Maria Callas's Lyric and Coloratura Arias

Ginger Dellenbaugh

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501379031
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

More than 40 years after her death, the legend of Maria Callas, "La Divina Assoluta, " remains unsurpassed. Much has been written about her sensational opera career and fraught private life, from her definitive mastery of iconic opera roles to her love affairs and tantrums. The prototype for the 20th century celebrity diva, Callas emblematizes the cliche of tormented talent – genius in the ring with catastrophe.
Her extraordinary voice, in particular, has become an object of cult-like adoration and cultural significance almost with a life of its own: as fetish object, as sophisticated sonic signifier, and most recently, as the lifeblood for a Callas hologram. Such adoration is not without consequences. When Callas is transformed into a vessel for such transcendent magic, it overshadows what is perhaps her most superhuman ability – the masterful technique she deployed to shape and craft her astounding instrument. Singing bodies are working bodies, enacting an intimate and complex form of artistic labor and cultural signification.
Using one of Callas's first recital recordings from 1954, this book envisions each aria as a lens to examine various aspects of vocalization and cultural reception of the feminized voice in both classical and pop culture, from Homer's Sirens to Star Trek. With references to works by Marina Abramovic, Charles Baudelaire, Michel Chion, Wayne Koestenbaum, Greil Marcus, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, as well as films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jonathan Demme, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, each chapter explores phenomena unique to the singing voice, including the operatic screaming point, the politics of listening, and the singing simulacrum.

1

Cilea, Adriana Lecouvreur, Act I

Io son l’umile ancella [I am the humble servant of the creative spirit]

The opening two arias on this album are taken from Francesco Cilea’s (1866–1950) most famous opera, Adriana Lecouvreur, which premiered in 1902 in Milan. It was the fourth musical setting of the 1849 play by Eugène Scribe and Ernest Legouvé, loosely based on the life of French actress Adrienne Lecouvreur, one of the most renowned actors of the early eighteenth-century stage. During her lifetime, Lecouvreur was both celebrated for her naturalistic, tragic performances, and infamous for her love affairs. When she lay dying at an early age in what some considered suspicious circumstances, Lecouvreur’s unwillingness to renounce her profession condemned her to burial in unconsecrated ground. One of her most ardent admirers, Voltaire, immortalized her talent and beauty, and criticized the hypocrisy of the French clergy, in a poem after learning of her death.

Like the biography of so many of the famous singers and actresses who would bring her character to life on stage and screen, including Callas, Sarah Bernard, and Joan Crawford, the tale of Lecouvreur’s life has been generously edited, if not reinvented, to reinforce Romantic stereotypes of female creativity and sacrifice. In this particular aria, the fictional Lecouvreur is rejecting the praise she receives for her acting, opening with a confession designed to accentuate the fragility of her body, and the strength of the external spirit that moves within it: “You see?” She says, “I am barely breathing.” The actress continues to protest that “I am the humble servant of the creator genius; he offers me speech that I give to others’ hearts.” She emphasizes her unimportance, effacing her body from this divine seance: “I am the accent of the verse, the echo of the human drama, the fragile instrument, lowly handmaiden . . . timid, playful, terrible: my name is fidelity. My voice is just a whisper that, with the new day, will die”

Callas never performed the role on stage, and this is the only recording we have of her singing these particular arias. It is a bold opening choice for her first official concert recording; rather than set the tone for the album with a bombastic operatic showstopper, Callas (and one of her most important artistic influences, conductor Tullio Serafin), instead opted for a slightly ambiguous introduction that is dreamy, even pensive.

The sung portion of the aria begins and ends with breath: the “barely breathing” of the initial protest, and the dying whisper at the conclusion. This feat of breathlessness, when operatic singing demands a steady flow of controlled air pressure, is not only a technical challenge—it also creates an effect that embeds the singer’s voice into the sound-tapestry woven by the orchestra.

