I watched the videotape a friend had lent me: the Maria Callas Gala at the Paris Opera, December 19, 1958: a pretty incredible performance, in which she does bits from Norma, Il Trovatore and The Barber of Seville in concert form, followed by a completely staged performance of Act II of Tosca with French tenor Albert Lance as Cavaradossi and Tito Gobbi (in splendid form vocally, though he wore a pretty obvious false nose that made him look almost like a cartoon character) as Scarpia. (Ironically, the only other extant film of her acting in an operatic context is another version of Act II of Tosca: the “screen test” Franco Zeffirelli shot in London six years later, also with Gobbi as Scarpia, as a warm-up for their studio film of Tosca that was, in the end, never made.) Aside from one scene in which Callas and Gobbi touch, Callas seems to have taken to heart the advice Sarah Bernhardt, who “created” the role of Tosca on the spoken stage, gave to the singers who played her in the opera: “Tosca’s hatred for the police-agent Scarpia … must be completely convincing; she must avoid even permitting the hem of her skirt from touching his body in the second act.” While it’s not known who directed the sequence in this broadcast (and my memories of the Zeffirelli/Callas film are of a much more creatively and intensely directed version than this one), it gives Callas a marvelous opportunity for pantomime after she’s murdered Scarpia (though she throws away the line, “E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma!,” much to my disappointment; she also doesn’t kick Scarpia after she’s killed him, which — despite the potential for major bodily harm to the baritone — the scene, especially given Callas’ vivid etching of her loathing for the man, one almost expects).
I remember an awful
production of Tosca in San
Francisco in which the original director/designer, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle (whom
my brother always used to call “Jean-Pierre Banalle”) gave the soprano singing
Tosca no fewer than three doors
she had to open and close to get offstage, thus denying her the chance to do
much of anything during that long, beautiful musical postlude after the murder.
(As Geraldine Farrar said of Bernhardt’s advice to her about this scene, “When
we came to the death scene, Mme. Bernhardt imparted to me the extent of her
stage business, and when I explained to her the number of musical bars allotted
to me in the opera, she threw up her hands in dismay. ‘It is impossible,’ she
said, ‘to do justice to the scene.’”) Zeffirelli gave Callas one door, and the anonymous designer of this production
had her exit through the wings without having to bother with a door at all.
Callas got to do all the action called for in the libretto, including placing
the two candles on either side of Scarpia’s corpse and placing something on his
chest (it’s supposed to be a crucifix, but in this mediocre 1958 television
image it looked more like a corsage to me!). It’s also clear in this version
that Callas means to murder
Scarpia from the beginning of the scene — as he’s writing out the safe-conduct
passes (one wonders if the authors of the original version of
Casablanca borrowed the “letters of
transit” device from Tosca) she
fingers the letter opener, reaching behind her own body to the desk it’s on,
then loses track of it and quickly scrambles to find it again — and when she
stabs him she doesn’t do so over her shoulder and through his back (the way
Grace Kelly killed her would-be murderer in Dial “M” for Murder), but straight through his chest where (as Bette Davis
might have said if she’d ever
played this role) his heart ought to have been.
As for the rest of the tape, Sebastian’s tempos are
unyielding (Lance could probably have made more of the “Miserere” duet from
Trovatore with a conductor like Serafin who
would have slowed down and allowed him to bend and shape the phrases
artistically instead of just belting them out), the choral work awful
(especially in the “backing vocals” to “Casta diva”), the backing singers
adequate (save for Gobbi and the Spoletta, Louis Rialland) and Callas uneven
but mostly stunning, beginning “Casta diva” a little out of things but slipping
fully into gear by the second chorus. (Incidentally, I remember an Opera
Quarterly article in which Phyllis Curtin
blamed Callas’ premature decline as a singer on her poor posture, which
allegedly prevented her from breathing properly while singing; I’d probably
have dismissed this as so much silliness if its author weren’t herself a
singer, and watching this and the Hamburg recital Callas gave four years later,
and noticing how hunched over she seems to be and how she seems to do most of
her singing with her head bowed down, I’m inclined to think Curtin may have had
a point.) — 2/14/95
•••••
Last night I was in an operatic mood with my video choices
for Charles and I to watch; going through my back files I’d got out Cecelia
Bartoli’s CD Maria, her tribute to the
legendary 19th century soprano Maria Malibran (1808-1836). She was
important as a singing actress — along with her contemporary, Giuditta Pasta,
and the German soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, Malibran was one of the
first singers who insisted on creating a strong, believable characterization in
an operatic role rather than just using it as an excuse for vocal display. She
became famous not only for her voice but for her skills as a composer, her
famous relatives (her father, Manuel Garcia, and sister, Pauline
Viardot-Garcia, were also opera stars) and her tragic death at age 28 from
lingering injuries she sustained after she fell off her horse in Milan in July
1836 — though she continued to perform for three more months instead of seeking
medical attention. As with the other singers of her time, we have no clear idea
of what Malibran sounded like aside from the written reviews critics wrote
about her performances and the range of music composed for her — including a
fascinating piece by Mendelssohn called “Infelice!” which he wrote for
Malibran, she performed twice and then the score was forgotten until Bartoli
and her conductor, Maxim Vengerov, rediscovered it for this 2007 tribute album.
