About Maria Callas
A well known and frequently debated fact about Maria Callas is that, a few years into her swift rise to worldwide fame, she went on a savage diet that swiftly turned her from a pudgy if vocally athletic young soprano into a svelte and stylish woman. Many people, however, feel that this undermined her voice in the long run and contributed to the comparative shortness of her career, and maybe even to her surprisingly early death. (Although singers do tend to die earlier than most; think of Jussi Bjoerling and Enrico Caruso.)
I have a little theory about this. Maria's first husband, the Milanese businessman Giovanni Battista Meneghini, said that Maria was sterile, incapable of conceiving. She could not have children. I would not be surprised if her discovery of this came shortly before the famous diet. Maria Callas at her best, on stage, did not just sing. And I am not speaking of acting in the technical sense, either, although she was born to master a stage like a queen. It was something more. She projected, radiated femininity and charm. Callas, objectively, did not have a beautiful face: her rather low forehead and enormous nose would have combined, in a normal woman, to make her look plain. But nobody, nobody, who had seen her sing, could possibly call her plain, The impression give was consistently that of extraordinary beauty. In fact - this is my theory - I think you might say that she lived out her nature as a woman on stage. Feminine by nature, she was denied the natural result of being a woman. But she had something else: that amazing gift that everyone, beginning with her harridan of a mother, had noticed since she was a child. And into her music, or rather into her singing - which included her stage presence, her physical presence - she poured the whole of her womanhood. If she could not be a mother, she could be a woman - Woman herself in her million forms - in front of the whole world. She could give the world an experience, an image, of the feminine, that would stand, to everyone, for absolute artistic truth. She might not be a mother, but she could be a goddess.
Look at her as Carmen. Carmen, understand, is bad news. She's the kind of girl who ruins lives, including her own. She is often played as a slut, or at least as a heavy, threatening femme fatale. That is NOT what Maria Callas does with her:
This is a Carmen who would seduce a saint - as indeed, in the opera, she pretty much does. She is smiling, continuously sweet, feminine, not brutally carnal - one feels, at first, more like hugging her, and perhaps kissing her on the cheek, than jumping on her; and that is the secret. Of course, from time to time you can see the claws ("et si je t'aime, prends garde a toi!"), and the whole performance has an underlying sensuality and muscularity that hints at hidden danger. But the conception is not only extraordinarily subtle, it is true to life. The kind of woman who would seduce and ruin a man would look and act exactly like this.
I have a little theory about this. Maria's first husband, the Milanese businessman Giovanni Battista Meneghini, said that Maria was sterile, incapable of conceiving. She could not have children. I would not be surprised if her discovery of this came shortly before the famous diet. Maria Callas at her best, on stage, did not just sing. And I am not speaking of acting in the technical sense, either, although she was born to master a stage like a queen. It was something more. She projected, radiated femininity and charm. Callas, objectively, did not have a beautiful face: her rather low forehead and enormous nose would have combined, in a normal woman, to make her look plain. But nobody, nobody, who had seen her sing, could possibly call her plain, The impression give was consistently that of extraordinary beauty. In fact - this is my theory - I think you might say that she lived out her nature as a woman on stage. Feminine by nature, she was denied the natural result of being a woman. But she had something else: that amazing gift that everyone, beginning with her harridan of a mother, had noticed since she was a child. And into her music, or rather into her singing - which included her stage presence, her physical presence - she poured the whole of her womanhood. If she could not be a mother, she could be a woman - Woman herself in her million forms - in front of the whole world. She could give the world an experience, an image, of the feminine, that would stand, to everyone, for absolute artistic truth. She might not be a mother, but she could be a goddess.
Look at her as Carmen. Carmen, understand, is bad news. She's the kind of girl who ruins lives, including her own. She is often played as a slut, or at least as a heavy, threatening femme fatale. That is NOT what Maria Callas does with her:
Click to viewThis is a Carmen who would seduce a saint - as indeed, in the opera, she pretty much does. She is smiling, continuously sweet, feminine, not brutally carnal - one feels, at first, more like hugging her, and perhaps kissing her on the cheek, than jumping on her; and that is the secret. Of course, from time to time you can see the claws ("et si je t'aime, prends garde a toi!"), and the whole performance has an underlying sensuality and muscularity that hints at hidden danger. But the conception is not only extraordinarily subtle, it is true to life. The kind of woman who would seduce and ruin a man would look and act exactly like this.