The first time I heard the voice of Maria Callas, I laughed.
The setting was a college professor's home. He had invited his music history class over one night so that we could all listen to a complete opera together.
His choice was a recording of Rossini's defining comedy The Barber of Seville starring Callas as Rosina. No sooner did she start in on her first aria than I got the giggles.
"It sounds like she has marbles in her mouth," I said, feeling quite the astute little critic.
The teacher just gave me a pity-the-poor-rube smile and let the records play on.
With the 25th anniversary of the soprano's death looming next month, I find it hard to believe I ever disliked, let alone giggled over, her incomparable, indelible singing. Now, I can't conceive of being without access to that astonishing sound.
The late John Ardoin, the most incisive of the singer's biographers, gave away his first Callas recording because he could not stand what he heard. But he nonetheless found himself oddly haunted by it. He later bought another copy, listened again and was hooked forever.
When Ardoin met Callas, he admitted he hadn't liked her voice initially.
"I thought not," she said. "Generally, I upset people the first time they hear me, but I am usually able to convince them of what I am doing."
Usually, but most certainly not always. One reason I love Callas so much is because she invariably divides people, challenges them, makes them think, feel, take a stand. You cannot possibly be neutral about this woman, this force.
One of my favorite Callas moments on record demonstrates that in a big way. It's a live performance at Milan's La Scala, Feb. 16, 1956, of the same opera that introduced her to me -- The Barber of Seville.
The studio recording she made of it in 1957 (the one I heard on that fateful college night) remains widely admired; opinions heard during that live one the year before are decidedly varied -- and noisy.
Early in Act 2, Rosina sings a showy aria as part of her music lesson. Almaviva responds, "Bella voce, bravissima!" ("What a beautiful voice!"), and Dr. Bartolo reaffirms it: "Certo, bella voce" ("Certainly, a beautiful voice").
After Callas finishes Rosina's lesson aria, she gets a nice enough ovation. But when tenor Luigi Alva sings the "Bella voce" line, catcalls and boos erupt from part of the audience, hearty applause from another. The show stops cold as the crowd emotionally debates the question that always dogged Callas -- was her singing really beautiful?
Callas supporters eventually gain the upper hand and things settle down. But no sooner does bass Melchiorre Luise proceed to utter Dr. Bartolo's "Certo, bella voce," than someone yells out, "Ah, no!" The threat of pandemonium hangs in the air for an instant, but Luise repeats his line, with a little more authority, and the performance resumes.
I just love that moment when all hell breaks loose in the house. It gives me chills, makes me feel like I'm there, makes me want to start screaming my two-lira's worth, too.
"It is not enough to have a beautiful voice," Callas once said. "When you interpret a role, you have to have a thousand colors to portray happiness, joy, sorrow, fear. How can you do that with only a beautiful voice?
"Even if you sing harshly sometimes, as I have frequently done, it is a necessity of expression. You have to do it, even if people will not understand."
Callas redefined beauty, just as she redefined what it means to be an opera singer. She expanded the boundaries, while raising the bar.
Today, we get an awful lot of routine opera performances, when all the notes are there (even sung quite beautifully), but unaccompanied by true, piercing moments of music and theater. With Callas, it's hard to come across a recorded performance that doesn't have such moments. Nearly every time she sang, it really was a matter of life and death.
(Much to my regret, my only exposure to the soprano is on disc and the paltry bit of filmed performances available. But Callas can make you see her, just by hearing her sing, which explains why she still attracts fans born too late to experience her in the theater.)
For Callas, music was never just words and melody, but a kind of open-heart surgery where she was both patient and surgeon, exploring, exposing.
"Hers may not have been an easy voice to listen to," Ardoin wrote, "but it was an impossible one to forget. In its dark, hollow recesses, it held the essence of theater.
"Even the flaws in her voice -- that bottled low register, a reedy middle range and a wavering top -- were turned into virtues by her use of them to convey a broad panorama of feelings. She was consistently a giver, never just a taker like so many singers currently before the public. Callas was incapable of indifference and was willing to take enormous risks to conquer onstage."
A colorful life
The legacy of those conquests looms larger than ever 25 years after her truly pathetic, reclusive demise in a Paris flat at the age of 53. That's the way it is with genuine legends; their stars never dim.
Elvis Presley, who died in August one month to the day before Callas, has yet to be dethroned as The King, despite rock music's permutations. And the talents of Joan Crawford, who died in May that same year (like Callas, alone in a big-city apartment), seem all the more brilliant now, despite the posthumous matricide committed by one of her adopted children.
