Patrick Bade
Singers Who Changed How We Listen: Maria Callas

Patrick Bade | Singers Who Changed How We Listen: Maria Callas

- Well, just apologies in advance because I have a slight head cold that has re-triggered my sinus problems. So I hope I won’t be coughing and sputtering too much and it won’t be too bothersome. So tonight I am dealing with the most celebrated opera singer of the 20th century. Like Cruza, tremendously influential, but controversial. I feel in a way, I’m entering into an operatic war zone. There are people who love Callas and people who absolutely detest her and think she ruined the art of singing. So I’m going to try and take a neutral course. I think I will say straight away, I’m more on the side of the admirers than I am on the side of the detractors, but I do think some of the adulation of Callas has been exaggerated and misplaced. And so I’m going to try and say what I think is great about her, but I’m also going to talk about some negative aspects of her singing and her influence. The first thing I want to do is to completely explode the myth that she was the first soprano who could act. That is ridiculous. There have all, oh, on the screen, of course, you can see two actresses taking the part of Callas. She’s very much in the news at the moment because of the showing at the Venice Film Festival of this new film about her with Angelina Jolie, who you see on the right hand side. And that’s had rave reviews. So I’m really looking forward to seeing that. Yes, this is Maria Malibran.

She was really the Callas of the 1830s. She was a very great singing actress. And then when you get into the 20th century, there are other very great singing actresses, that’s Gemma Bellincioni on the left, Claudia Muzio, I’ll talk more about her later, in the middle. You could say she was the Callas of the 1920s. And Magda Olivero, all very, very great singing actresses. But when you go to the bookshop of the Paris Opera, which is just the other end of the Rue Lafayette where I live, it’s absurd. There is shelves of books on Maria Callas and almost nothing on any other female singer. Now, the decisive moment in her career was during the opera season at La Fenice in Venice in 1949. She was scheduled to sing the role of Brunhilda in Wagner’s “Die Walkure.” That’s her on the left as Brunhilda. And in the same week, there was supposed to be a performance of Bellini’s “I Puritani,” with the much loved soprano, Margherita Carosio. She fell ill and the conductor in charge of the season, that was Tullio Serafin. He had enormous knowledge of the female voice. He was a veteran at this time. And he’d worked with very great singers, such as Rosa Ponselle at the Met in the 1920s. And he was convinced that Maria Callas could sing the role of Elvira in “I Puritani,” and he persuaded her to take it on. Everybody thought this was absolutely insane, that you’ve got this very young soprano. She’s already ridiculously young to be singing this heavy role of Brunhilda. And at the time, it was the kind of orthodoxy was that you needed a completely different soprano for these two roles. One was a heavy dramatic role, Brunhilda and Elvira is a high lying coloratura role.

And the wisdom was that no single soprano could possibly sing both roles, let alone in the same week. But Callas did. And it was a revelation and a triumph, and it really set her on a completely new course with her career. Now, as somebody who collects historic recordings, I’m always very interested in how, what we now have, what over 120 years of recordings. And we can see our voices have changed, how techniques have changed, how certain vocal skills have been lost over the years, sometimes regained, new skills acquired. It’s fascinating how the human voice has changed over that hundred years in the Opera House. Now, in the 19th century, there wasn’t that kind of division between dramatic sopranos and lyrical coloratura sopranos. So here are two 19th century singers, Lilli Lehmann on the left, and Anna Bahr-Mildenburg on the right, both in the role of Brunhilda. They both sang “The Queen of the Night” in “Mozart’s Magic Flute.” So nowadays, well, I think even today, I don’t think there’s anybody, any singer in the world who would be willing to undertake those two roles in the same season. And as the 20th century went on, this division between these different is the German word for a specialty.

So that this became opened up, that you got very different types of singers for these different roles. Oh, here is Maria Callas dressed for the role of Elvira with the great conductor Serafin. Now it’s somehow, I think it’s sad that Margherita Carosio, who I said was a very loved singer in Italy. She was a very beautiful woman, as you can see, and she appeared in movies. Her career went back to 1920s and as a very young girl, she sang in London in 1926 opposite . And she didn’t return to London ‘til after the second World War. So 20 years later, still looking stunningly beautiful as you can see, and a rather tactless reporter said, “Oh, Madam Carosio, are you the same Madam Carosio who sang with in 1926?” And she said, “Oh, no, no, that’s not me. That was my mother.” But it actually was her. She’s a very lovely singer. And I’m actually going to begin this talk with playing you the voice of Margherita Carosio. 'Cause I feel it’s so unfair that these days, if her name is mentioned at all, it’s only as having for a role, for a performance, rather, that she actually didn’t sing. So here she is in the role of Elvira, and it’s a light voice, but it’s full of emotion, full of pathos, and I think an exquisite, fragile beauty.

