Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (27 page)

Her arrival in London was her next social coup. Although the purpose of her visit was to sing two performances of
Norma
, on February 2 and 6, the interest and fascination had spread far beyond those wishing to hear her sing. The
Daily Mail
devoted three columns to the preparations for her arrival and the excitement of those involved in the preparations at Covent Garden and at the Savoy. Both performances were sold out before the first day of booking had ended, and among those lucky enough to find tickets, many came to London specially to hear Maria’s Norma. The French music critic Jacques Bourgeois arrived from Paris and, having declared to the passport official the purpose of his visit, was greeted with a rapturous, “Isn’t she fantastic!”

And she
was
fantastic—fantastic on the first night and even more fantastic on the second. This greatest of Normas gave the greatest performance she would ever sing in the role on February 6 at Covent Garden. After the torrential applause that followed “
Mira o Norma
,” her second-act duet with Ebe Stignani, John Pritchard, the conductor, had no option but to break Covent Garden’s ironclad rule against encores. “
Brava Divina
” was the cry that could be heard above the applause. Rudolf Bing sent a telegram congratulating her. “I am still trying to discover,” Maria wrote back, “what happened in New York. I am only sorry I couldn’t give you personally what other theaters have. I hope next year.” Meanwhile, as
Opera
put it, London’s hysterical reaction to her was “no more than the performance deserved.”

Maria’s return to La Scala with
La Sonnambula
on March 2 was just as triumphant. Once again she seemed unable to do wrong, once again the world was hers, and still another triumph was around the corner.

On April 14 Maria opened in Donizetti’s
Anna Bolena
with Gianandrea Gavazzeni conducting. It was her nineteenth role at La Scala. Visconti and Nicola Benois had created designs of such beauty and drama—all in black, white and gray—that the audience burst into loud applause as each new set appeared. But as Visconti put it: “For
Anna Bolena
, you need more than sets and costumes. You need Callas. Each day I went with her to the tailor to watch over every detail of her gowns, which were in all shades and nuances of blue. Her jewels were huge. They had to be to go with everything about her—her eyes, her head, her features, her stature.” Maria’s costumes, all inspired by Holbein’s portraits of Anne Boleyn, were practically sculptured on her figure. Whether slowly and regally descending the long, broad staircase of Windsor Castle or hurling herself on the floor in pain and humiliation, Maria was magnificent.

Here was, as the critic John Ardoin wrote, “the culmination of all the wronged, wounded characters she had previously portrayed.” Here also is the answer to those who have all too glibly summed up Maria as a great actress but not a great singer. Her greatness may have been that of an actress, but the dramatic use to which she put the natural gift of her voice was her genius. That is why thousands fell in love with her through her recordings long before they had a chance to experience the Callas presence, the Callas gestures and the Callas movements on the stage, and why thousands who never saw her in the flesh go on falling under the Callas spell only from what they hear.

Of course Maria’s voice, at the end of her career, was not what it had been at the beginning, but at the March premiere at La Scala in 1957, the combination of her still powerful voice and the inspired way she used it to enhance the drama made
Anna Bolena
the perfect demonstration of the unrivaled way in which at her best she fused the two arts. In the final moments of the opera her voice rises securely to its top Cs and is transformed for Anna’s final lines to the rawest of chest notes so that “
Vendetta
” is hurled out, transfixing the audience. They were cheering and applauding before the final notes of the orchestra had died away, and that night Maria broke the record of solo curtain calls at La Scala: twenty-four minutes of continuous applause.

A new peak in the mountain range of voice and drama had been scaled, but it was a culmination rather than a taste of things to come. The future could be predicted from a photograph in the Italian press a few days later: Elsa Maxwell in the arms of the waiting Maria at Milan airport. She had arrived at Maria’s invitation to see her in
Anna Bolena
, and in between performances and rehearsals for Gluck’s
Iphigénie en Tauride
, Maria had found the time to meet her at the airport. Maxwell was preparing a ball in Venice in Maria’s honor and castigating in her column “the evil web of invective” around Maria, forgetting that not so long before she had been one of the web’s chief spiders.

