Maria Callas Page 41

  For Maria, seeing him like this—suddenly old and wrinkled, all vigor spent—and listening to his manic outpourings revealed shockingly that the man she had idealized for years was not, after all, the omnipotent hero of her imagination. Suddenly the world seemed a more barren and dangerous place. At no point, though, did she yield to the temptation of being drawn into his web of despair and paranoia; the life in her and her love for him rose to the challenge. It was her existence and, even when he was not with her, the knowledge of her existence and her love that helped pull him through, at least for a time. Yet a vital string had snapped and the signs were everywhere. His business losses during 1973 were enormous. On paper his worth dropped from nearly a billion dollars to half that amount. He was spending less and less time with Jackie and had told her bluntly that he was no longer interested in indulging her luxurious frivolities.

  While Maria’s great love dwindled into a caricature of his former dynamic self, she became engrossed in work as a measure of self-preservation. But everything went wrong in Turin. “Maria knew nothing,” said Zeffirelli, “of moving a chorus or creating a stage picture. As always she went by instinct, but here, something else was needed. She was also very badly served by others. She needed a stage designer who would have taken all the production worries out of her hands so she could concentrate on the acting of the singers.” The designs and costumes of Aligi Sassu were heavy, even ugly, and to compound the problems the conductor, Vittorio Gui, fell ill shortly before the performance and had to be replaced by his assistant. The first night was the big operatic event of the year. The publicity surrounding Maria’s new debut was enormous and expectations stood dangerously high. In the reviews the following day, one could hear the sound of the thud: “The well-intentioned lady did little more than turn the lights on and off.” “Where is the thrilling, tempestuous personality of the singer of the century hiding? Certainly not in this direction . . .”

  Her collaboration with di Stefano had so far produced one failure in the recording studio and one in the opera house. It would have been a good time to say good-bye, but she had nothing else, or that is what she told herself. On May 20, they left together for Japan, where they did a master class for the winners of the Madama Butterfly competition. Luckily, it is not as easy to fail in a master class.

  One dream remained: a comeback singing together. John Tooley, who had succeeded David Webster as general administrator, had suggested a concert just for her at Covent Garden with a full orchestra. Di Stefano wanted a series of recitals around the world with only piano accompaniment. He insisted, encouraged, reassured and insisted again. Finally Maria agreed. Gorlinsky began to book: London, Hamburg, Berlin, Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam . . . As the bookings piled up, Maria grew scared, and when Gorlinsky announced that he would be presenting Renata Tebaldi and Franco Corelli at the Albert Hall in London, she found a reason to call off the tour. “How can you do this before our tour?” she complained. But di Stefano was insistent, di Stefano was persuasive—she was his only lifeboat—and at last Maria signed the contract. There was one fee for both of them and one contract, in Maria’s name: she was agreeing under its terms to supply di Stefano.

  Maria’s world tour, the comeback she and everybody else had prophesied, speculated about, gossiped over, was to be launched at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Ivor Newton, now in his eighties, was to be the accompanist, but as the insurance company would not insure the concerts without the presence of a younger accompanist, he asked Robert Sutherland to come on the tour as his number two. They both began practicing with Maria at Georges Mandel. “She could not decide what she wanted to sing,” remembered Ivor Newton, “and kept changing the program. ‘Don’t worry about it being too short,’ she would tell me. ‘Applause will take up most of the time.’ ” But the more the news about the excitement generated around the world was passed on to her by no less excited friends, the more scared she became. And the more she heard about the thousands clamoring for tickets in London, in Madrid, in Düsseldorf, in Amsterdam, some of them the new generation that had never heard her before, the more she panicked. Each day she would alternate a thousand times between flight and advance. She wrote to her godfather on September 1 :

  I am preparing for my concert tour and I’m scared stiff but I hope that I will be calm and well by my first one on the 22nd of this month, because the expectation is great and of course I am not what I was at 35 years—let’s hope for the best.

  I send you all my love and please love me as I think I deserve.

  All my thoughts are with you.

  Your god-child

  Maria

  It was the first in a series of tender, loving letters written to her godfather during and about the tour, as though at this time of trial she needed even more than before to express her love and draw strength from his.

  Her health, as always, suffered under the pressure; this time it was her eyes. As the day of the first concert approached, the pain in her eyes became so bad that she had to stop every few minutes to put drops in. In the middle of September, Maria, di Stefano and Robert Sutherland left Paris for Milan. They spent their days practicing in di Stefano’s studio, but Maria was feeling weak, apprehensive and unable to cope. The Festival Hall concert on September 22 was canceled. Would she or would she not go on with the tour? Without di Stefano to bolster her, to urge her on and to play on her professionalism and her pride, there is little doubt that she would not have gone on. But di Stefano was there, and on October 25 at the Congress Centrum in Hamburg, Maria was once again singing in public after eight years of silence. It was instantly clear to everyone who cared for her that the tour was going to be the greatest artistic disaster of her career. It was not the wobble, or the sharp changes of register, or her inability to sustain long phrases, or even the obvious care with which she was husbanding what remained of her vocal resources, holding back on both volume and intensity; it was the way in which her preoccupation with vocal survival had robbed her—and us—of that rare expressiveness, that unique ability to go to the heart of the music and through both the blazing power and the fragile beauty of her voice, to stir, disturb or caress us. “Like a monochrome reproduction of an oil painting,” was William Mann’s summing up of the effect a few months later in the London Times.