• Now let’s hear Callas. This is how she looked at the time. This is before she lost weight. In the same aria, but beginning a bit earlier with the rest of the tease. And you’ll hear that voice was inherently a much, much bigger voice and a much darker voice. But she lightens it for this role and for this aria.

• I’d be very interested to know what you think of those two singers. I personally think they’re both wonderful. I’m not sure which one I prefer. But the really astonishing moment came with the cabaletta at the end of that aria, which is fast moving and very brilliant, with lots of coloratura And of course, nobody expected at this time that a singer with a voice of Callas’ size could do this. And she did it absolutely brilliantly.

• Now, that top note was perhaps not the pleasantest sound in the world, but it’s brilliant stuff. And I think, again, something that sets her apart from most coloratura specialists is that not only is all those runs very, very accurate and technically brilliant, she knows how to make them express something. They’re not just a circus act. Now, she acquired these coloratura skills from a Spanish singer called Elvira de Hidalgo, who was teaching at the Athens Conservatoire during the second World War. And who was a great mentor and a mother figure to Callas, who really needed one. Her own mother was a bit of a monster, as we shall hear later. So Elvira de Hidalgo was a coloratura specialist. She made her debut at the beginning of the 20th century, at the early age of 16. Her famous role was Rosina in the “Barber of Seville,” which later became a specialty of Callas. And she really put Callas through her paces. She taught her all those skills, the drills, the runs, and so on. So I thought you might like to hear a little bit of Elvira de Hidalgo, and Callas always acknowledged this, she always said how much she had learned from Elvira de Hidalgo, here she is in “The Barber of Seville.”

• So Callas was born in 1923, in America. Her parents were Greek, but they’d immigrated to America. This is the family. There were three children. The oldest one on the right in the middle here, Jackie. And then there was a son who died in infancy. And when Litsa, I mean the name, their name was actually Kalogeropoulos, when she became pregnant again, she wanted a son to replace the dead son. And she was very disappointed when Maria was born and rejected her, refused even to look at the child for days. Never really developed a loving relationship with her. The father, who you see on the right hand, George, he was a chemist and he seems to have been, it’s an unkind term I suppose, but a bit of a loser in life. He was a ladies man, he was irresponsible. He really didn’t get on very well with his life. And he quickly abandoned the family. And I think you can say that this is Callas with him later in life. And I think she did suffer from abandonment issues. I think this is part of her problem in life. And of course, she had this absolutely terrible relationship with her mother. The photograph on the left hand side is actually the last time that they ever met, which was in Mexico in 1950. Callas invites her mother to come along, but also so bad between them that they never met or spoke again. And they conducted a very public feud, which fueled a lot of very negative publicity for Callas. Such as in this article, “Time Magazine” article in 1956. According to one of Callas’ closest friends, Giulietta Simionato, part of the anger that Callas felt towards her mother was not just the fact that she hadn’t really shown her any love, but that she consistently tried to exploit her vocal talents and that she had even attempted to prostitute her daughters with German soldiers during the German occupation of Greece. So here is Callas during the second World War.

She started singing quite big, heavy roles in her teens, something which nobody would advise any singer to do today, and may have contributed to her early vocal decline. On the left, you can see her singing the role of Leonora in Beethoven’s “Fidelio.” And interestingly, she also sang the role of Marta in Eugen Dalbert’s “Tiefland.” This is, I think it’s a wonderful opera. I love “Tiefland.” It’s kind of German . Eugen Dalbert was a Scottish, Belgian-German composer. And it’s an opera which has fallen out of fashion, very rarely done since the second World War, partly because the Nazis liked much, not Eugen Dalbert’s fault. He died before the Nazis took power. But it’s on a theme that was dear to the Nazis, which is the purity of the simple life in the mountains and the corruption of the city in the lowlands. So, I’d love to know what Callas was like in this role. I think it was a role, it’s sort a very tortured heroine. And I think it’s a role, she’s very good, of course. Callas is always at her best when she’s really suffering and angry, which the heroine is throughout much of this opera. So after the war, she went back to America initially to try her luck there. Met with certain rebuffs, came to Italy in 1949 and she made her first really important debut in an opera at the Verona Festival in 1949 in the role of Gioconda by Ponchielli, and this is where she met her husband, Meneghini, you see her with him here. And I think, you know, she’s definitely somebody who was looking for a father figure. You don’t have to be Freud to work that one out. And he really took over.