She was back for the dress rehearsal of
Iphigénie
. The result was another column devoted to Maria in which, like a knight protecting his beloved, she threatened to track down those spreading poison about her. The reference to denigrators was intended for Karajan and the Vienna State Opera: they had announced the cancellation of Maria’s scheduled return to Vienna to sing
Traviata
. In the course of the negotiations, Meneghini had suddenly announced that his wife’s fee had doubled. Vienna refused to go beyond $1600 per performance, and Maria’s visit was off. “I’m not interested in money,” Maria had said, “but it must be more than anyone else gets.” It was a childish demand for a tangible and much needed confirmation that she was the best. For manager-Meneghini, getting a higher and still higher fee for his wife was almost a
raison d’être
, but in Vienna his greed had met retribution. Maria found herself under attack for putting extravagant demands ahead of her art and her commitments, and at the same time she was in the vulnerable position of being defended by that semiofficial mouthpiece of the moneyed beau monde, Elsa Maxwell.

While the controversy raged, Maria was absorbed in the creation of her fifth heroine under Visconti’s direction.
Iphigénie
was to be their last collaboration, which neither of them suspected at the time. For once Maria strongly disagreed with Visconti’s interpretation. He had placed the opera in the middle of the eighteenth century in an elaborate rococo style. “Why are you doing it like this?” Maria kept asking. “It’s a Greek story and I’m a Greek woman, so I want to look Greek onstage.” And she went on and on through the rehearsals about wanting to look Greek, even after her glorious costumes, in silk brocade and with enormous trains, had been finished. Visconti considered
Iphigénie
his most beautiful production with Maria and, although this was not the general opinion, there were some stirring moments. Maria made her entrance during the storm scene that opens the opera; she walked up the high staircase and then raced down the steep steps with twenty-five yards of cloak flying wildly in the wind. “Every night,” remembers Visconti, “she hit her high note on the eighth step, so extraordinarily coordinated was her music and movement. She was like a circus horse, conditioned to pull off any theatrical stunt she was taught.”

Iphigénie
was Maria’s twentieth production at La Scala and on June 21 President Gronchi, in recognition of her artistic achievements, conferred on her the greatly coveted honorary title of Commendatore. A few days later, Elsa Maxwell conferred on her the honor of a three-day Maxwell tour of Paris—tea with the Windsors, cocktails with the Rothschilds, dinner at Maxim’s, the races with Aly Khan.

Elsa had met Prince Aly Khan, the Aga Khan’s son, in 1947, and ever since she had been acting as a kind of unpaid propagandist for him, praising his hard work as the heir to the Aga’s spiritual leadership of the Ismailis when all the other papers were concentrating on his colorful playboy activities, and defending him from Rita Hayworth’s charges when she left him a few months after their marriage. Now in Paris, Aly Khan placed himself at Elsa’s disposal as official escort on her Parisian merry-go-round. Having won more than one hundred races as a gentleman jockey, he was the perfect companion for the racecourse. Maria remained impervious to Aly’s notorious magnetism, and could work up little enthusiasm for horses; but for the moment, she continued to be eager to try whatever excitements Elsa produced next.

There seemed to be no end to them. Maxwell, who had for some reason been given the Légion d’Honneur by the French government, was as much at home in Paris as in New York, and Maria was enjoying getting to know Paris and being feted and admired, towed in the wake of one who knew which places were fashionable and at what hour of the day.

The respite from singing had turned out to be almost as exhausting. And there was a long summer of recordings ahead. Also, after twelve years, Maria was preparing to sing in Athens again. But her homeland was not yet prepared to rejoice at her return. Apart from the national reluctance to acknowledge greatness in a fellow Greek, Evangelia’s allegations about her daughter had created a very unpleasant stir that was still echoing. What threatened to turn Maria’s visit into a farce even before she arrived was the attempt of the opposition parties to make political gain from it. They accused the Karamanlis government of getting its social priorities disastrously wrong by agreeing to pay an exorbitant fee to an opera singer when the people were in desperate need. So sensitive and tense was the general atmosphere that the government had arranged for Evangelia and Jackie to leave during Maria’s visit; when Maria landed in Athens, they were already in America.

