The Magic of Callas (WNET 13, PBS, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Kaddish Symphony performance, I stumbled on the PBS Great Performances Web site mainly to make sure I had the right names for the soloists, both spoken and singing, but while the page was open I spotted an intriguing title called The Magic of Callas that turned out to be a show from the 48th season, originally aired January 15, 2021. The Magic of Callas was built around the live video of her in Act II of Puccini’s Tosca from the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in London on February 9, 1964, but true to form for music shows like this it didn’t just show the act complete with front-and-back commentaries about it. Instead, associate producer Katelin Levy (the only behind-the-cameras person credited on imdb.com’s page about this show) and whoever else was involved decided to show clips of the performance of Callas and her co-stars – baritone Tito Gobbi as Scarpia, tenor Renato Cioni as Cavaradossi, and Robert Bowman as Spoletta – interspersed with talking heads, some of them genuinely relevant, others less so. This show also repeated one of the longest-standing Callas myths: that this February 9, 1964 telecast was the only film footage that survives of Callas actually acting a role on the operatic stage instead of just singing detached arias in recital. Surprisingly, Callas biographer and friend John Ardoin said that in his 1977 book The Callas Legacy (published while Callas was still alive, though she died later in 1977 and Ardoin periodically revised his book to include additional Callas recordings that surfaced afterwards, including the legendary “Lisbon Traviata” of January 1958) that this telecast “is the only known existing visual document of Callas in live performance.” In fact, his book lists at least two others, and all three are of the second act of Tosca: a November 23, 1956 appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in which Callas’s Scarpia is George London, a December 19, 1958 French telecast marking Callas’s debut at the Paris Opéra, and this one.

Ardoin writes of the 1956 Ed Sullivan Show, “The second-act scene begins with the line, ‘Salvatelo,’ and cuts come fast and furiously, reducing the music by a good third and omitting the character of Spoletta,” and of the Paris show – which began as a recital of arias and orchestral selections, but after the intermission became a fully staged performance of Act II of Tosca, also with Gobbi as Scarpia – “Neither singer achieves his [or her] best, giving the intrusive conducting of [Georges] Sebastian; their interplay is sketchy and minus the subtleties that would come later. However, when engrossed in the action of a scene rather than trapped by the ambience of a concert, Callas is more giving and certain of herself. In Tosca, her voice is more assured and compelling than at any other point in the evening.” About the February 9, 1964 telecast, Ardoin kvetched that “the camera work is quite ordinary. It tends to stay on whoever is singing at a given moment, while often Callas is her most exciting and involving when silently reacting to another on stage. This is, of course, particularly true of her dramatic episodes with Gobbi. On this BBC [sic; it was actually for Britain’s commercial TV network, ITV] film, you only sense the mighty interplay which existed between the pair in the theatre.” The show also had a confusing and largely inaccurate portrayal of Callas’s tumultuous personal life, including her bizarre love affair with shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, and it said they had definitively broken up when Callas gave her Covent Garden Tosca performances in January and February 1964 – which they hadn’t. The documentary quotes Onassis’s kiss-off line to Callas – “You’re nothing but a sung-out old singer” – and dates his relationship with Jacqueline Kennedy as starting well before it did, all to suggest that Callas was doing method acting when she sang Tosca at Covent Garden and drawing on her tumultuous real-life relationship for inspiration. This ignores the fact that Callas had sung Tosca brilliantly well before she met Onassis, or even knew who he was, including on the 1953 La Scala recording (also with Gobbi as Scarpia) that is still considered the finest recording of this opera, bar none.

Three of the talking heads – baritone Thomas Hampson (who is quoted as saying that if you’re an aspiring baritone and don’t know Gobbi’s work, you don’t know anything about being a baritone) and soprano Kristine Opolais, and pop singer Rufus Wainwright – are listed on imdb.com. The six who aren’t include two more opera singers, soprano Anna Prohaska and tenor Rolando Villazón, along with conductor Antonio Pappano (current musical director of Covent Garden), fashion designer Wolfgang Zoop, journalist Jürgen Kestag and Brian McMaster, who attended one or more of the Callas Toscas at Covent Garden and recalled the rock-star atmosphere surrounding them. He said there were lines for tickets stretching for blocks around Covent Garden, and though he showed up almost a day in advance he was far from the first in line. He also remembered that even though his seats were in the galleries far from the stage, nonetheless the acoustics were excellent and he could hear Callas’s voice with perfect clarity. Wainwright, who came from a family that was part of America’s 0.1 percent, recalled he and his friends taunting Jackie Kennedy over her engagement with Onassis by driving by her home with a tape recorder blasting out Callas’s recording of “Casta diva” from Bellini’s opera Norma. The opera singers interviewed stressed the sheer power of Callas’s and Gobbi’s acting and said that, unlike other singers who sang the part. Callas actually screamed in pain when the libretto called for her to do so.

The production was directed by Franco Zeffirelli, who had previously worked with Callas in (among other things) a 1958 Covent Garden production of Verdi’s La Traviata with Callas but had sworn he would never direct Tosca – until Callas asked him to, and he accepted. Zeffirelli did a great job except for one issue I have with him: he had quite a lot of actual physical contact between Tosca and Scarpia before she first agrees to have sex with him in exchange for her lover’s life and freedom, then kills him rather than go through with it. I remember reading an interview with Geraldine Farrar, who sang Tosca in the early 20th century at the Met and was coached in the role by Sarah Bernhardt, who had starred in Victorien Sardou’s play on which the opera was based. Bernhardt told Farrar that Tosca’s loathing for Scarpia should be so complete she would not let so much as the hem of her dress touch him. Bernhardt also explained in detail all her elaborate stage business between Tosca’s murder of Scarpia and the close of the act, and when Farrar explained that Puccini hadn’t given her enough music to do all that stuff, Bernhardt said sadly, “Then it is impossible for you to do justice to the scene.” Oh, how I wish some opera director and star soprano would have the guts to do this scene the way Sarah Bernhardt did! Also, one of the talking heads said that because the surviving film is in black-and-white, it takes on a Gothic quality not unlike a 1930’s Universal horror film – something I’d been thinking all along, too. It’s not hard to imagine a 1930’s movie of Sardou’s play with Boris Karloff as Scarpia, Bela Lugosi as his assistant Spoletta, and maybe Zita Johann, heroine of Karloff’s 1932 film The Mummy, as Tosca and David Manners as Cavaradossi.