The aria begins with undulations of sweetly harmonic strings over a gentle sustained tone. These waves of sound slow down, as if through harmonic inertia, leaving an opening for Callas to utter the delicate “Ecco!” [Listen!]—Lecouvreur’s demand, but also Callas’s own. The voice is introduced to the ear; our listening cleaves to it as the strings ooze back in around the sung melody, lapping at it, washing over it. The vocal line is restrained, as if an afterthought. The characteristic amalgam of muffled tone and almost nasal clarity that distinguishes Callas’s unique vocal timbre is clearly audible. One hears her use of the space between the cheeks and lips and the hard gums behind them in these passages; the softness of the mouth as she articulates the text allows for the plangency of this articulating flesh to color the sound. (Anyone can feel the potential of this part of the face by blowing out through the lips as if to imitate the chuffing sound of a horse.)

Cilea constructs an increasing effacement of his fictional Lecouvreur as the aria progresses. The voice has a brief repartee with a violin as if to articulate the actresses’ status as “mere instrument.” The vocal line becomes more disjunct, unable to match the more conjunct melodies expressed by the orchestra. In the final moments of the aria, as Callas sings the octaves written to express Lecouvreur’s whispering, dying voice, the last note sounds on the verge of instability; the narrowed timbre of the vocal production almost makes the pitch flat, as if Callas is forgetting to sing. She lies back into the lush cushion of the strings that swell from the orchestra, and they absorb her fading last note.

The reciprocity between singer and orchestra is exquisite; the deliberate precariousness of that final note, as it acquiesces to the orchestral embrace, makes the acute harmony of the strings all the richer and sweeter in its accuracy. The singer, too, remains autonomous of the orchestra’s ranks through this gesture. We are reminded, in that brief moment of harmonic instability, of humanity, of vocal technique, and of Callas, who could easily have been subsumed into the Romantic, perhaps even lugubrious, slurry of the orchestration. Instead, we are acutely aware of her presence, even when she is silent.

In 1969, Maria Callas appeared in her only non operatic film role as the titular character in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea. Pasolini’s interpretation of the Greek tragedy is gritty and bleak, verging on barbarous. As Medea, the abandoned sorceress who murders her own sons to exact revenge upon their fickle father, Callas haunts the screen. In close-ups, her face is mask-like, dark eyes enormous, hair wild, rows of chains and charms around a neck that seems too fragile to bear their weight. She barely speaks, and when she does, it’s as if into a vacuum. While she pleads, young men in sheepskins grin back at her benignly. Stumbling away from their camp, she paces the cracked, parched landscape; muttering to herself, she wonders why she no longer recognizes the earth and the sky, why they no longer speak to her. Medea is, quite clearly, not of this world, alienated from the environment that surrounds her, unheard and misunderstood.

A year before filming, Maria Callas had been quite publicly abandoned by her lover, shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, for the glamorous presidential widow Jackie Kennedy. Her voice, according to some critics, was in tatters. She had not appeared on the opera stage for a number of years. The face that fills the screen in Pasolini’s film, proud and charismatic, mirrors the face that looks out from numerous record covers, opera posters, and the front pages of lurid tabloids, making the conflation of actress and character not only tantalizing but almost inevitable. As one review of the film concluded, “Callas could play a passionate character who avenged herself with exacting composure, at least in part, because she was one” (Feidelson, 2014).

This nearly silent, resigned Medea forms a poignant coda for the Callas legend, as it was a vi rtuosic vocal embodiment of Medea that, early on in her career, established her as an opera icon. Until Callas took the title role, Luigi Cherubini’s Médée (1797) was an opera that had fallen into obscurity partly because of the extreme difficulty, both musically and emotionally, of the title role. Bringing the character of the infamous sorceress to life on the stage would become one of Callas’s defining artistic achievements. “The Callas instrument,” writes a reviewer of a 1959 recording, “has a bizarre affinity for this role and seems to sail through it. Once Medea/Callas enters, we are taken to a different sphere, one in which every note and word is filled with searing intensity. [. . .] Callas as Medea—the sorceress playing a sorceress” (Siff, 2014).

