From the beginning there was a rivalry between Tebaldi and La Callas., she was an Italian lyrico
spinto soprano.,the contrast between her voice and my voice was like day and night, Champagne and Coca Cola, no dishwater.It's true she had the voice of an angel,day in and day out sang different arias and different operas with the same voice, beautiful but boring to death, the same voice, the same rone, same sound to espress love. anger ,hope and despair.It's that oprea then in that case I.between Callas's often unconventional vocal qualities and Tebaldi's classically beautiful sound resurrected an argument as old as opera itself, namely, beauty of sound versus the expressive use of sound.
[16][31]
In 1951, Tebaldi and Maria Callas were jointly booked for a vocal recital in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Although the singers agreed that neither would perform encores, Tebaldi took two, and Callas was reportedly incensed.
[50] This incident began the rivalry, which reached a fever pitch in the mid-1950s, at times even engulfing the two women themselves, who were said by their more fanatical followers to have engaged in verbal barbs in each other's direction. Tebaldi was quoted as saying, "I have one thing that Callas doesn't have: a heart"
[7] while Callas was quoted in
Time magazine as saying that comparing her with Tebaldi was like "comparing
Champagne with
Cognac. No, with Coca Cola."
[51] However, witnesses to the interview stated that Callas only said "champagne with cognac", and it was a bystander who quipped, "No, with Coca-Cola", but the
Time reporter attributed the latter comment to Callas.
[7]
According to
John Ardoin, however, these two singers should never have been compared.
[16] Tebaldi was trained by
Carmen Melis, a noted
verismo specialist, and she was rooted in the early 20th century Italian school of singing just as firmly as Callas was rooted in 19th century
bel canto.
[16] Callas was a dramatic soprano, whereas Tebaldi considered herself essentially a lyric soprano. Callas and Tebaldi generally sang a different repertoire: in the early years of her career, Callas concentrated on the heavy dramatic soprano roles and later in her career on the
bel canto repertoire, whereas Tebaldi concentrated on late
Verdi and verismo roles, where her limited upper extension
[31] and her lack of a florid technique were not issues.
[16] They shared a few roles, including
Tosca in Puccini's opera and
La Gioconda, which Tebaldi performed only late in her career.
The alleged rivalry aside, Callas made remarks appreciative of Tebaldi, and vice versa. During an interview with Norman Ross in Chicago, Callas said, "I admire Tebaldi's tone; it's beautiful—also some beautiful phrasing. Sometimes, I actually wish I had her voice." Francis Robinson of the Met wrote of an incident in which Tebaldi asked him to recommend a recording of
La Gioconda in order to help her learn the role. Being fully aware of the alleged rivalry, he recommended
Zinka Milanov's version. A few days later, he went to visit Tebaldi, only to find her sitting by the speakers, listening intently to Callas's recording. She then looked up at him and asked, "Why didn't you tell me Maria's was the best?"
[52]
Callas visited Tebaldi after a performance of
Adriana Lecouvreur at the Met in 1968, and the two were reunited. In 1978, Tebaldi spoke warmly of her late colleague and summarized this rivalry:
This rivality
[sic] was really building from the people of the newspapers and the fans. But I think it was very good for both of us, because the publicity was so big and it created a very big interest about me and Maria and was very good in the end. But I don't know why they put this kind of rivality
[sic], because the voice was very different. She was really something unusual. And I remember that I was very young artist too, and I stayed near the radio every time that I know that there was something on radio by Maria.
[13]
Vocal decline[edit]
Several singers have opined that the heavy roles undertaken in her early years damaged Callas's voice.
[46] The mezzo-soprano
Giulietta Simionato, Callas's close friend and frequent colleague, stated that she told Callas that she felt that the early heavy roles led to a weakness in the diaphragm and subsequent difficulty in controlling the upper register.
[53]
Louise Caselotti, who worked with Callas in 1946 and 1947, prior to her Italian debut, felt that it was not the heavy roles that hurt Callas's voice, but the lighter ones.
[4] Several singers have suggested that Callas's heavy use of the
chest voice led to stridency and unsteadiness with the high notes.
[46] In his book, Callas's husband Meneghini wrote that Callas suffered an unusually early onset of menopause, which could have affected her voice. Soprano
Carol Neblettonce said, "A woman sings with her ovaries—you're only as good as your hormones."
[41]
Critic
Henry Pleasants has stated that it was a loss of physical strength and breath-support that led to Callas's vocal problems, saying,
Singing, and especially opera singing, requires physical strength. Without it, the singer's respiratory functions can no longer support the steady emissions of breath essential to sustaining the production of focused tone. The breath escapes, but it is no longer the power behind the tone, or is only partially and intermittently . The result is a breathy sound—tolerable but hardly beautiful—when the singer sings lightly, and a voice spread and squally when under pressure.
