It is not overstating the case to say that Maria Callas forever altered how people listen to opera and what is expected of an opera singer. Her comparatively short stage career was essentially from 1948 to 1959, after which, with the exception of a dozen-or-so staged performances through 1965, she mainly gave concerts. But what made her unique, and what we can hear on the 90 Opera arias presented here, was her ability to get to the heart of each of the characters she portrayed (many of which she never sang on stage) through fidelity to text and music, the light and shade of tone, phrasing, instinct and her enormous — three octave — range. Callas was what is referred to as a 'soprano sfogato' (or 'soprano assoluta'), which, essentially, means, as the great Italian conductor Tullio Serafin first said about her, that she could sing anything written for the female voice. In the first half of the 19th century, before vocal ranges were so clearly defined, women's voices were categorised as either soprano or contralto, high or low, light or dark. But if one reads contemporary reports about Giuditta Pasta, for whom Bellini composed both Amina in La sonnambula and the heroine of Norma, two vastly different roles (and two of Callas's great successes), it seems as if the writers are describing Callas. The 'sfogato' or 'unlimited' voice is anchored in the mezzo range, but through study, or nature (in Callas's case, both) can extend upward to incorporate notes above the high B natural - sometimes as high as E. The timbre is basically darkly hued and has the power to cut through full orchestration (as in Norma) in exclamatory sections, but includes great agility in the filigreed bel canto style (as in the role of Amina, and sections of Norma as well) and can be manipulated to sing at any dynamic level at any register. It almost sounds too good to be true, and while there have been other singers since Callas - Leyla Gencer and Montserrat Caballé come to mind - who have come close, none has defined each role she sang in quite the same manner. Her story is well known: born in New York on 2 December 1923 to Greek immigrant parents, she won first place in a national amateur talent contest on the Mutual Radio Network, after which her mother began entering her in a seemingly endless cycle of singing competitions. In 1937 Maria and her mother left the United States for Greece, where she soon entered the Athens Conservatory (passing for 16 in order to be admitted) and in 1940 began her studies with the celebrated coloratura soprano Elvira de Hidalgo. De Hidalgo realised that her student had the raw material that would be receptive to training as a soprano whose voice makes full use of the whole range from mezzo to high soprano, while making certain that the technique never veered from the rules of bel canto — seamless legato, agility, great breath control. Each register of the voice — chest, mixed and head — is trained separately and the three registers are then joined together into a more or less unified whole, though the transition from one to another is never completely seamless. (This was a criticism levelled at Giuditta Pasta, to be mimicked in the case of Callas 120 years later.) De Hidalgo gave Callas endless exercises to keep the voice high, light and supple. Acclaim came in 1947 when she appeared under the conductor Tullio Serafin in Verona as La Gioconda, and she was soon in demand for many of the heavier soprano roles: Isolde, Turandot, Leonora (La forza del destino), Aida, Norma, Brünnhilde and Kundry. But superstardom arrived in Venice in January 1949 when, to fill in for an indisposed soprano at Serafin's behest, Callas learned and sang the ornate, delicate, bel canto role of Elvira in Vincenzo Bellini's I puritani in a week's time; this feat was all the more remarkable considering that she had just completed a series of performances of the Walküre Brünnhilde. Under Serafin's tutelage, she took Italy — and eventually the world — by storm, breathing new life into the bel canto roles, operas that had been deemed dramatically vacant and relegated to the 'songbirds,' the high, coloratura sopranos whose main interests were vocal acrobatics and pretty, chirpy sounds. Her portrayal of the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor was revolutionary: while she certainly excelled in the stratospheric coloratura of the role, she also brought out the innate tragedy of this sinned-against character that had been lost for a hundred years. At the opera's premiere, people in the audience wept at Lucia's madness; by the 1950s, they were waiting for the high notes and little else. Callas taught the opera world how to listen as if experiencing the music for the first time. Her feuds with the heads of opera companies (the Metropolitan, La Scala, and Rome), professional jealousies, frequent cancellations, glamorous jet-setting (in 1959 she began a well-publicised affair with the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis) became as newsworthy as her singing. The causes of her growing vocal problems — unreliable high notes, a pitch-altering 'wobble' on sustained notes, uneven transitions between registers from the top to the bottom of her range, overly forceful singing — were hotly debated and remain so to this day. As mentioned above, she retired from opera in 1965 after five years of drastically curtailed stage appearances; performed in a non-singing role in Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Medea in 1970; gave master classes at Juilliard in 1971—1972; and took on an ill-advised concert tour with the tenor Giuseppe di Stefano in 1973—1974. Even now, listening to the distinctions, both vocal and dramatic, that Callas can make among characters, one is dazzled. And then there's the sheer sound — tender, girlish, murderous, charming, imperious, innocent, seductive, filled with either love or hate — it was a voice that could be anything, except, some have argued, conventionally pretty. This is not altogether true; it's just that 'pretty' did not interest her: 'It is not enough to have a beautiful voice,' she said. 