What about Callas? Comparing Generations of Opera Singers

I may regret engaging with one of the opera world's most inflammatory questions, but it is one that has been nagging at my consciousness with increasing frequency -- and increasing insistence -- as I spend longer as an opera audience member. It is this: how do, or ought to, opera audiences discuss opera singers across time? The exigencies of musical performance, and of everything else contributing to an operatic career, mean that one operagoer usually hears several generations of opera singers within a lifetime. And to my great chagrin, this long and rich experience seems more often used to make categorical and usually negative statements than to share enthusiasm. As the very existence of this blog testifies, I'm passionately interested in contemporary and historical performance, and in analysis of what contributes to trends in that performance. And, combining indomitable optimism with scholarly zeal, I'm convinced that there must be a productive mode of performing oral histories of opera, that honors both musicians and the audiences who flock, with legendary and sometimes notorious devotion, to hear them.

Callas as Tosca

The anniversary of Callas' birth seems an appropriate time to flesh out my long-hoarded thoughts on this subject. For Maria Callas, of glorious memory, of eternally astonishing voice, is often cited as the paragon to crown all paragons. There's an astonishing variety of roles for which, in discussions of their performance history, her name is inevitably mentioned, in accents of hushed or ecstatic reverence. She is, for many, the diva, La Divina, ne plus ultra. I'm not exempt from the impulse to adore. Her Tosca was the first CD set I bought for myself, and others have joined it since (there's a fuller panegyric here.) In part, perhaps, because of her preternaturally polished off-stage glamour, Callas has come to be a potent and multivalent symbol. She is, sometimes, the essential Diva, the goddess, having become the perfect woman by her transcendence -- or transmutation? -- of female fickleness and frailty. She is, sometimes, the symbol of glories past, never to be attained by the present and degenerate generation. She is, sometimes, the incarnation of opera's astonishing ability to simultaneously surmount and express the anguish of the human condition.

L'amor della diva

On this, the thirty-third anniversary of her death, I've been thinking about Maria Callas, for whom adjectives seem either superfluous or misleading.  Aprile Millo has a touching post here.  There are some great stories of Callas-discovery over at Parterre box, but I had no older-generation opera-lovers to take me literally or figuratively by the collar and command, "Listen to this!"  I find I can't say for certain what the first time I heard Callas' voice was.  But I do remember, vividly, the first times I listened.  Tosca was one of the first operas I loved, and her Tosca was the first opera recording I bought for myself.  This was an investment undertaken in fear and trembling by my undergraduate self, after searching reference works and internet comment for recommendations.  I listened.  I was drawn in.  And the diva's entrance was, for me, an "aha" moment: so that is what Tosca sounds like.  I was mesmerized.  It was impossible not to take the emotions expressed by that voice seriously; impossible not to be moved.  After that, I checked Un Ballo in Maschera out of the college library; that became the second recording I bought.

The person and persona of Maria Callas are, of course, of legendary stature. Here she discusses the definition of a prima donna (!), serving music, acting in opera, Serafin, and Bellini (further parts of the interview include discussion of choosing and learning roles, interpreting characters (and convincing the public you're right!) and giving opera life in the face of changing audience sensibilities.  But I hope it is a tribute to the artist that, however much I may admire, pity, and puzzle over the particulars of her life, all that fades and is forgotten when listening to her sing.  She is Tosca, Amelia, Norma, Leonora, Violetta, Medea, Anna Bolena; and I believe every note... after the first one, which is always occupied with me thinking "Ah yes! Callas."

Vissi d'arte, vissi d'amore

Poor Tosca's cri de coeur has perhaps suffered from being so very beautiful. It's become--perhaps it has always been--a showpiece. We're accustomed to hearing it as a proof of technical facility and artistic accomplishment. And I admit, I know I've sat back in a university recital hall thinking, "Fine, show me," instead of honorably doing my best to think of the devout, passionate woman caught in an impossible situation in 1804 Rome. Tosca has garnered praise and blame for its melodramatic tendencies, and I'm not denying that a soprano being asked for sexual favors (ahem) by a corrupt baritone police chief in order to save her tenor lover from execution has, to put it mildly, rather an air of the contrived about it. But who can remain unmoved when Tosca sings what has sometimes been called her credo: her almost childlike enumeration of her good deeds, her unquestioning giving of herself in love, in charity, in song, ending with the heartbroken, unanswerable "why?"