
the wind streams,
the divine wind
that brings not healing, but ever more sickness;
and you seek to stop her, she who would turn back,
there isn’t a day, an hour, an instant
in which this desperate effort can cease;
you cling to almost anything,
begetting the desire to kiss you.
In the Orthodox Church, 15 August is a Great Feast: The Dormition of the Theotokos (Κοίμησις της Θεοτόκου) or “The Falling-asleep of the G-d-bearer.”Orthodox theology teaches that the Theotokos has already undergone the bodily resurrection, which all will experience at the Second Coming, and stands in heaven in that glorified state that the other righteous ones will enjoy only after the Last Judgment.Maria Callas celebrated her name day on 15 August and all her life was devoted to the Theotokos. She wrote to her Roman Catholic husband, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, from Buenos Aires in 1949:
The other evening I went with a Greek journalist and a lady to the Greek Orthodox church to light a candle for us and my Norma. You see, I feel our Church more than yours. It’s strange, but it’s so. Perhaps because I’m more accustomed to it, or perhaps because the Orthodox Church is warmer and more festive. It’s not that I don’t like yours, which is also mine now, but I have a strong partiality for the Orthodox Church.(Okay, that quotation, transcribed when I was insufficiently caffeinated, does not in fact mention the Theotokos, though it shows that Callas was a believer and attached to her religion, albeit not a church goer.)
Now go talk to all your patron saints and ask them for advice, ask them if you are in the right, but also pay a visit to your Madonna in the Cathedral in Milan, the Madonna you saw so very many times, before whom you genuflected and prayed.The Madonnina (Madunina in the local dialect) who stands atop the Duomo is the symbol of Milan.
she appeared to be in the highest of spirits. Dressed simply in black and with a black chiffon scarf decorated with a few sequins over her head, Maria looked much younger than her years and the personification of Greek beauty.Maria Callas reportedly died with a rosary (the gift of her sister-in-law Pia Meneghini) on her bedside table.
Composers’ dependence on women is unique to opera. Beethoven piano sonatas can be played by men, and men are capable of playing the trombone or conducting an orchestra, but no boy soprano could ever sing operatic female roles. Women are thus critical in authoring the operatic work as an audible reality; they cannot be prohibited from the work’s production unless (as Britten did) the composer limits himself to an all-male cast. And once they start singing, these women—cozily envisaged as pleasurable objects—will begin creating sound instead.I think that Abbate’s point about boy sopranos may hold only for “modern” opera. Isn’t it true that in eighteenth-century Rome, for example, Papal censors did not allow women on stage, and female rôles were taken by boys?
Carolyn Abbate, “Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women”
Michael Scott, the founder of the London Opera Society, has an acid tongue and, it seems, the constancy of a streetwalker.A recent recording, taking advantage of this scholarship,… suffers from a Fiorilla whose florid singing is full of aspirates [audible exhalations of breath]; so obviously is her voice caught in her throat, the analogy she conjures up is that of a turkey gobbling.Now that he is in Naxos’s employ, Mr. Scott seems to have discovered heretofore unsuspected virtues in Maria Callas’s performance. In his bitchy, hateful Maria Meneghini Callas (1991), he had written of her Fiorilla:
From the time Callas has lost weight we note the element of contrivance beginning to obtrude in her characterizations. However, spontaneity is essential to Rossini’s style. Although Callas’s Fiorilla may be remarkably different from her Leonora, it lacks charm and does not engage the listener’s sympathy… Exaggerating was the nearest Callas could get to comedy.Judge for yourself whether Callas’s Fiorilla “lacks charm” or, indeed, whether “in her attempts to refine her characterization she loses sight of the basis of secure vocal emission: a correctly supported voice.”
November 4, 2008 has been the happiest day of my life so far. I did not think that the United States would elect a black President in my lifetime.I’ve got Jay-Z on there. I’ve got Frank Sinatra on there. I’ve got Maria Callas on there…Hail to the Chief!
In the past month, lovely Internauts from some three dozen nations and every continent (except Antarctica) have visited Re-visioning Callas, to wit:Venezuela, the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Spain, the Russian Federation, Portugal, Poland, the Philipines, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Namibia, Mexico, Macedonia, Latvia, the Republic of Korea, Italy, Israel, Ireland, Hungary, Greece, Germany, France, Egypt, Denmark, Costa Rica, China, Chile, Canada, Bulgaria, Brazil, Belgium, Azerbaijan, Austria, Australia, Argentina…Thank you for your visits, and please drop by again soon!
May I ask you something: Do you consider yourself a fortunate woman?The sound clip is from Maria Callas’s 1954 recital, Puccini Heroines.
I feel privileged because I’ve had an extraordinary destiny. I am a creature of destiny. Destiny chose me and wanted me thus. I stand outside of myself and watch my life from without. I see myself clearly, and I see others.
As a woman I consider myself unfortunate because I have neither a man’s affection nor the love of children.
Do you feel nostalgia for your childhood?
No. Because it was not a happy childhood.
Maria Callas may have had ulterior motives in September 1954 when she recorded “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana” from Alfredo Catalani’s La Wally.Pier Paolo Pasolini: The man who didn’t make Maria Callas sing…Catherine Clément, the French philosopher and novelist, seems to inspire extreme reactions. Her beautiful screed, Opera: Or the Undoing of Women, is a fundamental, must-read text for me, yet scholarly friends for whom I have the deepest respect dismiss it as rot.
It wasn’t his choice to take part in the great masquerade that transforms a woman into a female transvestite. In the case of opera singers, this masquerade is so powerful that it can ultimately destroy these (apparently cherished) live marionettes. It wasn’t his choice as a homosexual. In the world of opera, there swirls around divas a world of men who “adore” women, all the more and all the better when they are no longer women, but masks...
The singer, finally mute and yet shown, in her violence and her life. The singer finally set free from her song.
Catherine Clément, “La Cantatrice muette ou le maître chanteur démasqué”
When I last interviewed Cecilia Bartoli, I praised her rendition of “Casta diva,” and she hinted that she might undertake the title rôle in Bellini’s Norma, which is usually assigned to dramatic sopranos these days.“‘Casta diva’ is a prayer, and the dynamic markings are piano, pianissimo, sotto voce. And since Norma is by Mr. Bellini and not by ‘the tradition,’ I–as an interpreter, as the composer’s servant–simply recorded this aria with a period orchestra and the dynamics that Bellini wrote in his music.”Cecilia Bartoli sang Norma in concert form last night in Dortmund, with a reprise scheduled for 1 July. My understanding of German does not (yet) allow me to grasp nuances of the reviews, but they seem positive and, in some cases, downright ecstatic.
Bartoli has a point. In the diaphanous playing of Zurich’s Orchestra La Scintilla and the ever-shifting luster and shadings of her voice, one can hear the moonlight and the numinous shimmerings of the forest evoked in Norma’s prayer to the moon goddess.
Would Bartoli ever consider singing the rôle onstage? “It would have to be a Norma not tied to ‘tradition,’ but to the autograph score,” she says. “The orchestras that played in Bellini’s day consisted of 40, 45 musicians. It would be a bel canto Norma–not, let us say, a Wagnerian Norma!”
Posts
All Comments
