Love Among the Ruins

Just 75 years ago, on December 3, 1923, Maria Callas, perhaps the greatest opera singer of our century, was born here in New York in a hospital in Spanish Harlem. For the next 54 years, her personal life was (as Ethan Mordden said in his definitive diva study Demented) "a musical comedy by Eugene O'Neill." Maria's bitter stage mother Evangelia could have stepped out of Gypsy. In true My Fair Lady style, Callas transformed herself from an ungainly frump into a pretty fair approximation of Audrey Hepburn � just in time to get trapped in a hopeless, self-destructive love affair with a two-timing man (think Funny Girl, with Onassis standing in for Nick Arnstein.)

The melodramatic facts of Callas life, perhaps too familiar to us through Terrence McNally's play Master Class, tend to overshadow Callas's legacy of operatic interpretation. She's not the easiest singer to cuddle up to: appreciating Callas requires hard work and perseverance. To begin with, there is the matter of the timbre or basic sound of the voice, which in Callas's case is the exact opposite of soothing. That's a turnoff for "tone queens," admirers of the lush voices of Leontyne Price or Renee Fleming. But timbre is the surface of singing, the equivalent of a beautiful face or body. One can be infatuated with that sort of beauty, but what one loves for a lifetime is something deep below, something rich and abiding that persuades you to forgive even the most glaring surface flaws.

What we adore in Callas is her vocal message, her discourse in the language of singing. Because we are not, in general, used to such densely meaningful communication from opera singers, it takes a while to adjust to what Callas is doing. She does nothing for show, and she throws nothing away. Every instant matters. As such, you can't relax when Callas is singing or you'll get lost; you'll lose sight of the whole.

So: the best way to appreciate Callas is to shut out distractions: lock the door, unplug the phone, sit quietly with a libretto or score -- or even just with your eyes shut. Your job is to listen and to allow Callas to work her magic. The 1955 Norma from La Scala (available on the bargain-priced Gala label) is a very fine place to start. Listen, for example, to the subtle phrase-by-phrase variations in tempo, vocal color and volume in the recitative preceding "Casta diva," mirroring the priestess's conflicting emotions. Notice that it's not "acting with the voice," as if singing were talking on pitch. All the effects are done with musical means, little rubati and portamenti, smooth attacks and hard attacks, connected notes and staccato notes. And then notice that with these tools Callas builds the aria itself into a whole, all the details subordinated to a unified mood of calm and exaltation.

All Callas's work is like this, even after her voice became less and less physically capable of doing what her imagination demanded. We are promised a glimpse of the later Callas's genius on a CD-ROM mastered by Mike Richter, who has assembled onto a single disc an entire semester of classes the diva taught at the Juilliard School of Music, the very sessions that inspired McNally's play. Unlike the Broadway hit, this recording offers no gossip about Callas's private life; rather it is an encyclopedia of the vocal art, with special emphasis on the constant hard work and intense musical preparation that gives a singer the freedom to interpret. From time to time, to demonstrate a point, Callas sings, and suddenly, she�s there, communicating, vibrating, making the music live, with perfectly judged ornaments, a solid messa di voce, and a flawless wind-instrument trill. We hear big sections of Verdi, Puccini, Mozart � even tenor and baritone arias, with the sweep and grandeur that only the greatest artists can achieve.

As one listens, one begins to feel like an archeologist who discovers beauty hidden inside rubble. To listen to Maria Callas is to go on an excavation where a most precious treasure awaits the explorer.

James Jorden