'When you interpret a role, you have a thousand colours to portray happiness, joy, sorrow, fear. How can you do this with only a beautiful voice?' The sweetness and sincerity with which Amina addresses her dear friends at the very start of La Sonnambula tells us why she is so loved in her village; when the vocal line begins to flower, Callas's high staccati are timidly in character and perfectly executed. Contrast this with her singing of 'Casta Diva', Norma's great opening prayer: the sound is warmer and darker but not heavy; the long lines are sculpted as if out of marble. And near the end, after an ascent to high B flat, Callas achieves a lovely diminuendo and then a downward chromatic scale that has been compared to a string of pearls. It is as tranquil and noble as Amina's music is joyful. And then there is hatred, Anna Bolena's final words from the opera of the same name. 'Coppia iniquia, I'estrema vendetta', she sings almost with clenched teeth, as she curses the marriage of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour. The upward succession of trills in the middle of the voice articulate rage; the tone bottled up, all of the fury and misery vented. We enter the darkness with Maddalena's aria from Giordano's Andrea Chénier. 'They killed my mother at the door of my room', Maddalena sings with an almost dead, emotionless tone, as befits this character's almost catatonic dejection. When she pictures the flames surrounding her, Callas/ Maddalena sounds panicked, but she soon settles back into the deadness and loneliness. And then, as in a dream, she tells how love came to her: this image carries her through, in solid tone and in a semi-ecstatic state, to the aria's final, solid B natural. A small melodrama, a gutwrenching experience. Wally's aria finds the character resolute but sad, distantly picturing the snow and clouds into which she is being set adrift. The voice hardens and then pulls back when she realises that she is bound for sorrow, the tone darkening. The sound sweetens when she thinks of her mother and past happiness, but realising she will never see her again, she draws the tone to a whisper, almost unable to imagine such sadness. The ending, as one might imagine, is fierce and tragic. Yet another example of a complex dramatic situation sung/acted with nuance that makes the situation tangible. How can one reconcile — in one voice — the presence of joy, nobility, fury, tragedy and darkness with the pure showiness and silliness of the state of affairs in Meyerbeer's Dinorah? Or the virginal innocence of Gilda in Verdi's Rigoletto? In the former, which is one of the great 'songbird' showpieces in the repertoire, our young, eponymous heroine, has lost her mind. Wandering the hills with her pet goat (!), she spots her shadow and 'plays' with it: this is the aria's dramatic content! It's a trifle, but Callas actually allows us to hear what Dinorah thinks she's doing: the weird echo effects as she toys with her shadow, asking it to answer and sing with her, are achieved through an eerie drawing back of the tone in the repeated phrases; if we did not know better, we'd suspect it of being electronically manipulated. More variations follow: can art for art's sake ever be better justified? The upward runs and the interplay with the flute are a delight. A trill that doesn't quite catch leads to a cadenza, a better trill and a rock-solid high D-flat. The fact that Callas recorded this aria and the Wally aria in the same week is astonishing: this is not about a voice maturing, or aging or changing: it is about art. Her Gilda, like her Butterfly, are young girls as well, but their dramas are more serious, as are their arias. Gilda begins the recitative dreamily repeating the name of her beloved; Callas's downward portamento on the word 'innamorato' 'lovesick' is almost a sigh --- the word becomes onomatopoetic. With the start of the aria proper, she uses Verdi's rests between notes to depict breathlessness; each phrase is connected from then on with perfect legato or upward portamento -- the whole aria becomes one long reverie. The voice tapers to a wisp when she refers to her 'last breath'. Breathless, expressive staccato as her thoughts fly ('volera'), girlish/womanly ecstasy is anticipated. She repeats his name in a trance-like state. By the end of the aria it isn't merely perfect singing; we actually know this young girl. We could continue to give examples — the dignity of the vestal virgin; Lucia's fragile happiness and eventual madness; Leonora's predicament in Il trovatore; Turandot's iciness; Manon's introspection and self-doubt; Dalila's cruel seduction; Carmen's one-of-a-kind arrogance; Tosca's jealousy and piety; the hallucinatory guilt of Lady Macbeth's Sleepwalking Scene — practically an entire opera in 11 minutes. These recordings offer a vast portrait gallery. Suffice it to say that the shadow of Maria Callas looms long: sopranos who sing her great roles are still compared to her, 50 years after her career ended. Her musico/dramatic choices were uniquely right due to a combination of instinct, rigorous study and a voice that encompassed vast colours and simply did not sound like any other. She recreated the entire soul of a character in a few minutes of music. On September 16, 1977, Maria Callas died of a heart attack at her Paris home, aged 53. "I've just seen her on her bed. She was the very image of La Traviata as performed in 1956 at La Scala in Milan. There's not a wrinkle on her face. She looks like she's resting," testifies Michel Glotz, her former artistic director. END
