[23], The great turning point in Callas's career occurred in Venice in 1949. It lacked those elements which, in a singer's jargon, are described as velvet and varnish... yet I really believe that part of her appeal was precisely due to this fact. expected, even when a role or a production was not new. Callas was notably instrumental in arranging Franco Corelli's debut at La Scala in 1954, where he sang Licinio in Spontini's La vestale opposite Callas's Julia. [28][33] Walter Legge stated that Callas possessed that most essential ingredient for a great singer: an instantly recognizable voice. But in Italy, 28 years after her death, they still love her. Everything I did for them was mostly good and everything they did to me was mostly bad. Maria Callas, the soprano whose intensely dramatic portrayals made her the most exciting opera singer of her time, died of a heart attack yesterday at her home in Paris. Callas was unique and irreplaceable for everyone except the man she came to love with all her heart. She was right in turning it down—it was frankly a beginner's contract."[22]. She won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, where one of her teachers was Elvira de Hidalgo, a famous Spanish soprano in her day. international society, she had liaisons with billionaires, and she was glamour incarnate. Upon her arrival in Verona, Callas met Giovanni Battista Meneghini [it], an older, wealthy industrialist, who began courting her. Callas and Tebaldi generally sang a different repertoire: in the early years of her career, Callas concentrated on the heavy dramatic soprano roles and later in her career on the bel canto repertoire, whereas Tebaldi concentrated on late Verdi and verismo roles, where her limited upper extension[45] and her lack of a florid technique were not issues. When she and Stignani sang Norma, at the bottom of the range you could barely tell who was who ... Oh it was colossal. And before the evening was over, she took a high E-flat. in the title role of Ponchielli's "La Gioconda." The production was grueling, and according to the account in Ardoin's Callas, the Art and the Life, Callas is said to have fainted after a day of strenuous running back and forth on a mudflat in the sun. [19] Litsa herself, beginning in New York and continuing in Athens, had adopted a questionable lifestyle, that included not only pushing her daughters into degrading situations to support her financially but also entertaining Italian and German soldiers herself during the Axis occupation. [25], In support of Gobbi's assertion, a bootleg recording of Callas rehearsing Beethoven's aria "Ah! Vassilis's death from meningitis in the summer of 1922 dealt another blow to the marriage. In the large-scale operas, such as "Aida," "Norma" or "La Gioconda," He continued to see Callas … It was as if someone asked Birgit Nilsson, who is famous for her great Wagnerian voice, to substitute overnight for Beverly Sills, who is one of the great coloratura sopranos of our time. Because she could say everything only with her voice! [44], During "The Callas Debate", Italian critic Rodolfo Celletti stated, "The timbre of Callas's voice, considered purely as sound, was essentially ugly: it was a thick sound, which gave the impression of dryness, of aridity. This would occur in the most delicate and troublesome areas of a soprano's voice—for instance where the lower and middle registers merge, between G and A. I would go so far as to say that here her voice had such resonances as to make one think at times of a ventriloquist ... or else the voice could sound as though it were resonating in a rubber tube. "[22] Fellow singer Maria Alkeou similarly recalled that the established sopranos Nafsika Galanou and Anna (Zozó) Remmoundou "used to stand in the wings while [Callas] was singing and make remarks about her, muttering, laughing, and point their fingers at her".[22]. "[45] Musicologist and critic Fedele D'Amico [it] adds, "Callas's 'faults' were in the voice and not in the singer; they are so to speak, faults of departure but not of arrival. [68], Louise Caselotti, who worked with Callas in 1946 and 1947, prior to her Italian debut, felt that it was not the heavy roles that hurt Callas's voice, but the lighter ones. In Medea, everything was angular. "[30], Photos and videos of Callas during her heavy era show a very upright posture with the shoulders relaxed and held back. And then I was tired of playing a game, for instance playing this beautiful young woman, and I was heavy and uncomfortable to move around. That alone is an art. Seletsky, Robert E., "Callas at EMI: Remastering and Perception"; "A Callas Recording Update"; "A Callas Recording Update...updated", This page was last edited on 3 April 2021, at 08:06. But I don't know why they put this kind of rivality [sic], because the voice was very different. [79], Callas spent her last years living largely in isolation in Paris and died of a heart attack at age 53 on September 16, 1977.[84]. "[28] And of her performance of Medea a year later, John Ardoin writes, "The performance displays Callas in as secure and free a voice as she will be found at any point in her career. And you can't estimate the toll that emotional turmoil will take as well. "[37], Her Metropolitan Opera debut, opening the Met's seventy-second season on October 29, 1956, was again with Norma,[38] but was preceded with an unflattering cover story in Time magazine, which rehashed all of the Callas clichés, including her temper, her supposed rivalry with Renata Tebaldi and especially her difficult relationship with her mother. [39] She further consolidated this company's standing when, in 1958, she gave "a towering performance as Violetta in La traviata, and that same year, in her only American performances of Medea, gave an interpretation of the title role worthy of Euripides. These and others were precisely the accusations made at the time against Pasta and Malibran, two geniuses of song (as they were then called), sublime, yet imperfect. Callas was photographed with her mouth turned in a furious snarl. In 1946, Callas was engaged to re-open the opera house in Chicago as Turandot, but the company folded before opening. In 1973, she and her close friend, the tenor Giuseppe di Stefano, tried their hand at staging opera. She attended Public School 164 at Wadsworth Avenue and Her imposing She must be viewed totally—as a complex of music, drama, movement. So I'm really not doing anything extraordinary. "[28] Edward Downes recalled Callas watching and observing her colleagues with such intensity and concentration as to make it seem that the drama was all unfolding in her head. Being fully aware of the alleged rivalry, he recommended Zinka Milanov's version. "[45] D'Amico adds, "The essential virtue of Callas's technique consists of supreme mastery of an extraordinarily rich range of tone colour (that is, the fusion of dynamic range and timbre). [citation needed], In 1969, the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini cast Callas in her only non-operatic acting role, as the Greek mythological character of Medea, in his film by that name. Unable to find a replacement for Carosio, Serafin told Callas that she would be singing Elvira in six days; when Callas protested that she not only did not know the role, but also had three more Brünnhildes to sing, he told her "I guarantee that you can.". perfido" and parts of Verdi's La forza del destino shortly before her death shows her voice to be in much better shape than much of her 1960s recordings and far healthier than the 1970s concerts with Giuseppe Di Stefano.[33]. But her sensitivity! Her father was a pharmacist. "[35] The two collaborated several more times at La Scala, singing opposite each other in productions of Fedora (1956), Il pirata (1958) and Poliuto (1960). She was famous as a Verdi and Puccini singer, and she included in her repertory such seldom-heard operas as Cherubini's "Medea" and Gluck's "Alceste." This is precisely Celletti's distinction between the natural quality of the voice and the technique. Callas received her musical education in Athens. 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