While Presley went from sexy to dumpy, Callas went from dumpy to sexy; she refashioned herself into a glamorous woman. She never lost that image, even as she experienced a decline in vocal resources. And, as with Presley, that decline was not enough to erase the memories.
The original power of her art still burned somewhere within, even during her last, diminished nights on the stage during a 1973-74 concert tour with another past-it singer, Giuseppe di Stefano.
The flash of her genius lit up the operatic world for a relatively short time -- the 1950s, plus or minus a few years.
To the operas of Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini, the soprano brought not just an often spectacular flair for florid melodic lines, but a then-revolutionary brand of hair-raising, intensely personal involvement. It was the same with operas by Verdi, which gained new layers of urgency and theatricality from her vocalism. And she had a stunning way of putting the verisimilitude into verismo warhorses by Puccini and others.
Concurrently, Callas generated reams of press about her private life, including the breakup of her marriage to her manager, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, and a tempestuous affair with Aristotle Onassis that took a serious toll on her musical and emotional well-being.
Rough patches in her singing, especially in the upper register, became more pronounced as her fame broadened. By 1965, she retired from the opera stage, barely into her 40s.
Callas made only a few waves after that. There was a series of master classes in New York in 1971 that inspired Terrence McNally's 1996 hit play Master Class, and that ill-advised tour.
Insecurity haunted Callas in those last years. So did her own legacy, which she could not live up to any longer. In the end, it seems as if her heart, still scarred by Onassis, and her spirit, still darkened by the vocal troubles, simply gave out on Sept. 16, 1977.
Gave it her all
For Callas, opera was not something that could ever be taken lightly (she demonstrated little interest in any other musical form). Unlike many opera stars, Callas routinely sang out in full voice during rehearsals, rather than conserve her strength for the performance. She was as tireless as she was insightful.
She was a prima donna, to be sure, capable of being difficult, demanding, petty, stubborn. But few prima donnas, male or female, have ever been so thoroughly prepared, so thoroughly absorbed in opera's subtleties, so thoroughly devoted to the art and the task of doing it justice.
"They said they didn't like my sound," the character of Callas says in McNally's Master Class. "That wasn't it. They didn't like my soul."
She still makes some folks uncomfortable. They want their opera more congenial, predictable. Callas doesn't let your ear or your mind wander; her soul, not just her sound, pins you to your seat and will not let you go. Maybe you'll want to boo afterward, like that La Scala crowd, but at least you will never, ever be indifferent.
That power to involve, to arouse helps explains the Callas phenomenon. There is an amazing nakedness to her singing -- no artifice, no fakery, no foolishness and, especially, no stinting.
"We give the audience everything," McNally's Callas says about artists in Master Class. "And when it's gone, we're the ones who end up empty."
Maria Callas should never have experienced that emptiness; hers should have been a much longer, much more fulfilled life. Like so many of the heroines she portrayed onstage, she faced death too soon. But, also like those heroines, she enjoys a kind of immortality, bestowed years ago by gushing fans. They named her "La Divina" -- The Divine One.
As the 25th anniversary of her death approaches, Maria Callas wears that crown more securely than ever.
A Star Is Born
Dec. 2, 1923: Maria Anna Sophia Cecilia Kalogeropoulos born in New York to Greek immigrants. (Family name later changed to Callas.)
Entering the Spotlight
1937: Maria moves to Greece, studies with Elvira de Hidalgo at Athens Conservatory, makes her debut with Athens Opera two years later and continues to sing with the company during Nazi occupation.
Meteoric Rise
Aug. 2, 1947: Debuts in La Gioconda at Verona, Italy, launching career that quickly takes her to other major opera houses and, by 1952, an exclusive recording contract with EMI.
Unlikely Duet
April 21, 1949: Maria marries much older Giovanni Battista Meneghini, who becomes her manager.
Unlikely Diet
1952: Begins shedding 65 of her 210 lbs., attributing dramatic loss to a tapeworm, and soon adds glamour to her assets. Love Boat
July 22, 1959: Maria meets Aristotle Onassis; affair begins between the diva and the shipping tycoon. Maria soon leaves Meneghini; she and Onassis become favorites of tabloid press.
Swan Song I
July 5, 1965: Maria gives final performance in an opera, Tosca, at Covent Garden, London.
Swan Song II
Nov. 11, 1974: Final concert performance (with tenor and then-lover Giuseppe di Stefano) in Sapporo, Japan.
Final Curtain
Sept. 16, 1977: Maria dies in Paris of apparent heart attack.