“Well,” said Madame Callas. “What do you want to be, a songster or an opera singer!?” Cynthia Clarey faced the diva and replied somewhat defensively, “A songster.” At that point she went to the piano, picked up her music, and walked off the stage.
Thus ended Clarey’s first—and last—masterclass with the great Maria Callas.
“Are you crazy?!” asked the girl who was about to go on. “You can’t do that! Ms. Kimball is going to be so upset!” To have come this far and now, Clarey thought, she may be kicked out of Juilliard. She quickly wrote a note apologizing to the dean, which he accepted but added, “I think it probably would be a good idea if you did not go back to the class!”
Walking out on “La Divina” may sound like a blatant affront to Callas, but in all fairness, Clarey had no intention of being an opera singer—at least not at this point. “When I went to New York, I wanted to do musical theatre,” Clarey says. “I didn’t even know that I wanted to be an opera singer. I just got thrown into it, but really had no interest in being in Juilliard’s Opera Center.”
So it was that Clarey—who has had an international operatic career spanning several decades and five continents—found herself at Juilliard when Maria Callas held her now famous 23 masterclasses during the fall and spring of 1971 and 1972. “I was singing in the cafeteria and the director of the chorus for the opera program came over to me to see if I would like to sing in the opera,” Clarey says. “I assumed he meant the chorus, and said I guess I would.” However, he took her to the faculty dining room and the conductor asked her if she knew any arias from Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
“I told them I’d never seen an opera! I was put in the second cast doing Pamina—my first opera!” About this time a memo started going around the school announcing upcoming auditions for Madame Callas’ masterclasses. “I was working with Florence Page Kimball ([Leontyne] Price’s teacher) and knew I had an audition with Callas,” said Clarey. Over 300 students auditioned and 26 were accepted; Clarey was one of them. Call it naïveté or the ignorance of youth, but Clarey chose to sing “Casta Diva” from Bellini’s Norma—a Callas trademark—for her first masterclass performance.
“She wanted a Bel Canto aria and I had sung ‘Casta Diva’ in college. I learned it really, from her recording,” said Clarey. “I knew very little about Callas. I knew she had sung Norma, but didn’t realize it was her signature role! Ms. Kimball let me sing it because I needed a Bel Canto aria to perform. When I sang it, [Callas] must have realized that that’s what I had listened to,” said Clarey. “So I guess she couldn’t say too much because I was going to say, ‘I did the same thing you did!’” Clarey laughs.
When Callas told her that, of course, she would never sing the role of Norma, Clarey expressed no regrets. “I was surprised I was singing any role! I had no idea, really, about opera or roles. I was just happy I didn’t embarrass myself,” she added. (There is a wonderful YouTube audio of Clarey’s “Casta Diva” with Callas.) “I didn’t have any clue about it, but she was very kind,” adds Clarey. “At least she didn’t say, ‘You must be crazy!’
“Sometimes people expect a miracle in a masterclass where you only have 20 minutes to work with a student,” says Clarey. “I think Callas realized this and that’s why she wanted to have the singers on an ongoing basis rather than just one class where you really can’t do anything.”
Callas selected her students diligently, if not with a certain bias. “She had the pick of the school,” remembers Clarey. “Barbara Hendricks was in the class. Neil Shicoff, Neil Rosenshein, and Brent Ellis were all classmates. I do know that she made a decision to not take any student who was overweight. A friend of mine auditioned for her, a big woman. She told me when she walked out onto the stage she heard Callas say, ‘No, no,’ even before she had opened her mouth! Of course, Callas hadn’t been singing in a long time, and this was her new ‘thin’ self.
“Apparently, there was a memo which I hadn’t seen around school which said something about all women having to wear long dresses or those Palazzo pants like Callas wore.” Clarey showed up to sing for famous soprano in a short black dress. “I had been uptown singing at my church. I didn’t have another Bel Canto aria, so I offered her Pamina’s aria, ‘Ach ich fűhls.’ She asked me if I had anything else and I told her just songs I was preparing for my recital.
“So when she asked me if I wanted to be an opera singer or a songster, it just got my hackles up. It was like songs were beneath her. I really felt badly about walking out, but there’s a moment in everybody’s life when you have to say, ‘I don’t have to take that.’ Besides, I had no real investment at that point in opera. Ms. Kimball said maybe if [Callas[ had sung more songs, she’d still be singing! Plus,” adds Clarey, “she said my dress was too short!”
Several weeks later Clarey ran into Callas while waiting for the elevator. “The doors open and there she is, with the dean! ‘Well,’ said Callas, ‘and here’s the young lady who thinks she has the world at her feet!’ I just stood there. I didn’t say anything. What could you say?”
It wasn’t until after the premature death of Callas that Clarey really understood the famous singer better. “I didn’t even know all the stuff this poor woman had gone through. What a sad and lonely life. Tragic.” Still, she did learn valuable lessons from that masterclass so long ago. “Callas was very much into the text and making sure that we understood that was equally important, which was something I had not particularly thought of at that time,” she said.
When Clarey finally dared to attend additional masterclasses as a spectator, she did so as inconspicuously as possible. “I sat in the back of the auditorium!” she laughs. “I don’t think I ever encountered anyone quite like her before. We were all a bit intimidated, but she was very down to earth, very matter of fact about everything.” Clarey recalls. “She always looked beautiful. She wore glasses, the thick ‘Coke bottle’ lenses. She demonstrated, and everyone was waiting for her to sing a little—and she did, which was nice.”