  From Hamburg they left for Berlin. Robert Sutherland, who was turning the pages for Ivor Newton, had already discovered that mouthing the words for di Stefano to hear and giving him his musical entries was even more important for the concert. “The page turner sang along,” wrote a reviewer in Berlin. It was also becoming embarrassingly obvious that Ivor Newton, great accompanist though he had been in his prime, was simply too old for the strain of a major recital tour. He began having dizzy spells in the street and fantasizing about his death: “If I have a heart attack while Maria is singing a high note,” he said to Robert Sutherland, “you are to push me off my stool and take over as though nothing had happened.” While Ivor Newton was dreaming of a glorious death in the middle of accompanying the great Callas, Maria was frightened that if they had told him they did not want him to continue on the tour, it might really have killed him. So Ivor Newton stayed on.

  From Hamburg to Berlin, to Düsseldorf, to Munich, to Frankfurt, to Mannheim, to Madrid, to London, to Paris, to Amsterdam, to Milan, to Stuttgart, the world watched the drama of a tragic decision unfold. It was as if Maria had decided to destroy Callas in public, choosing to make her comeback with a partner who should have stopped singing years earlier, with a past eighty, semiretired accompanist, in a repertoire which her voice could no longer handle and, most important, without the support and the excitement of a full orchestra, which she needed now more than ever. It was as if she had dared the audience to hear her and then go on believing in the legend that had brought them to the concert halls. And they did go on believing.

  Once, when Maria had been ill for one of the Tosca rehearsals at Covent Garden, John Copley, who was assistant resident producer, took over her exits an
d entrances so that the rehearsal could go on. “Mario, Mario,” cried Mr. Copley from the wings—Tosca’s first words before she makes her entrance. “What a voice!” exclaimed a lady reporter who was covering the rehearsal and had somehow missed the news that the great Callas would not be there.

  It was only the ghost of the great Callas on tour. Yet it was an unbroken succession of ovations, an hour-long program stretched to over two by the applause. In London, at the end of the performance, the audience thronged to the stage to shake hands with Maria, to throw her flowers, their eyes moist or glazed with emotion. But the tour both in Europe and around America—where Robert Sutherland finally replaced Ivor Newton—had, as John Ardoin put it and as many critics implied, “tarnished the artistry of her greatest years.” For Callas, the perfectionist, the prima donna assoluta of the twentieth century, it was a tragic ending to a glorious career. For Maria, growing increasingly isolated and fighting the desperation threatening to engulf her, it was, despite the terror of each performance, a much needed confirmation that she was loved. “Why do they love you?” she had asked once. “Not because I sang a beautiful aria or note; there must be more to it than that.” And the tour convinced her that there was. “She has long commanded our attention, our gratitude, our awe,” wrote Richard Dyer after her concert in Boston. “Now in her struggle and in her exhaustion she asks and earns, at cost to herself and to us, what she had never before seemed to need, our love.”

  Her second concert in London was on December 2, 1973, Maria’s fiftieth birthday. In the middle of the prolonged applause at the end of the concert, Ivor Newton returned to his stool and di Stefano started to sing “Happy Birthday.” The audience went wild, and it was love, not just admiration or enthusiasm, that filled the auditorium. Afterward Maria told Ivor Newton, “I thought you were trying to force me to do an encore. . . . I could have killed you. . . . Then I forgave you everything.”

  The tour had bolstered her confidence and momentarily banished the sense of futility that had filled the last few years. At first she had tried to convince herself that it was all going as well as it could. She wrote to her godfather from Frankfurt:

  Tonight I’m singing my fifth concert—God willing. I’m quite happy, dear Leo. People love me—of course they know I am not as I was 15 years ago, but they are extremely happy so why should I complain . . .

  Well working does me good anyway.

  I love you—keep well—my very special person—

  Your

  Maria

  But as the tour went on, and even without the critics’ comments which made her feel as though she was being pecked by the hard, strong beaks of a flock of predatory birds, she knew that as an artist she had failed. “Don’t tell me anything,” she said to Peter Diamand when he went to see her backstage at the Festival Hall. “I know. Go to Pippo. Tell him something, anything to pep him up. Do it for me. . . .” She knew, but in a television interview with David Holmes, she tried hard to fight the knowledge. Its five minutes twenty seconds provided one of the most painful scenes ever shown on television. You can hear in her voice, you can see in her eyes, the anguish she is pushing back. Yet what really catches at the heart is the almost surreal contrast between the truth we see and the words she speaks. “During the concerts I will improve even more the whole status of the voice. . . . In a year’s time I’m sure that I’ll be much better than what I am . . . what I actually am now, because I have not worked certain muscles for eight long years. . . . Every evening is an improvement.”