She arrived totally drained from the previous year, longing for a haven. When she found herself instead in the middle of a storm, she panicked. She did not feel strong enough to confront an audience coldly withholding approval, nor did she feel in good enough form to seduce them into surrender. At the same time she knew that a cancellation would arouse even more hostility. She vacillated, prevaricated and finally decided. Her first return concert at the theater of Herodes Atticus would have to be canceled. Through a combination of Maria’s indecision and the Greek tendency to postpone the delivery of bad news, the cancellation was announced one hour before curtain time. Maria had expected disapproval; what she encountered was rage.

When finally, five nights later, exactly thirteen years after she had sung
Fidelio
there, Maria made her entrance on the stage of the ancient theater, she faced an icy wall of hostility. But now she was ready to use that hostility as a challenge, to ride it out and dissolve it with her magic. Her last aria was the Mad Scene from
Hamlet
and the ecstatic applause that broke at the end demanded an encore; the whole occasion acted as a detonator for all the accumulated tensions of the past week. It was even interpreted, by those for whom there is a political motive behind every “Bravo,” as a vote of confidence in the Karamanlis government.

Back in Milan, the pattern that Maria’s life had followed for over ten years now—an excess of work and tension leading to anxiety and exhaustion—now approached a dangerous collapse. She was thinner than she had ever been, her collarbones protruded whenever she wore an open dress, and her blood pressure was worryingly low. Her doctor advised the cancellation of all her engagements, artistic and social. Maria decided that canceling her visit to the Edinburgh Festival with La Scala so soon after the Athens cancellation would be disastrous. And canceling her visit to Venice for Elsa Maxwell’s ball would be such a pity—such a glamorous occasion to have to miss!

Edinburgh was cold and overcast when she arrived to open the operatic season at the festival with
Sonnambula
. The first performance suffered from her run-down state, but as Harold Rosenthal, who saw her on the fourth night, said in
Opera
: “Dramatically her interpretation is a
tour de force
. By her very nature Miss Callas is an imperious figure more suited to the great tragic roles of the lyric stage, and yet, although Amina is a Giselle-like figure, the soprano was able by her personality to make us believe in the figure she created.”

Dramatic interpretations, tragic roles and Giselle-like figures were all to be drowned in the torrent of publicity that surrounded Maria’s “cancellation” of her fifth
Sonnambula
. “Another Callas walk-out” was how it was presented in the British press. The facts were very different. Maria had never agreed to a fifth performance; she had clearly told Ghiringhelli that she would sing only four. Perhaps Ghiringhelli simply assumed that if it were announced, Maria would have no alternative but to stay on and sing. He assumed wrongly. Maria had had enough, and she was not going to sing a performance that was not part of her engagement just to save La Scala’s face. The lord provost of Edinburgh and his wife, warmly wishing her good-bye at her hotel, understood. The music critics understood: “One was glad for her sake when she departed for the warm south.” But the world press, that overzealous guardian of artistic morality, neither understood nor forgave her, especially as departure for the warm south meant Venice and the grand ball Elsa Maxwell was giving in Maria’s honor. It was clear that whether or not Maria broke an agreement, she certainly chose not to sing but to attend instead the party in Venice, a decision the press found outrageous. If she was too exhausted to sing, how could she not be too exhausted to spend all night at the ball? The newspapers were full of photographs of Maria at her most radiant, confident and polished. Maxwell herself, often insensitive and indiscreet, boosted her own ego at Maria’s expense. “I have had many presents in my life . . . but I have never had any star give up a performance in an opera house because she felt she was breaking her word to a friend.” Maria, so quick to imagine betrayal, could not see it when it lay bare before her.

For the moment Elsa could do no wrong. Maria desperately needed someone in her life to play the part of the all-good, all-comforting mother figure, and Maxwell was delighted to oblige. The surface of society, titles, money and gala balls constituted Elsa’s only reality. Maria was a noteworthy and beautiful acquisition, and Maxwell, with her cultural pretensions, knew perfectly well that she could afford to exchange quite a few counts and maharajahs for the cachet that Maria added to her column and her parties. Moreover, the effect of the
coup de foudre
Maria had dealt her that night at the Waldorf-Astoria still continued. So she kept delving into her social repertoire to produce all sorts of toys that would keep Maria, for a time, fascinated and involved.