Callas at Juilliard: The Master Classes.

Callas at Juilliard: The Master Classes

I REMEMBER BEING on a ferry in the middle of Block Island Sound that September day in 1977 when I picked up the New York Times and read on the front page the news that Maria Callas had died of a heart attack at the age of 53 in her Paris apartment. I was too young to have heard Callas in performance at the Metropolitan Opera (where, in any event, she made very few appearances), and I had not listened to her recordings; the name of Maria Callas was mainly associated in my mind with yachts in the Mediterranean and the comical reaction that had greeted Aristotle Onassis's choice of a bride. (Even in those days, it seemed to me that it was Miss Callas's fans, not Camelot's, who had cause for indignation.) "Oh, well," I thought, "another media celebrity shoved off to the Happy Hunting Grounds." It was to be another seven years before, in the grimmest throes of an interminable Wyoming winter, I discovered those records.

Maria Callas retired from the stage in 1965, her voice and her artistic willpower played out after a public career lasting almost 25 years and characterized by a positively daemonic energy hitched to an uncompromising perfectionism. She did not sing in public for eight years after that, and when at last she attempted a comeback, it was a fiasco. "It's all tension, you know," she said. During that time she had been taking her voice down, so to speak, trying to build it up from nothing again, like a conservatory student. In the process of doing this, she was apparently forced to articulate for herself, precisely and formally, the concept and techniques upon which her art rested; when, therefore, Peter Mennin, President of the Juilliard School of Music in New York, invited her to work with a select group of 25 young professional singers in a series of master classes in "The Lyric Tradition," she accepted the offer. The classes ran from October 1971 to March 1972, during which period the soprano presided "like a Delphic Oracle," as one commentator put it, before sold-out audiences of students, fans, the press, and such distinguished colleagues as Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Tito Gobbi, Bidu Sayao, and Franco Zeffirelli. In John Ardoin's words, "Not only were Callas's comments extraordinary insights into her training and thinking, but they were a virtual summing-up of a grand-line operatic tradition reaching back to Donizetti, Verdi, and beyond which she had learned and practiced under such conducting giants as Tullio Serafin and Victor de Sabata. It is a tradition of which Callas was not only a principal exponent but one of the last of the breed."

Ardoin, who is the author of The Callas Legacy and co-author (with Gerald Fitzgerald) of Callas, has made a truly superb book from this material. Producing it, he explains, was far more than a matter of providing a literal transcription of what went on in the classes, for many of Callas's most penetrating "remarks" were sung rather than spoken. The points made through vocal examples had to be interpreted and translated into words. This meant listening "between the lines" to what was sung and supplying the reasons for many musical points when not given or fleshed out. Furthermore, as many of Callas's remarks were directed to the specific problems of a specific singer, they had to be adapted to fit the problems that singers in general would face. ... In presenting Callas's ideas, I have tried to keep her words when possible, but at times foreign-language expressions and musical terms had to be converted into English, thoughts had to be paraphrased, clarified, and above all organized into a concise flow.

Finally, Ardoin created a prologue "from general remarks made during the classes and from interviews given myself and others," in which Callas discusses such matters as her early training with Elvira de Hidalgo, the building of an operatic career, and reflections upon the nature of her art. the result is, quite simply, one of the best books I have ever read on singing, and one that I would imagine to be of as great value to singers and musicians generally as Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners is to writers of fiction. It is, in addition, the lucidly triumphant personal expression of a very great artist who was also, despite her (quite undeserved) reputation as a classic theater bitch, a woman of unshakable courage, enormous integrity, and genuine humility.

Maria Callas, of course, revolutionized the Italian repertory and style in the twentieth century, thus returning to the great opera houses of the world long-overlooked gems of nineteenth-century bel canto composition. Bel canto, she insists, is not simply a matter of "beautiful singing"; rather, it is "a method . . . a sort of straitjacket you must put on. You learn how to approach a note, how to attack it, how to form a legato, how to create a mood, how to breathe so there is a feeling of only a beginning and an ending. In between, it must seem as if you have taken only one big breath, though in actuality there will be many phrases with many little breaths. [But] above all, bel canto is expression." A born actress, after whom no podgy singer could ever again with impunity squat grossly upon the stage and waggle stock semaphoric gestures, she declares, "Music was all the acting training I ever had."

This book is best read with the great recordings at hand--La sonnambula, conducted by Leonard Bernstein and recorded live at Teatro alla Scala in 1955; the 1957 Anna Bolena, also recorded live at the Scala and with a magnificent supporting performance by giulietta Simionato; the 1955 Scala Traviata with the superb baritone Ettore Bastianini--along with the afore-mentioned Callas, in which Fitzgerald's photographs capture the soprano's every nuance of poise, gesture, and expression. Thus circumstanced, the reader is prepared to follow Madame Callas as she breaks down one aria after another, bar by bar: fermata, glissando, portamento. (The volume, by the way, is replete with musical examples; offered is replete with musical examples; offered for the most part as Callas herself would have them sung, rather than as they may appear in the printed score.)

On "CAsta diva," from bellini's Norma: "As [the aria] is a consequence of this domination [of the priestess over her people,] the . . . lines must be kept very peaceful, very silvery, as a contrast to the powerful recitative just before. . . This opening page must be kept very smooth, very clean, with all the pitches exact and covered by a good legato. Be particularly careful not to change the color of your voice while singing the ornaments; they should be a single sound."

On tempo in general: "Remember, tempo is a question of attitude, and your attitude is what is most important. . . . You can save yourself and the situation [a fast conductor] by striking a slower attitude within his fast tempo. You do this through the way in which you handle your sound, the way you weight your words."

Discussing the "Willow Song" from verdi's Otello: "Three cries of 'salce' occur at four different points in the aria. Each 'salce' needs a different color, and each group must be different from the previous group. For the first time, I would sing the 'salce' forte, then piano, then pianissimo, each time draining a bit more color and vibrancy from your tone until the last is like an echo from a great distance."

On characterization: "My Traviata has changed also, though my Norma much less so. With Violetta, I gradually realized that her kind of sickness would not permit many or quick movements. I also learned that the less she moves, . . . the more the music gains."

Two popular myths pertain to opera, the first--that it is a dead art, irrelevant to modern ways of feeling and thinking--of relatively modern vintage; the second--that opera singers, as a breed, are dumb; in fact, that they can hardly be called musicians at all--of more hoary pedigree. Callas herself recognized some truth in Myth Number One: [We] must search and change in order to convince the public of what we are doing, for opera is a dead form in the sense that it is hard today to accept anyone singing, 'I love you,' 'I hate you.' This can be spoken, it can be screamed, but it is out of fashion to sing it. Yet we have to ask the public to accept it, and the only way they will is if we bring a bit of fresh air . . . Everything must be as credible as possible within the limitations the composer has left us."

Of Myth Number Two, her words now, as well as her records, stand in ultimate refutation.