I used this as a sort of curtain-raiser to one of the three video items
included in the new Warner Classics boxed set of live performances by Maria
Callas: the famous December 19, 1958 gala performance Callas gave at the Opéra
in Paris — the first time she had ever performed live in France. It was the
last recorded Callas performance from a year that had begun wretchedly for her
with a fiasco in Rome in which she had been hired to sing the title role of
Bellini’s Norma in a big gala
including the President of Italy in the audience — only Callas fell ill just
before the performance and withdrew following the first half of act one. The
surviving tape of the broadcast features a long series of anxious announcements
from the radio hosts speculating on whether Callas would return — which she
didn’t, and since they had no understudy for her (though Anita Cerquetti would
come in later and finish the rest of the scheduled run) the performance had to
be cancelled. The Rome Opera sued Callas and there was a seven-year legal
battle which Callas ultimately won.
At the end of 1958 she came to Paris — a
city she would fall in love with and live in during her retirement — for
another gala, again with a national president in the audience as well as such
luminaries of the time as Charlie Chaplin, Juliette Greco and Brigitte Bardot.
This time Callas came in fine voice (one high note in “D’amor sull’ali rosée”
from Il Trovatore goes a bit
wild, but otherwise this performance is free from the aggravating wobbles that
frequently afflicted her high register as she got older) for a wide-ranging
program that featured a recital concert with excerpts from Bellini’s Norma, Verdi’s Il Trovatore and Rossini’s The Barber of Seville in the first half and then, after the intermission,
a fully staged performance of the second act of Puccini’s Tosca with Tito Gobbi as Scarpia and French tenor Albert
Lance as Cavaradossi. Callas opens with the big first-act aria from Norma, “Casta diva,” beginning it with its introductory
recitative, “Sediziose voci,” which Callas doesn’t quite tear into with the
intensity of her surviving complete performances but it’s still nice to hear
the scene in its full context, complete with a bass (Jacques Mars) and a
chorus. Callas is absolutely stunning, not only vocally but physically; it’s
well known that her 16-month diet program in 1953-54 was inspired by her seeing
the movie Roman Holiday and
deciding she wanted to look like its sylph-like star, Audrey Hepburn, and
judging from her appearance here, she achieved it. She also sings with such
total power and authority one forgets the sheer (and typically operatic)
preposterousness of the situation: Norma is the High Priestess of the Druids in
ancient Britain (not “Gaul” —
ancient France — as the perhaps French-chauvinistic authors of the English
subtitles maintain), and as such she is obliged to lead a public service in a
glade one night every month at the height of the full moon to worship the
Druids’ moon goddess (which is who the “casta diva” referenced in the aria is).
She’s also supposed to maintain chastity, but she’s broken that vow with the
general of the occupying Roman army, Pollione, and when the opera opens this
affair has been going on for three years and she’s borne him two children — yet
no one has noticed that she’s
carried two pregnancies to term even during her regular public appearances
every month. (I once joked this is why zaftig sopranos like Joan Sutherland and Montserrat Caballé
got cast as Norma: they were already large enough you could actually believe
they could carry two pregnancies to term and no one would notice.)