From the film adaptation that leverages the physical presence and celebrity of its leading actress, to the reviewer who sutures Callas to her role through a simple act of punctuation, the fusion between private life and public performance is easy to make. In fact, the blurring of the line between Callas, the artist, and Callas, the woman, is one of the most problematic aspects of the Callas legend. Daughter of Greek immigrant parents, Callas was born in New York in 1923 and grew up in the shadow of a beautiful and talented older sister, Jackie. Even from a young age, it seemed like her life was played out on a stage. At 16, Callas was already performing opera professionally, the start of a career that seemed formed as much out of pure will as talent.

In Callas reception and critique, the conflation of private life and performance is exacerbated by both the operatic material that made her famous (in addition to Medea, she was noted for playing tragic Verdi heroines like Lady Macbeth, Aida, and Violetta) and her much publicized personal life: tantrums during rehearsals, broken singing engagements, the doomed love affair with Onassis, her subsequent loss of voice, and self-imposed seclusion. Correlation is easily perceived as causation—the extremes of personal experience interpreted as that which enables, and sometimes undermines, Callas’s effectiveness as a performer.

It is female singers, in particular, who seem subject to this toxic psychoanalysis, as if they cannot prevent the drama of music, the excess of singing, from bleeding over into their private lives and vice versa.¹ Callas was certainly not the first female singer subject to such speculation. When the celebrated French soprano Cornélie Falcon lost her voice, dramatically and permanently, mid-performance in 1837, vicious gossip considered the trauma punishment for an illicit abortion. Female singers continue to be subject to the same scrutiny. Shania Twain’s voice was “silenced” by her traumatic divorce from producer Mutt Lange, Christina Aguilera’s melismatic flourishes are seen as signs of personal “indulgence.” Beyoncé invents an alter ego, Sasha Fierce, as a prophylactic to insulate her private identity from public performances of excess and sexuality.

In Callas’s case, the translation of real, into playacted, passions intersects most problematically at the publicly analyzed and imagined site of Callas’s body, watershed for the intersection of the private and public: as a site for synchrony (Medea/Callas), a site with an unruly voice that must “respond to her wishes,” a site of sorcery and magic. Even when it is silent on screen, this body is imbued with an expressive power all on its own. On and off the stage, bodily indications, such as weight fluctuations or inconsistencies in vocal production, become saturated with meaning, ripe for diagnosis. Too often, as scholars like Nina Sun Eidsheim have noted, these symptoms are reflected back onto Callas herself: “Callas’s seeming non-conformity to ‘docility and gender normalization’ is punished by dismissing her vocal artistry as all ‘charisma’”—an “electrical presence and ‘supreme acting, unforgettable acting’” at the expense of “Callas’s technical abilities and artistic agency” (Eidsheim, 249–68).

Naturally, physical and mental health have ramifications on physical activity, and thus on vocal health—it would be inadvisable, if not impossible, to attempt to disentangle the body of Callas, the private person, from Callas, the performing artist. And yet the focus on Callas’s body obscures her agency as an artist and craftsman. Specifically, the problem lies with conceiving Callas’s body as a single site for the intersection of public and private, with the voice as a symptomatic Geiger counter. The mystification of Callas’s vocal production reinforces this fusion even further by denying the role that technique plays in performance. Her creative labor, as a singer, is attributed to powers beyond her control. Subsequently, and significantly, she is stripped of her agency as a technician; artistry becomes a sign of vulnerability, even of hysteria, rather than a sign of mastery.

