Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (14 page)

Except for one night. It had been the first night of
Aida
and Maria had already been in bed for an hour, with the lights off, when Evangelia, unable to sleep, heard her sobbing. She went up to her.

“Are you worried that it wasn’t a huge success? It was. You know it was,” she whispered to her.

“I don’t care about Aida,” sobbed Maria even more loudly than before.

“Then what is it? What is it?”

“I want children. . . . I want twins. . . . I want many children around me. . . . And I want you to bring them up. . . .”

She went on sobbing in her mother’s arms, until she fell into a deep, deep sleep. In the morning she had to make herself believe it had never happened. When Maria walked to the table where her mother and Simionato were having a late breakfast, her mother leaned toward her to give her a good-morning kiss. Maria pushed her aside: “Don’t, Mother, I’m no longer a child!” she exploded. What she dismissed as childish was that tender, vulnerable part that would always be with her; she shrank in horror from any intimation of what lay beneath the carapace of dedicated professionalism and an efficient marriage. And the price she had to pay for giving way to it the night before was the necessity of suppressing it even more rigorously the morning after.

Such behavior was not easily accounted for. It certainly outraged Simionato. “If I were your mother, Maria,” she said, “I’d give you a good slap.” No doubt Evangelia longed to do just that, but she did not. Later on she was to give Maria quite a few metaphorical slaps, and to say quite a few bitter things, giving vent to her mounting frustrations. For the time being Evangelia and Maria were far too busy being feted everywhere, and the frustrations were simply allowed to accumulate. Maria even spent a whole morning between
Tosca
and
Trovatore
choosing a fur coat for her mother for her final “appearance” on the Mexican social scene and for the cold New York winter ahead of her. It turned out to be a parting-forever gift, and perhaps it was because at some level Maria already knew as much that she spent so much energy and time choosing the coat and so much money buying it.

The first night of
Trovatore
was on June 20, 1950. It was the first new major role Maria had prepared on her own. Before she left Italy, she had asked Serafin for advice, but he had refused to help her prepare a performance that was to be conducted by someone else. So Maria threw herself into the role on her own, and the performance was the most passionate and full-blooded Leonora she ever sang. A few months later, when she sang it again in Naples, this time under Serafin, her portrayal had become much more lyrical and much less full-blooded. Kurt Baum, who had already forgotten his vow that he would never sing with her again, was Manrico. His presence gave rise once again to some crude but electrifying competitive singing. During the celebrated trio in the first act (with Leonard Warren as the Count di Luna), Maria and Kurt Baum sailed to an unwritten D flat, each determined to outsustain the other, and neither prepared to release the note first; it was Baum who was the loser. Leonard Warren only sang one more performance of
Trovatore
and then had to leave Mexico, suffering from the high altitude—and no doubt also from the antics of his two colleagues. For the third and last
Trovatore
, Ivan Petroff took the place of Warren, Maria and Kurt Baum outdid themselves in vehemence and overpowering declamations, and the added D flat was held not for seven measures, as in the previous two performances, but for nine.

This was Maria’s last appearance in Mexico for the 1950 season. The following morning she left for Madrid and Meneghini. Her mother was at the airport to say good-bye. In the car on the way to the airport, Maria gave her mother the $700 that her godfather had lent her, and money for her hospital bills. Evangelia was going to stay in Mexico for a few more days, “catching her breath,” as she put it. She was not overeager to return to New York and a marriage that only seemed emptier as time went on. She spent her last three days in Mexico surrounded by the flowers the hotel manager went on sending up every day, but sunk deep in a sea of foreboding. She never saw her daughter again.

Maria, in Madrid with Titta by her side, felt relieved that Mexico and her mother were behind her. She was exhausted, but also proud of this glittering year and, looking ahead from Madrid, all things seemed possible—even an Italian sequel to her Mexican popular triumph. Nearly three months of rest in her new penthouse in Verona lay ahead of her. In a letter to her godfather at the time, she summed up how she felt both about life and her closeness to him:

Dear Leo, it’s true that our lives are very similar. You are married to a younger woman, I to an older man—both happily married. We both have become famous, you a doctor, I a singer—both worked hard and really earned their happiness and success. Am I right?