They married very quickly and he looked after her and managed her career for the next 10 years until of course she met up with Aristotle Onassis. But you could, part of the problem I think, was her transformation during their relationship. You can see here what she looked like at the time of their marriage and then what she looked like five or six years later. So she starts off her career singing these really heavy, dramatic roles. “Gioconda’s” a huge dramatic role. And very much admired in Wagner. Extraordinary when you think, she’s born in 1923, she’s only in her mid 20s. Lise Davidsen, I dunno how old she is, she can’t be more, she was in her mid 30s, I think, or even late 30s. And everybody’s been hailing her as the older Brunhilda of the future. But she’s paced herself very, very carefully, not taking on these heavy roles. I think she’s about to sing her first Brunhilda. But Callas went straight into older Brunhilda and Kundry. We have a commercial recording of the from “Tristan and Isolde.” And there was a radio broadcast, which has not come to light. I’m dying to hear it if it ever does. I do hope I live long enough for it to surface. So the only complete Wagner role we have of Callas is Kundry in “Parsifal.” And I often recommend it. People say, “Oh, I don’t like Wagner. It has negative associations, you know, with Hitler in the Second World War, and I don’t like the German language.” So I often say, “Well, try listening to Wagner in French or Italian.” It’s amazing how it transforms it. And this is a really wonderful, wonderful performance. And it does, singing, you know, with very good singers, Boris Christoff and other excellent singers. And it really does change it, sung in Italian. It sounds like Puccini on a particularly good day. So, again the role of Kundry is absolutely perfect for Callas. Again, a very tormented character. So here is Kundry in second act, getting very, very worked up.

• Now Callus had some of her greatest early tryouts in Mexico City in two seasons, in 1950 and 1951. And I want to play you two excerpts from the 1951 performance, which was broadcast and which survives in quite good sound of “Aida.” Now, later on, she recorded the whole opera commercially. And it’s not really one of my favourite recordings of “Aida,” nor one of my favourite recordings of Callas. But if you can get hold of this live performance in 1951, it is very thrilling, very incredible. I think usually for “Aida,” I just want a more beautiful voice than Callas had to offer. But she’s so exciting in this performance. So imperious, listen to the opening of the act, aria when she’s horrified to find herself wishing for victory of her enemies.

• Wonderful coloratura intensity there. So in the 1950 performance, she was singing opposite a Czech tenor called Baum, and he’s somebody again, who’s only remembered these days for this incident in this performance in 1950, where he was very jealous of Callas’ success with the audience. And he tried to sabotage her by holding onto a top note and she was not having it. And so at the end of the trial scene, she got her revenge, as it builds up to a great climax, she, in the score, Aida has to go up and then come down again. But in this performance, she didn’t come down again. She goes up and up and up and she ends with a top E, top E. Think of it, for a dramatic soprano singing that and a note to wake the dead, positively ear splitting. And the audience had never heard anything like that in their lives before. They were absolutely thrilled and amazed. Now that particular performance doesn’t exist. But when she came back to do “Aida” the next year, of course, that’s what the audience wanted. They were expecting it. They wanted to have this again, and that 1951 performance does exist. So here is this absolutely extraordinary moment when Callas goes up to this stupendous top note.

• And it just goes on and on and on. Now aspects of Callas’ personal life, which fascinate public at large. And this huge fame that she has, I think owes as much to her private life as it does to her singing. And one of the most famous incidents in her life was this extraordinary transformation. And this is the same woman, just two or three years apart. So in 1954, she dramatically lost weight. This is controversial for a number of reasons. Firstly, there are different stories about how it happened. And one story has her deliberately drinking a tape worm in a pill in a glass of champagne. Apparently, whether she did it deliberately or not, a tape worm does seem to have had something to do with the loss of weight. And there are very gruesome versions of the story, which I won’t bother you with tonight. So having been this rather dumpy, frumpy woman, she became one of the most elegant and beautiful. Of course, everybody identifies that. It’s the ugly duckling story really, isn’t it? She was a woman of enormous determination. And so here’s this big heavy woman and she sees Audrey Hepburn on the screen and she thinks I am going to transform myself into Audrey Hepburn. And she does it, as you can see. There is Audrey on the left and Maria on the right. So from this time onwards for the next 10 years, she was a real fodder for the media, for news. And, you know, gossip columnists. And super elegant, one of the most elegant women in the world. The designer Biki was her exclusive dress designer.