Following
the Norma excerpt, which not only
features the cavatina (the slow first half of a two-part aria) but the
cabaletta (the fast second half), “Ah, bello, a me ritorna,” which even though
she’s still standing in the middle of the glade and all the Druids can hear
her, she laments her sense that her illicit lover Pollione is about to leave
her for someone else (which he is: her assistant priestess, Adalgisa), which is
all supposed to be an aside (communicated in the subtitles in this film by
putting an open parenthesis mark at the start of the cabaletta) even though
it’s being delivered in full view of the people from whom she’s trying to keep
the affair secret. Then Callas and the Paris Opera Orchestra and Chorus, under
the baton of the underrated George Sebastian (a Hungarian-born conductor whose
name seemed to change spelling whether he was working in his native country,
France or the U.S., and a quite underrated musician who was a superb recorded
accompanist for Callas and Kirsten Flagstad in their live concerts), do one of
Verdi’s most audaciously imaginative scenes, the beginning of Act IV of Il
Trovatore, consisting of heroine Leonora’s
magical aria “D’amor sull’ali rosée,” in which she laments that her lover
Manrico is in prison about to be executed; followed by the “Miserere” duet, in
which a chorus is singing a Christian lament for the dead, Leonora is pleading
with God to find some way to spare her lover’s life, and Manrico, hearing all
this from his cell, sings that he awaits death and welcomes it but hopes
Leonora does not forget him. One could have hoped for a more butch Manrico than
French tenor Albert Lance (obviously they got him because he was part of the
home team, and they’d probably blown their talent budget getting Callas and the
great Italian baritone Tito Gobbi for the Tosca Act II at the concert’s end), but he’s lyrical and
up to the demands of the music — and Callas is haunting. One can only wish that
they had restored Leonora’s cabaletta after the “Miserere,” “Tu vedrai che
amore in terra,” which for decades had been cut from the score but had been
restored by Callas and conductor Herbert von Karajan for their studio
“complete” of Trovatore in 1956,
which would have made an already magical sequence even better (and would also
have showcased Verdi’s formal daring in separating a cavatina from its
cabaletta not by just a few lines of recitative, as was customary, but an
entire big duet with chorus).
The next selection is the big aria “Una voce poco
fa” from Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, a piece I have a weird history with because I first heard it on the
soundtrack to the film Citizen Kane,
where Dorothy Comingore as Susan Alexander Kane butchered it in private
performance. (Comingore did her own singing for the film in the scenes in which
she performs privately for Charles Foster Kane, but she had a voice double,
Jean Forward, in the scenes in which she’s shown singing a staged opera — and
though Forward was a fully professional singer, composer Bernard Herrmann threw
her a curveball by writing the opera excerpts one key too high for any soprano to sing comfortably.) So it was a bit of a
shock when I got a Lily Pons LP on Columbia and first heard it sung properly.
“Una voce poco fa” was also interesting to hear in this context right after the
Cecelia Bartoli featurette on Maria Malibran because it was one of the two
pieces on this Callas concert that was in Malibran’s repertory — and it
underscores the interesting argument Bartoli made in the film that Malibran was
really not a soprano, but a mezzo-soprano with an upward extension. In the 19th
century there was actually a lot more freedom in the opera world to adjust keys
to fit singers than there is now, when taking an aria down a half-tone or a
tone to accommodate a singer is considered cheating. Malibran’s sister, Pauline
Viardot-Garcia, was generally considered a contralto (though her Wikipedia page
lists her as a mezzo), and she freely transposed the music of operas like
Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor
and Verdi’s Macbeth down so she
could sing it. (She also commissioned Hector Berlioz to make an arrangement of
Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice
for her; Berlioz fused Gluck’s versions — the Italian-language 1762 original in
which Orfeo was a soprano castrato and the French rewrite in 1774 in which
Orfeo was a tenor — and for some reason his rewrite, not either of Gluck’s
originals, has become the standard text.)