Maria had earned her happiness and success, but not the ability to relax and recharge herself. Only when she had severe headaches, some of them too painful for her to do anything but rest, would she stay in bed, and even then there would always be a score next to her. Occasionally she might be persuaded by Titta to stay in bed for a little while after the pain itself ceased to issue commands, but in general doing nothing was extremely hard for Maria. Even the three months of rest were crowded with shopping, adding more gilded swans to her bedroom, or more golden mirrors to the bathroom, and having dinner or drinks with members of the Veronese Establishment.

The growth of her reputation could be measured in social terms: invitations were becoming more numerous and more persistent. The first stage of Maria’s transformation had been completed, and fashionable Italian hostesses—extremely sensitive barometers of success—began issuing their invitations as if to let Maria know that she was ready to “go out into the world.” Yet Maria felt unready. She was still awkward at social gatherings and she was so preoccupied with how she looked and how she was dressed that she felt quite drained afterward. Stepping outside their provincial, tightly knit Veronese circle seemed even more threatening. But fashionable hostesses were very persuasive, and Maria half wanted to be persuaded. After all, social success was an important element of the dream image she had built for herself, even though ideally she would have liked the social success without all the hard work that other people called “having a good time.”

“You learn according to the rules and then you forget them,” Maria had said about her singing, repeating Serafin’s advice. Onstage she put this into practice more brilliantly than any singer in this century, but in life she was never confident enough, never sufficiently at ease, to forget the rules and the form and just be. So her life became yet another performance—one in which she was least assured and least happy. Three months’ socializing on top of practicing and worrying about the performances coming up began to tell on Maria’s nerves. She became intensely irritable, annoyed by trifles, exaggerating their importance and unable to shake off her excessive concern with them; and when she was not irritable she would sulk. Sulks were for Maria a rarely used weapon, but they were a weapon that occasionally took complete control of her.

Meneghini so totally identified with his wife’s moods that he ended up prolonging and intensifying them. If she was critical of someone, half-knowing it to be unjustifiable and fully expecting to be contradicted, he took it so seriously that she began to think there must, after all, be something in it. If she railed against someone in a momentary outburst, Meneghini’s support turned a passing irritation into a real, solid grievance. The more hostile the world, the more convincing was his role of Husband-Protector; and he was very good at painting dragonlike pictures of “the enemy,” so that he would always be there, ready to provide the fortifications to keep the enemy out. During these three months in Verona, the two of them spent more time alone together than they had in a long while. It is true that Maria’s affections were equally divided between her Titta and her piano, but still they were together, and Meneghini found Chopin and Rachmaninoff no more threatening than Verdi and Bellini.

In the meantime Maria had begun working at home on her first role in comic opera—Fiorilla in Rossini’s
Il Turco in Italia
. As the young wife of Don Geronio she wandered around her home extolling the joys of infidelity and flirting with the visiting Sultan. For Maria, who had so far brought to life only woebegone operatic creatures,
Il Turco
was a real challenge. “It particularly appealed to me,” she explained six years later in an article she wrote for
Oggi
, “because it allowed me to stray from the subject—by this time frequent—of great tragedies in music, and to breathe the fresh air of a very funny Neapolitan adventure.”

She had been offered the part by Maestro Luccia, but there was another man who had chosen her and was the prime mover of the whole enterprise: Luchino Visconti. He was to become, after de Hidalgo and Serafin, the third great influence in the shaping of Maria Callas. She was instantly fascinated by him, a fascination that went much beyond the aura of aristocratic elegance that surrounded him and the fame as perhaps Italy’s foremost film director that preceded him. Maria sensed Visconti’s dramatic genius, and his mere presence at the rehearsals—even when he was not offering any specific suggestions—had a powerful effect on her. “I was so surprised,” she remembered later, “to see a man of his distinction sit in attentively at almost all the rehearsals, which lasted a minimum of three or four hours—and we rehearsed twice a day.”