  So she said, but by the time she got to New York in February 1974, the tour seemed endless, without purpose or achievement. The fears had increased and the despair had deepened. Dario and Dorle Soria went to see her at the Stanhope where she was staying. “The television was on,” remembers Dorle Soria. “We offered to switch it off. ‘No, I never turn it off,’ she said sharply. ‘Do you?’ ”

  The night before her concert she went on taking one sleeping tablet after another, without counting, hardly knowing what she was doing. The following day she could not get out of bed, let alone sing. Dr. Louis Parrish arrived at her hotel to try to reduce, according to the official announcement, “the acute inflammation of Miss Callas’s upper respiratory tract.” In the state medical directory, Dr. Parrish was listed as limiting his practice to psychiatry, but as the executive director of Carnegie Hall put it, “Well, if it’s psychosomatic, she’s still sick.” An hour before the concert was due to start, the large, fashionable New York crowd milling around in the lobby was told by Dario Soria that the performance would now be held on March 5. A man tried to rip down a five-foot-high poster advertising the concert; another shouted, “She’s done it to me once, she won’t do it again.” Police on horseback were trying to clear the traffic jam as chauffeur-driven cars kept pulling up to deposit their passengers for the concert and then sped off when they heard the news, with the passengers still inside. Maria had asked Robert Sutherland to go to Carnegie Hall to observe the reactions. An excited fan summed them up: “It may be a cancellation, but this is the biggest event of the season.” The isolated outbursts of anger did not affect the general feeling of resignation and compassion. The audience knew, or sensed, that the cancellation had nothing to do with tantrums and whims.

  It is very doubtful whether di Stefano, the man who was supposed to be her source of strength at this time of trial, ever understood her. He was under tremendous strain during the tour, because his daughter whom he adored was, in her early twenties, slowly dying of cancer. As the tour went on, his quarrels with Maria were becoming more and more violent. At first he had a way of saying things, sometimes absurd things, that made her laugh, giggle and feel like a young girl. Now the periods of rows and unpleasantness in between these good times became longer and longer.

  From New York they flew to Boston where they had a concert planned for February 27. On the day itself, they had a fight, at the end of which di Stefano stormed out. Maria called Sol Hurok in New York: “Ask Vasso,” she said, “if she’s still in New York.” Vasso Devetzi, a concert pianist, herself Greek and a close friend of Maria, was at the Regency with her suitcase packed ready to leave for Paris when the order was issued: “You are going to Boston. I’m sending you the press lady to help you get ready. A helicopter is waiting to take you there.” In Boston, Maria was furious: “Imagine him leaving me alone . . . ,” she told Robert Sutherland. “And in Kennedy country!” That day the only rehearsal took place while she was having her hair done. Robert played the piano in one room and Maria sang in the other while the hairdresser was putting her hair up in a chignon. When Vasso arrived, Maria still was not too sure what she was going to sing. She never knew until the last moment what she would choose from the large selection included in the program. Vasso Devetzi played Handel, Schumann and Chopin. After di Stefano’s roaring and crooning in falsetto, it must have come as a relief.

  “Mr. di Stefano is indisposed,” had been the announcement. By the time they returned to New York for the postponed concert, he had stopped being “indisposed,” and on March 5, they were ready to face together their select audience at Carnegie Hall. A few hours before they were due to leave their hotel, Maria heard of Sol Hurok’s sudden death. He had organized her American tours since the 1950s, but the effect of the shock went far beyond the unexpected death of an old friend. His death on the afternoon of her concert was for Maria in her present highly susceptible state an omen of ill luck. She was overcome by an irrational but overwhelming feeling that from now on anything she undertook would be a failure. She was finally persuaded to go on with the concert that night to avoid a second cancellation for the same audience, but she was in a distraught state.

  For anyone who cared for Maria, or even for anyone who knew where the next note was meant to be, it was sheer agony to watch her struggle through with a voice in ruins and to wonder just how far off target she would be. Before the concert began, she had made a speech dedicating it to Sol Hurok’s memory and apologizing for her overwrough
t emotional state. At the end of the concert she nearly had a complete breakdown on the stage. She suddenly launched into a long, bitter and largely incoherent attack on the way opera houses, and especially the Met, were being run. Once again she saw herself as the victim of managements which would not give her adequate rehearsal time and proper artistic conditions in which to work. It was rambling, painful and with practically the entire Met establishment there, intensely embarrassing; it was impossible to miss the agony under the aggression. The audience froze as the mask fell away. No one knew how long she would go on, or whether she would ever stop. Suddenly, very revealingly, she changed tack. Singing at the Met, she said, with the support of the orchestra, chorus and scenery, was a game compared to what she had done tonight. It was partly self-justification but, even more, a bitter judgment on herself; she could no longer refuse to see the hopelessness of the way she had chosen to come back to the stage after eight years.