[54]
In the same vein,
Joan Sutherland, who heard Callas throughout the 1950s, said in a BBC interview,
[Hearing Callas in Norma in 1952] was a shock, a wonderful shock. You just got shivers up and down the spine. It was a bigger sound in those earlier performances, before she lost weight. I think she tried very hard to recreate the sort of "fatness" of the sound which she had when she was as fat as she was. But when she lost the weight, she couldn't seem to sustain the great sound that she had made, and the body seemed to be too frail to support that sound that she was making. Oh, but it was oh so exciting. It was thrilling. I don't think that anyone who heard Callas after 1955 really heard the Callas voice.
[55]
Michael Scott has proposed that Callas's loss of strength and breath support was directly caused by her rapid and progressive weight loss,
[10] something that was noted even in her prime. Of her 1958 recital in Chicago, Robert Detmer wrote, "There were sounds fearfully uncontrolled, forced beyond the too-slim singer's present capacity to support or sustain."
[18]
Photos and videos of Callas during her heavy era show a very upright posture with the shoulders relaxed and held back. On all videos of Callas from the period after her weight loss, "we watch... the constantly sinking, depressed chest and hear the resulting deterioration".
[56] This continual change in posture has been cited as visual proof of a progressive loss of breath support.
[10][40]
Commercial and
bootleg recordings of Callas from the late 1940s to 1953—the period during which she sang the heaviest dramatic soprano roles—show no decline in the fabric of the voice, no loss in volume and no unsteadiness or shrinkage in the upper register.
[19] Of her December 1952 Lady Macbeth—coming after five years of singing the most strenuous dramatic soprano repertoire—Peter Dragadze wrote for
Opera, "Callas's voice since last season has improved a great deal, the second passagio on the high B-natural and C has now completely cleared, giving her an equally colored scale from top to bottom."
[16] And of her performance of Medea a year later,
John Ardoin writes, "The performance displays Callas in as secure and free a voice as she will be found at any point in her career. The many top B's have a brilliant ring, and she handles the treacherous
tessitura like an eager thoroughbred."
[19]
In recordings from 1954 (immediately after her 80-pound weight loss) and thereafter, "not only would the instrument lose its warmth and become thin and acidulous, but the altitudinous passages would to her no longer come easily."
[10] It is also at this time that unsteady top notes first begin to appear.
[19] Walter Legge, who produced nearly all of Callas's EMI/Angel recordings, states that Callas "ran into a patch of vocal difficulties as early as 1954": during the recording of
La forza del destino, done immediately after the weight loss, the "wobble had become so pronounced" that he told Callas they "would have to give away seasickness pills with every side".
[30] There were others, however, who felt that the voice had benefitted from the weight loss. Of her performance of
Norma in Chicago in 1954,
Claudia Cassidy wrote that "there is a slight unsteadiness in some of the sustained upper notes, but to me her voice is more beautiful in color, more even through the range, than it used to be".
[18] And at her performance of the same opera in London in 1957 (her first performance at Covent Garden after the weight loss), critics again felt her voice had changed for the better, that it had now supposedly become a more precise instrument, with a new focus.
[18] Many of her most critically acclaimed appearances are from the period 1954–1958 (
Norma,
La traviata,
Sonnambulaand
Lucia of 1955,
Anna Bolena of 1957,
Medea of 1958, to name a few).
Callas's close friend and colleague
Tito Gobbi thought that her vocal problems all stemmed from her state of mind:
I don't think anything happened to her voice. I think she only lost confidence. She was at the top of a career that a human being could desire, and she felt enormous responsibility. She was obliged to give her best every night, and maybe she felt she wasn't [able] any more, and she lost confidence. I think this was the beginning of the end of this career.
[13]
Soprano
Renée Fleming has stated that videos of Callas in the late 1950s and early 1960s reveal a posture that betrays breath-support problems:
I have a theory about what caused her vocal decline, but it's more from watching her sing than from listening. I really think it was her weight loss that was so dramatic and so quick. It's not the weight loss
per se - you know,
Deborah Voigt has lost a lot of weight and still sounds glorious. But if one uses the weight for support, and then it's suddenly gone and one doesn't develop another musculature for support, it can be very hard on the voice. And you can't estimate the toll that emotional turmoil will take as well. I was told, by somebody who knew her well, that the way Callas held her arms to her solar plexus [allowed her] to push and create some kind of support. If she were a
Soubrette, it would never have been an issue. But she was singing the most difficult repertoire, the stuff that requires the most stamina, the most strength.
[40]
A change has also come over Voigt’s voice lately, though it’s hard to tell if it’s from weight loss or normal aging—controversy still rages over whether Maria Callas’s drastic diets contributed to her rapid vocal decline. Not that Voigt as yet exhibits any of Callas’s technical problems: Her voice continues to be reliably supported and under control. What is noticeable, however—earlier this season in Verdi’s La Forza del Destino and now in Tosca—is a marked thinning of quality at the very center of the instrument, together with a slight acidity and tightening of the tone that has definitely taken the youthful bloom off, especially at the top.