In his book The Callas
Legacy John Ardoin quotes a contemporary
review of Giuditta Pasta by Marie-Henri Stendhal (a French writer best known
for his novel of the French Revolution, The Red and the Black) and suggests it applied to Callas as well: “She
possesses the rare ability to be able to sing contralto as easily as she can
sing soprano. I would suggest … that the true designation of her voice is
mezzo-soprano, and any composer who writes for her should use the mezzo-soprano
range … while still exploiting, as it were incidentally and from time to time,
notes which lie within the more peripheral areas of this remarkably rich
voice.” We don’t have records of Pasta, of course, but ever since I read that and
similar remarks from critic Henry Chorley, writing about Pasta the way critics
120 years later would write about Callas — praising her intense acting and
dramatic skills, and criticizing her wobbly high notes — that Pasta’s voice
probably sounded a lot like Callas’s, especially since three of Callas’s
biggest successes were in operas originally written for Pasta: Donizetti’s Anna
Bolena and Bellini’s La
Sonnambula and Norma. Getting back to The Barber of Seville, Rossini originally wrote the leading female role of
Rosina for mezzo-soprano and later pitched it higher for light sopranos — Lily
Pons and Kathleen Battle are examples of that type of Rosina — while Callas,
nominally a soprano, sang the part in the original mezzo keys. One of the
remarkable aspects of the surviving concert films of Callas is that she didn’t
let the fact that she was just singing on a bare stage in normal clothes
absolve her of the obligation to act. I remember seeing Birgit Nilsson in
concert in San Francisco in 1979, and her voice was spectacular but she did
absolutely nothing with her body:
she just stood straight and hurled the music out at the audience without
changing her posture or making any gestures. Not Callas; after playing the
doleful heroine trapped in a forbidden relationship in the Norma and Trovatore excerpts, she is flirtatious and coquettish in the Rossini aria, as
the text and the situation demand, and she’s fully in charge of the role.
Then
the concert film proceeds to the second half of the program, a fully staged
performance of Act II of Puccini’s Tosca with Callas in the title role, Tito Gobbi as the villainous Baron
Scarpia — a repressive police agent attempting to maintain order in Rome and
suppress the rebellion being led by supporters of French emperor Napoleon
(who’s a good guy in this, not surprisingly since the source play was by French
writer Victorien Sardou) no matter how many men he has to kill, or how many
women he has to rape, in order to do it; and Albert Lance as Tosca’s boyfriend,
Mario Cavaradossi. Scarpia and his assistants Spoletta (Louis Rialland) and
Sciarrone (Jean-Pierre Hurteau) have captured Cavaradossi and are torturing him
— excuse me, using “enhanced interrogation techniques” — to get him to tell
them where he’s hiding Angelotti, one of the leaders of the rebellion. Scarpia
realizes Cavaradossi will probably never “break” — or at least he won’t break
in time for Scarpia to arrest and kill Angelotti before his dinner (referencing
a more recent tyrant, I joked, “His cheeseburger’s getting cold”) — but if he
can apprehend Tosca (an opera singer who’s just wrapping up a special church
benefit performance as the act begins) and make her hear the sounds of
Cavaradossi being tortured, she’ll
break down and give him Angelotti’s whereabouts in exchange for him letting up
on her boyfriend. She indeed does that, and naturally Cavaradossi is pissed at
her, though his mood brightens up when word reaches everybody that Napoleon has
just won the Battle of Marengo (“Vittoria! Vittoria!” Cavaradossi cries). Then
he’s led back to his prison cell and Scarpia makes Tosca an offer: he’ll
release Cavaradossi if she’ll have sex with him. Tosca, who in Sardou’s play
was described as an orphan who was raised in a convent (like Maria von Trapp in
The Sound of Music) and is
therefore very religious, sings her character’s best-known aria, “Vissi
d’arte,” as a prayer to God asking why He has put her in this situation — let
her boyfriend die or have sex with a man she can’t stand. (Indeed, when
Geraldine Farrar was preparing Tosca
she sought out an interview with Sarah Bernhardt, the legendary actress for
whom Sardou had written the play, and Bernhardt told her that Tosca’s loathing
for Scarpia should be so total she wouldn’t let so much as the hem of her dress
touch him.)
