Forty years after her untimely death, we operaphiles are still being mesmerized by the voice of Maria Callas. Why, I pondered, would such a singer endure and evoke such emotion still, after a career fraught with vocal decline and constant attacks from both press and public? And still we remain captivated despite some very bad vocal recordings, a vibrato as wide as the ocean, no trill per se, and an often shaky top at best.
My first exposure to the Callas voice was as a 10-year-old boy soprano. I had recently discovered opera with our local Tri-Cities Opera in Binghamton, New York, and was now a Metropolitan Opera broadcast regular listener. But it was not in a live performance that I first heard “the voice.” It was in both her late recorded Tosca with Carlo Bergonzi and her Carmen with Nicolai Gedda. The sound haunted and caught me. It was foreign; no other singer had sounded like this before.
I tried to explain it to my voice teacher. Hers was a woody, nasal, hollowed sound—not really beautiful tonally, but there was that something that compelled you to listen, to make you want to hear more, and to understand how and why she sang the way she did. It wasn’t until I listened as an adult that I finally “got it,” finally understood what held her listeners and encapsulated them into a world of drama long since dead.
Having grown up in a generation of Leontyne Price, Joan Sutherland, and Renata Tebaldi, I was used to singers whose voices processed a tonal beauty, sheen, and sound so gorgeous that I would ponder why more people my age did not like the art of opera. And yet I was drawn to that strange and foreign timbre of Callas, that often uneven and thinly veiled tone that had more dramatic intent and excitement than any singer I had ever encountered. It was even more so the ugliness in her tones when the situation required: Tosca’s tormented “Questo è il bacio di Tosca!” Carmen’s unwillingness to scream at her stabbing, but the guttural “Tiens!” as she throws Don José’s ring aside. Norma’s wrenching sobs as she weeps for her children, “Son figli miei!”
Callas went on record in the liner notes of her 1964 Carmen recording to express her distaste for singers who do not change the vocal quality when expressing emotional fervor. “Nothing is more absurd than when, during the most violent phrases of the action, a singer persists in retaining the tonal beauty of her voice. Is it right to sing ‘Je te hais!’ (I hate you!) with a timbre of velvet and gold? No, one must not be afraid to distort the voice just as one distorts facial expression to indicate rage or even despair.”
When her EMI rarities were reissued years later, a time when the voice was clearly on the verge of disintegrating, to me these were the most telling, the most passionate, the most exciting audio accounts of what a truly great artist this woman was. I was no longer interested in a beautiful (and sometimes boring) tone. I wanted fire and excitement. I wanted to hear the torture on her part to “get through” the aria and, in doing so, her vindication at leaving the listener charged to the point of agitation. I wanted my own release, my own absolution.
Several of these arias had been reissued on her Callas by Request LP which I had practically worn out. After years of listening to her singing, I realized two things: she wasn’t merely an interpreter with exceptional dramatic gifts, but she was singing from her life’s experiences. The excitement, pain, innate suffering, and sheer explosion of her being was what pulled her listeners in. It was our suffering and pain and magnificent obsession with the soprano voice which spoke directly to us and made her instantly believable, instantly relatable. She gave us restitution.
Take, for example, her version on Amelia’s “Ecco l’orrido campo” from Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera. Listen to her audible gasp of fear when the bell strikes midnight—chilling. The breathless voicing of “e terri . . . bi . . . le sta,” punctuated with terror, hyperventilating with anguish. How could you not understand Callas’ own frustration, her own loss, our own loss? And the Callas chest voice was always there. She may have lost her top, but what a thrilling descent into darkness when she would glissando into the end of Verdi’s aria “Arrigo! Ah, parli a un core” from I Vespri Siciliani or Aida’s tortured “E dal mio labbro uscì l’empia parola!” in “Ritorna vincitor!”
As I read the LP’s program notes and realized that the majority of these recordings were made from about 1960–64, it became even more clear to me that Callas was not only singing to save her career but her life! She was singing to justify her existence. Her disastrous relationship with Onassis, a voice which was already broken, and a confidence long gone . . . Callas was a woman in pain but, more so, she was human. The diva throne thrust upon her had indeed taken a toll at a time when singers jetted around the world often arriving only hours before rehearsal with little rest before a performance.
I wondered: Had she been born 20 or 30 years sooner when the singer was not as easily accessible and remained in one place longer, could her voice have perhaps been saved or restored? Would the press have been as cruel, as demanding, as pursuing as when she reached her pinnacle in the 1950s? The fact that she even had the physical energy to sing, particularly in the 1960s when the voice was practically gone, is even more amazing.
Perhaps it is also because she put so much emphasis (rightly so) on the text and her diction is impeccable. Unlike Price and Sutherland, who were technically expert singers with gorgeous sound, but their diction was often muddied to the point of being unrecognizable. Callas, however, had a sense of communication and extreme musicality which makes her one of the best operatic orators of our time. She may have sung, but she also acted with her voice, and the words, while at times tonally unpleasant, were always razor sharp, immediately grabbing the attention of her listeners.
No, I don’t believe it was her celebrity that has kept her memory so present in today’s operagoers and is the reason her records continue to sell. We are obsessed by the sad life we now know she encompassed and the courage it took her to endure in a profession that sought to destroy her. And yet she leaves a legacy so secure that no other singer has eclipsed her greatness since that sad day she left us too soon.