[57]
Voigt herself explained how her dramatic weight loss affected her breathing and breath support:
Much of what I did with my weight was very natural, vocally. Now I've got a different body—there's not as much of me around. My diaphragm function, the way my throat feels, is not compromised in any way. But I do have to think about it more now. I have to remind myself to keep my ribs open. I have to remind myself, if my breath starts to stack. When I took a breath before, the weight would kick in and give it that extra
Whhoomf! Now it doesn't do that. If I don't remember to get rid of the old air and re-engage the muscles, the breath starts stacking, and that's when you can't get your phrase, you crack high notes.
[58]
Callas herself attributed her problems to a loss of confidence brought about by a loss of breath support, even though she does not make the connection between her weight and her breath support. In an April 1977 interview with journalist Philippe Caloni, she stated,
My best recordings were made when I was skinny, and I say
skinny, not slim, because I worked a lot and couldn't gain weight back; I became even too skinny ... I had my greatest successes—
Lucia,
Sonnambula,
Medea,
Anna Bolena—when I was skinny as a nail. Even for my first time here in Paris in 1958 when the show was broadcast through Eurovision, I was skinny. Really skinny."
[59]
And shortly before her death, Callas confided her own thoughts on her vocal problems to Peter Dragadze:
I never lost my voice, but I lost strength in my diaphragm. ... Because of those organic complaints, I lost my courage and boldness. My vocal cords were and still are in excellent condition, but my 'sound boxes' have not been working well even though I have been to all the doctors. The result was that I overstrained my voice, and that caused it to wobble. (
Gente, October 1, 1977)
[4]
Whether Callas's vocal decline was due to ill health, early menopause, over-use and abuse of her voice, loss of breath-support, loss of confidence, or weight loss will continue to be debated. Whatever the cause may have been, her singing career was effectively over by age 40, and even at the time of her death at age 53, according to
Walter Legge, "she ought still to have been singing magnificently".
[30]
Fussi and Paolillo report[edit]
A 2010 study by Italian vocal researchers Franco Fussi and Nico Paolillo revealed Callas was very ill at the time of her death and her illness was related to her vocal deterioration.
According to their findings, presented at the
University of Bologna in 2010, Callas had
dermatomyositis, a disease that causes a failure of the muscles and tissues, including the larynx. They believe she was showing signs of this disease as early as the 1960s. Fussi and Paolillo cite an initial report by physician Mario Giacovazzo, who in 2002 revealed he had diagnosed Callas with dermatomyositis in 1975. Treatment includes corticosteroids and immunosuppressive agents, which affect heart function. Callas's death from heart failure may have been related to the disease or to the medicine she took for it.
At an event hosted by the journal Il Saggiatore Musicale, Fussi and Paolillo presented documentation showing when and how her voice changed over time. Using modern audio technology, they analyzed live Callas studio recordings from the 1950s through the 1970s, looking for signs of deterioration. Spectrographic analysis showed that she was losing the top half of her range. Fussi observed video recordings in which Callas's posture seemed strained and weakened. He felt that her drastic weight loss in 1954 further contributed to reduced physical support of her voice.
Fussi and Paolillo also examined restored footage of the infamous 1958
Norma "walkout" in Rome, which led to harsh criticism of Callas as a temperamental superstar. By applying spectrographic analysis to film from that night's performance, the researchers observed her voice was tired and she lacked control. She really did have the bronchitis and tracheitis she claimed, and the dermatomyositis was already causing her muscles to deteriorate.
[60]
Scandals and later career[edit]
Callas as Amina in
La sonnambula
Pier Paolo Pasolini, director of the film of
Medea
The latter half of Callas's career was marked by a number of scandals. Following a performance of
Madama Butterfly in Chicago, Callas was confronted by a process server who handed her papers about a lawsuit brought by Eddy Bagarozy, who claimed he was her agent. Callas was photographed with her mouth turned in a furious snarl. The photo was sent around the world and gave rise to the myth of Callas as a temperamental
prima donna and a "Tigress". In 1956, just before her debut at the
Metropolitan Opera,
Time ran a damaging cover story about Callas, with special attention paid to her difficult relationship with her mother and some unpleasant exchanges between the two.
In 1957, Callas was starring as Amina in
La sonnambula at the
Edinburgh International Festival with the forces of
La Scala. Her contract was for four performances, but due to the great success of the series, La Scala decided to put on a fifth performance. Callas told the La Scala officials that she was physically exhausted and that she had already committed to a previous engagement, a party thrown for her by her friend
Elsa Maxwell in Venice. Despite this,
La Scala announced a fifth