And also the jewellery, I suppose with the Duchess of Windsor, she is the most celebrated collector of jewellery of the 20th century. And first of all, it wasn’t, of course she was only huge sums of money, but it was her husband, Meneghini. And then later Aristotle Onassis, who were funding the jewellery collection. And everywhere she went, she was news and everywhere she went was scandal. She was followed by one scandal after another. And this was one of the biggest scandals when in 1958, she dropped out of a gala performance of “Norma,” at which the President of Italy was the guest of honour. I won’t go into all the details of that story, but I mean, it really wasn’t her fault. She was very, very shabbily treated by the management of the Rome Opera. But it made her, she became a hate figure in different countries. She was hated in America because she didn’t love her mother. And she certainly became a hate figure in Italy, ‘cause she was said to have disrespected the President of the Italian Republic. So many of these pictures, and feuds. She was a very good feuder. Not only with other singers, but with opera management. We’ve got two photographs of her here with men with whom she had big feuds. It was Ghiringhelli, who was the director of “La Scala” in Milan and Rudolf Bing. Rudolf Bing is very interesting about all of this in his autobiography. He actually admired her hugely, and says very, very positive things about her as an artist. But he was, of course, he was an iron-willed tyrant and she was pretty iron-willed.

And so they came, metaphorically at least, to blows. And of course, with other singers. This is a baritone called Sordello. Again, poor guy is only known for his quarrel with Callas. People have forgotten him otherwise, totally. And he did the usual terrible thing of hanging onto a note. And she ordered the MET to dismiss him, and they did. And here he’s posing for photographers, tearing up photographs of Maria Callas. And on the right hand side, Giuletta Simionato who says that on one occasion, Callas behaved so badly during rehearsal that Simionato actually slapped her in the face, but she was forgiven and they actually became, well as far as you could be, with Callas, best mates. Another famous scandal took place in Chicago. It was the only time that Callas ever sang the role of Butterfly. There’s a very fine commercial recording, and she vocally, she really does a fantastic job of making herself sound young and convincing as Butterfly, but she can’t be very convincing on the stage. And I don’t think God intended her to be Madam Butterfly or Mimi. Tosca, yes. , yes. Norma, yes, but not these fragile, passive heroines. And on this occasion, after the performance, she was served with a writ. And this very famous photograph was taken of her on the right hand side, where in a flash she’s transformed from a little Butterfly into a raging demon, Madea or . And then there was the famous, long running feud with Tebaldi. They’re both actually quite dismissive of this. It wasn’t really either the two singers, it was the publicists. And of course it was great publicity for both of them. And they had this famous reunion backstage after a performance of “Adriana Lecouvreur,” where it was all, again, that was all set up with photographers ready to catch the moment. Another famous moment, JF Kennedy’s birthday party in 1961, when Marilyn Monroe, in this positively indecent dress, that really doesn’t hide a thing, does it? Sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” in a little baby, breathy voice.

Callas was deeply unimpressed, as I think you can see that there wasn’t a great meeting of minds on this particular occasion. By this time, roundabout 1960, I think Callas had lost some of her motivation as a singer. She became involved with Aristotle. She started to live the life of a society queen. She became a great friend of Elsa Maxwell, who gave the poshest parties in Europe, as you can see on the left hand side. And she was invited on Aristotle’s yacht with fatal consequences for her marriage. And here she’s with Aristotle Onassis. People couldn’t really understand his appeal for either Callas or later Jackie Kennedy. They mocked him as an ancient Greek ruin. Actually, I think he looks quite handsome in this photograph. And when he was young, he was gorgeous, as you can see here. Now, the extraordinary thing about Aristotle Onassis is that he was apparently tone deaf, wasn’t really interested in opera at all, but he had affairs with two of the greatest female singers of the 20th century. I think I’ve told the story before of, this is Claudia Muzio. She was queen of Buenos Aires in the 1920s and she helped him make his first fortune. At the time, he was effectively her gigolo he was just a clerk in the bank. And he got a consignment of pink tipped cigarettes, and she agreed to smoke one in public, and then everybody wanted to smoke them in Buenos Aires. And that was his first financial coup. I’d like to play you a little bit of a voice of Claudia Muzio. She had many, if not all, of the qualities of Callas, so here she is.