The fascination was mutual. Visconti had first seen Maria the previous year during the Rome Opera performance of
Parsifal
. So when the Anfiparnaso group, a group of left-wing artists and intellectuals to which he belonged, decided to revive
Il Turco in Italia
, Visconti immediately suggested Maria. The flighty young wife of an old Neapolitan, madly in love with the faithless Turk Selim, is a long way from Kundry in
Parsifal
. Visconti’s imagination bridged the gap. In Rome that October, in and around the Teatro Eliseo on the Via Nazionale, an incongruous friendship began to develop. Over meals, the roles were reversed. It was Maria who sat, enthralled and listening, and Visconti and his Anfiparnaso friends who were doing the talking. Politics, art, revolution, new music, new morals—it opened up for Maria worlds as fantastic as a world in which Turkish sultans descended on Naples. In themselves, intellectual speculation and aesthetic theorizing had no appeal for her, but, filtered through Visconti’s personality, they acquired a kind of fascination by association.

“Maria Callas was the surprise of the evening,” wrote the Rome correspondent of
Opera
after the opening night on October 19. “She sang a light soprano role with the utmost ease, making it extremely difficult to believe that she can be the perfect interpreter of both Turandot and Isolde.” The cast included Cesare Valletti, Mariano Stabile (Toscanini’s great Falstaff) and Sesto Bruscantini, but there was no doubt as to who was the star of the evening: “The solo voices were splendid, but it required Maria Callas’ superb musical flair to keep the others together in the concerted numbers.”

There were only four performances of
Il Turco
, the last one on October 29. The next time Maria sang Fiorilla onstage was five years later at La Scala in a production created for her by Zeffirelli. In the interim there came the Visconti period of her life. She did not work with him again until 1954, the year that marked their dazzling season at La Scala, yet we can begin dating the Visconti period from the autumn of 1950. Maria’s close contact with Visconti over the rehearsal weeks had revealed a whole new dimension of her dramatic personality, and his initial influence remained alive working underground until they came together again, four years later, for Spontini’s
La Vestale
.

By now Italian audiences were so used to Maria’s ability to sing anything, and to follow it by singing anything else, that it was no longer stirring news when, just over three weeks after she had sung her last Fiorilla, she was back in Rome singing Kundry in a radio broadcast of
Parsifal
with Boris Christoff as Gurnemanz. In between the two, she had been working on a major new role, Elisabeth de Valois in Verdi’s
Don Carlo
. Throughout her life, Maria, too driven to pace herself, had to have rest forced on her when her body revolted against overwork, nerves and anxiety. This time, too exhausted to fight the infection, she collapsed with jaundice. She had to leave in the middle of the
Don Carlo
rehearsals with no hope of returning. The doctor had ordered not just rest, but complete rest, so all performances of
Don Carlo
, both in Naples and in Rome, had to be canceled, the only time such an event did not find its way into the headlines as another “Callas Cancellation.”

Maria’s recovery was filled with letters from Athens. Her mother, finding life with her husband increasingly unbearable, had suddenly decided to leave New York and join Jackie in Greece. Filled with bitterness, she poured some of it into her letters to Maria. At first the complaints were directed exclusively at Maria’s father, but gradually, when Maria failed to respond, they became reminders of all Evangelia had done for her daughter. The reminders of the past were accompanied by pointed reminders of the stark present—of Evangelia’s financial burdens and of a daughter’s duty to do something about them, especially since the daughter was married to a millionaire. Evangelia’s attacks on Meneghini became less and less veiled. Ostensibly they were all about his lack of generosity and concern for Maria’s family, but behind this litany of grievances was Evangelia’s pain at seeing her place at Maria’s side filled by Meneghini.

If anyone in the world seemed to have a special claim on Maria, a special claim to her glory, it was no longer the mother who had first nurtured her talents, but the husband. Evangelia sensed Maria’s withdrawal, and she panicked. The more she panicked, the more strident and reproachful her letters became, and the more Maria withdrew. Every sentence in her mother’s letters was an accusation, and every accusation a further invitation to withdrawal. Maria stopped replying. Instead she sent a letter to her godfather: