My Back Pages

So much critical ink has been spilled on Maria, Pablo Larrain and Steven Knight's biographical fantasy on the last days of operatic soprano Maria Callas (footnote 1), that everyone who hasn't yet seen it "knows" exactly why. Which is a crying shame, given that very few reviews present the musical reasons that make Maria essential viewing, especially for people who care deeply about music.

Everyone who comes to Callas comes to her in a different way. As a teenager, I kept hearing what a great, genre-defining singer she was. Because opera was in my blood—I was weaned on the acoustic recordings of Enrico Caruso, Amelita Gall-Curci, and Louisa Tetrazzini—my curiosity was piqued. Eventually, I visited the public library and borrowed Callas's late-career recital, Rossini and Donizetti Arias, which hit stores shortly before Callas's last operatic performances, in Puccini's Tosca, in July 1965. Every time she hit a climactic high note, her voice wobbled uncontrollably. I thought it was funny, laughed out loud, and returned the LP to the library with a shrug.

Nonetheless, tales of Callas's greatness persisted. Finally, in my junior or senior year at Amherst, I bought what "everyone" had declared one of the most important opera recordings of the century, Callas's 1953 mono recording of Tosca with tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano and bass Tito Gobbi, conducted by Victor de Sabata.

At one in the morning, I cued up side 1 on my father's aging Magnavox record player (footnote 2). Not knowing the plot, I listened and listened, wondering when I'd finally hear Callas's voice. After what seemed an interminable wait, I heard this strange, muffled sound from what seemed to be an "offstage" voice. To be honest, the sound was so covered, I wasn't sure what or who it was. But as the voice neared the microphone on the second repeat and clearly uttered the name of Tosca's lover, "Mario," I saw sparks fly before my eyes. Honest. Nothing like that had ever happened before.

"Oh my God, that's Maria Callas!" declared my inner voice. Never had I heard a singer pack so much jealousy and fury into a single word. I didn't even know it was possible to sing like that. At that moment, one aspect of Callas's greatness became clear. As one Callas authority once wrote, Callas was the only opera singer who ever dared emit tones of pure hatred onstage.

It's important for audiophiles to experience Maria through a good sound system, because it contains sufficient carefully chosen excerpts of great Callas recordings and performances to reveal what made her great and why her voice aroused so much controversy. Take the excerpt from the close of her studio recording of "Ebben? Ne andrò lontana," the aria from Catalani's rarely performed opera, La Wally, which figured in the movie Diva. As Callas rises to the climactic high B, her intensity is as breathtaking as her sound is frightening. If you were to excerpt that B from the recording and play it on repeat without interruption, someone might justifiably exclaim, "What a horrible sound!" Yet, in the context of the opera, the passion Callas conveys through her sound makes her performance emotionally shattering.

The "Ave Maria" from Verdi's Otello will enable you to hear how vulnerable and alone Callas could sound, while her frightening high A at the start of a short excerpt from Cherubini's Medea leaves no question that she could stop someone dead in their tracks with the power of her exclamations. In a live performance of Donizetti's Anna Bolena, she once extended a pause between a repeated phrase long enough to stare down an entire hostile audience and win it over.

An excerpt from her first studio recital, recorded in 1949 when she was 25, reveals Callas bringing unparalleled nuance and flexibility to a single, exquisitely extended bel canto line by Bellini. I still can't get over how much she expresses in so few notes.

A single excerpt, "Sempre libera" from Callas's 1953 commercial recording of Verdi's La Traviata, gives us a taste of Callas's facility in high-flying, rapid-fire coloratura. Even though her basic sound was anything but carefree—we hear the "other" Callas in a highly nuanced brief excerpt from Anna Bolena—Callas's dramatic instincts and musical intentions were so strong as to leave us convinced. I once compared six different recordings of Mimi's great aria from the first act of Puccini's La Bohème and was amazed to discover that Callas, whose voice least fit the Mimi stereotype, conveyed the music's innate drama and passion better than anyone else.

To Larrain's credit, he also enables us to hear some of what was not right with the voice. The start of Tosca's "Vissi d'arte" from Callas's 1964 stereo recording of the opera reveals that her notorious wobble had descended lower into the range. We can also hear the recording engineer intentionally raise the level of the orchestra to mask her wobble on the aria's climactic high B-flat. Jump ahead 10 years, and the flawed encore from her final live London recital (not included on the soundtrack recording) leaves no question as to why she abandoned the operatic stage nine years earlier.

It's a shame that Larrain and Knight omit basic biographical details about Callas's life and occasionally present conjecture as fact. A brief biographical segment could have clarified the movie's numerous references and flashbacks. Nonetheless, the manner in which Maria establishes Callas's artistic greatness makes the film invaluable.

See and hear Maria on the largest screen available, with the best sound system. As you listen, you'll understand how Callas singlehandedly altered the history of opera and what we thought possible from the human voice.

---

Footnote 1: See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_(2024_film).

Footnote 2: It was sweetmodern.com/products/vintage-record-player-on-brass-tipped-legs-by-magnavox/46261/c55">this one.