Tosca agrees with the utmost reluctance, but Scarpia says that he
can’t just release Cavaradossi: he has to stage a fake execution — “like we did
with Palmieri,” he tellingly stresses to Spoletta — and he’ll write two
safe-conduct passes so Tosca can get herself and the supposedly dead
Cavaradossi out of Rome. (I’ve often wondered whether Murray Burnett and Joan
Allison, author of the play Everybody Comes to Rick’s that eventually became the movie Casablanca, got the gimmick of the “letters of transit” from Tosca.) Then Scarpia zooms in on Tosca, ready to claim his
prize — and Tosca grabs a letter-opener from his desk and stabs him with it,
killing him. Tosca has a long scene after Scarpia’s death, lighting candles and
putting them on either side of his body while she says, “He’s dead! Now I forgive him!,” and giving him one more look of
disgust, she says contemptuously, “And before that all Rome trembled.”[1]
Callas oddly throws that line away in this performance — a minor disappointment
in what is otherwise a brilliantly executed rendition of this score, so
different from the bel canto
arias of Rossini and Bellini and the extension of bel canto Verdi composed in Trovatore. Tosca
is an example of the operatic movement called verismo — which literally means “realism,” though the
realism of verismo was mostly
expressed in sordid plots about love and betrayal, and what separated the verismo works from previous operas about love and betrayal
were that they were about ordinary people, not royals, nobles or figures from
Greek or Norse mythology. We can hear the dramatic contrast between Puccini’s
succinct, almost telegraphic style of writing and the elaborate forms of
earlier Italian composers; in a way Puccini and his verismo contemporaries, Mascagni and Leoncavallo,
anticipated film music in general and film noir in particular in the highly dramatic nature of their
plots, their realistic depictions of crime and the motives behind it, and in
the way they largely abandoned form-based arias in favor of a continuous dramatic
declamation critics called parlando
(literally, “speech-like”).
When verismo composers stopped the action for an aria, it was to heighten the
dramatic situation and convey the character’s inner thoughts and emotions, much
the way Shakespeare had done with his soliloquies, not to give a star singer
the chance to show off his or her voice. One of the things that made Maria
Callas legendary was that she could do it all; she was equally adept in bel
canto operas and verismo works, and she probably picked the program for this
concert deliberately to highlight and demonstrate her versatility. It’s also
interesting that though Callas and Gobbi had recorded Tosca together at La Scala in Milan in 1953, with Victor
de Sabata conducting and Callas’s lifelong friend (and occasional lover)
Giuseppe di Stefano as Cavaradossi — a record still hailed by critics as the benchmark for all Tosca recordings — they had never appeared together on
stage in this music until this performance. In fact, only three films exist of
Callas in an actual opera performance (as opposed to a recital concert), and all are of Act II of Tosca: a 1956 Ed Sullivan Show appearance with George London as Scarpia, this one
and a 1964 rematch with Gobbi on a BBC program in London. With Rosa Ponselle we
have the frustration of having only two complete opera recordings, both from
the Met — La Traviata in 1935 and
Carmen in 1936 and 1937 — and
otherwise we have to imagine what her complete performances were like from
studio recordings of snippets. With Callas we have an ample, if not absolutely
complete, documentation of her repertoire on audio recordings but
heartbreakingly little on video. With today’s singers we get plenty of videos,
though many of them are hard to enjoy because of the creepy antics of the
so-called Regietheater directors
who arbitrarily impose their “concepts” on the operas and usually turn them
into travesties of the original dramas.
This 1958 Paris concert has been
available in several different presentations and re-edits; this one was
included in the 42-CD boxed set of Callas live recordings from Warner Classics
(which acquired the classical catalog of EMI, Callas’s record company, when
Universal Music bid for EMI’s pop catalog — including the Beatles — and
European antitrust authorities decided that if Universal took over EMI’s
classical records as well they’d have a virtual monopoly on classical music
recordings, so they forced EMI’s owner to sell the classical branch somewhere
else) and was originally produced in 1999 for French TV. It deleted the purely
instrumental selections — it’s customary for a full-length concert of a singer
with orchestra to include some instrumental numbers to give the singer a chance
to rest his or her voice, and the original telecast included two of these, the
overture to Verdi’s La Forza del Destino (which opened the original concert) and the overture to The
Barber of Seville (played, appropriately,
just before Callas sang “Una voce poco fa”). The DVD edition also left out the
opening footage showing the celebrities in the audience, and substituted
modern-day footage of the Paris opera house with a narrator babbling on
endlessly over what a great facility it was and is. I’d rather have had a
document of what the original audience for this telecast saw — no less and no
more — but at least the additions stayed out of the way of the music (which was
not the case of the absolute hash
PBS made of the incalculably historically important footage of the inaugural
gala Frank Sinatra staged for President-elect John F. Kennedy on January 19,
1961!) and, out of the all too few films of Callas in action, this may be the
very best. — 5/23/18
[1] — In Act III we learn that Scarpia double-crossed
Tosca; Cavaradossi’s execution turns out to be real — the firing squad’s guns
have actual bullets in them, not blanks — and Spoletta and his agents show up
to arrest Tosca, only she escapes them by committing suicide via a spectacular
jump off the roof of the castle where Cavaradossi’s execution took place.