Denying women autonomy as artistic laborers is deeply embedded in historical and fictional narratives that explicate the perceived excess of the female voice. From Homer’s Sirens, whose seductive voices in hideous bodies lure men to their deaths, to Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s 1886 novel The Future Eve, where the voice of the recalcitrant beloved is captured to be implanted in a more docile, android body (created by, of all people, a fictional Thomas Edison), the synchrony between female body and female voice is posed as undesirable, if not monstrous. More often than not, representations of the female voice serve to disenfranchise, if not completely erase, the female subject. The casual psychoanalysis of the female voice in contemporary critique, whether it be of Maria Callas or Nina Simone, continues this tradition; while shifting the nexus of vocal power onto the female subconscious, it perpetuates Romantic fantasies of artistic sublimity, of the female artist as channel or medium for divine powers. The voice, in these narratives, emerges as if by magic, and powerful characters (Medea/Callas) reflect personal experience, instead of craftsmanship.

All this is exacerbated by the inaccessibility of the voice itself. One of the greatest difficulties in evaluating technical vocal skill arises from the physical position of the voice in the body. Unlike other instruments of virtuosic prowess, like the violin or the piano, the vocal apparatus is invisible. The inability to witness the subtle, intricate manipulations of vocal production thus shrouds technique in mystery, conflating applied skill with unconscious expression. For female singers, in particular, the concealed apparatus of the voice is mirrored by the hidden apparatus of sexual reproduction, an erotic connection that, as musicologist Bonnie Gordon has explored, had consequences for female opera singers and their status on stage and in public in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This prejudice about the female voice and its perceived sex ual excess still lingers in our conception of female vocality, particularly in the critical reception of female celebrity. The disempowerment of the female singer allocates interpretative control over the voice’s merits onto the listener, where the voice becomes an object—stolen, possessed, caressed, and even despised. Reinstating the power of the working body in vocal production is like a fail-safe against fetishization—a constant reminder that behind every transcendent moment, there is the physical application of craft and practice of creative labor.

Notes

1 Consider, for example, the quote above about Callas with the gender of the singer and role exchanged: “Bryn Terfel (Or McCormick or Pinza, or, or, or . . .) has a bizarre affinity for this role . . . Terfel as Don Giovanni—a misogynistic womanizer playing a misogynistic womanizer.”

2

Cilea, Adriana Lecouvreur, Act IV

Poveri fiori [Poor flowers]

The final act of Adriana Lecouvreur’s convoluted plot opens on Adriana’s “name day,” a holiday celebrated in some parts of Europe that follows the calendar of saints where a person receives gifts on the day of the saint whose name accords with their own. Among other luxurious gifts, such as a priceless diamond necklace, Adriana receives a mysterious casket containing a desiccated bouquet of violets. Surprised and dismayed, she recognizes them as a gift she once gave to her fickle lover. Embracing the flowers, putting them to her face to try to find a last trace of their original scent, Lecouvreur sings “Poor flowers! Buds of the meadow, born only yesterday, dying today—what oaths of a treacherous heart!” Little does she know that the violets have been soaked in poison by a romantic rival.

Hearing these two arias, “Io son l’umile ancella” and “Poveri fiori,” back to back makes one wish that Callas had brought the character of Adriana Lecouvreur to life in a full production of the opera. Her characterization, even in these two brief arias, is tantalizing. Gone in this second aria are Cilea’s undulating strings, replaced by a more restrained march-like motif, but Callas’s voice resonates, in the first phrases, with the same restraint as in “Io son l’umile ancella.” The first octave leap is beautifully delivered, as if without effort; Callas gives the impression of intimate self-dialogue: Lecouvreur with the flowers in her hand, remembering their intention as a gift of love. As the aria progresses, Callas widens her resonance, lowering her tongue and spreading the back of the throat (like yawning), which adds breadth to her vocal timbre, that unique, slightly nasal twang in the middle range, and more force in the upper notes. The orchestra swells as if responding to her engagement; briefly, a clarinet mirrors the vocal line. With the next octave leap, Lecouvreur becomes more distraught, and yet Callas metes out melancholy with iron-like control.

Just a minute int...