• Now, that’s great vocal acting, certainly as moving and intense as anything in Callas’ recorded repertoire and a much, much more beautiful voice, to my mind. A voice, Larry Volpe described, as a voice made of size and tears and restrained in a fire. She didn’t have Callas’ coloratura skills. I can’t imagine she made a very good Norma, although she sang it quite frequently. Now Callas said, “If you want to really understand me as an artist, you must listen to me in the role of Gioconda. It was her favourite role, by Ponchielli. Americans listening in will probably be quite familiar with it because it’s regularly performed, has always been regularly performed at the Met in New York. Oh, I dunno when it was last. Probably not performed at Covent Garden since Ponselle did it in the 1920s. And British critics can be very sniffy about it when English Opera North did it a few years ago. There was one critic said, "Oh, well, you know, Gioconda, the Americans and South Americans and Europeans like it, but that just shows what provincial taste they have,” which is a sort of classic case of British insularity, really. It’s like the famous headline, you know, “Fog in the Channel, Europe cut off.” Don’t pay any attention to such silly judgments. It’s a marvellous opera, it’s a marvellous, marvellous role for a great singing actress. And it fitted Callas absolutely like a glove. I’m going to play you a short excerpt from the last act. I should have commented earlier, of course, on her use of the chest voice. You will have heard that in the first “Aida” excerpt I played you.

Another controversial aspect of her technique. I mean, it’s very effective, it’s always effective and it’s always exciting, but it’s a dangerous thing too, for a soprano to do this sort of almost baritone, chesty sound at bottom of the voice. It’s a way to wreck a voice. And it may have been part of the causes of her vocal decline. Incidentally, I meant to say the many people attributed to her loss of weight. I had a very intense discussion about it with a singer recently who said, “No, no, no, that’s not true. You know, her loss of weight is not the cause of her decline.” I would say it’s not the whole cause, but I think it did contribute to it. You can hear the difference in her voice, pre and post weight loss, quite soon afterwards. Anyway, here is Callas, I think, absolutely her most spine tinglingly thrilling, at her best, of course in a very unhappy state.

• So in the space, two, two, three minutes, she’s run through an extraordinary gamut of emotions. So it’s a favourite opera of mine and I must have at least a dozen recordings more, I think. And overall I think Callas does outclass every other soprano in this role. But you can’t have everything in one singer. And there is one key moment in “Gioconda” where Callas simply doesn’t really have the goods. It’s in act one. And Gioconda’s mother has nearly been lynched by a mob as a witch. And she’s saved by Gioconda’s lover, Enzo and Gioconda’s very grateful. And as she walks off stage, she turns to him and she says, “Enzo,” she says, “My adored Enzo, how much I love him.” And as she walks off the stage, she has to hold a high pianissimo, high B flat. Very, very, very difficult to do. Not many sopranos on record have been able to do it. And Callas has a good attempt. It’s not really pianissimo. She does a kind of crescendo and decrescendo and it’s not a pretty sound. It’s a kind of shrill, raw sound. And it’s not completely steady. I mean, she just doesn’t have the vocal goods, really, to do it. Not very nice of me to play this, but here it is. Now this is how it should be done. This is Zinka Milanov, very fine singer, also she sang the role many times and there are numerous live recordings, as well as a commercial recording. And they’re all very fine. Overall, I don’t think she matches Callas in drama and intensity, but this was her moment. And in every live performance, she always knocks the audience for six, they always go berserk as she walks off the stage with this incredibly beautiful, floated high B flat. So Gioconda is certainly a role I recommend you listen to.

And maybe the other really, really great achievement, of course, is Norma, an impossible role, impossible opera. And I would say over the last 150 years, there have probably only been three sopranos who really came close to satisfying every demand of this opera. First was Lilli Lehmann, who was singing it ‘round the turn of the century. Then Rosa Ponselle in the 1920s, who to my mind, sings the most beautiful version of the aria casta diva. But it’s Callas in the more dramatic moments of the opera who I think wins out. Raging and using this tura, you know, singing with incredible velocity and incredible fury and passion. So she’s warning her faithless lover to fear. And you would fear, wouldn’t you if somebody did that to you? Now I was hoping to make a comparison in the great aria casta diva of Callas and Ponselle, but I’m really running out of time, so I don’t think I can do that. You can do that for yourselves on YouTube. As I said, I think Ponselle is the one for the aria. There is Ponselle, but of course I can’t leave out “Tosca,” which was one of her most celebrated roles. She claimed not to like it, but she recorded it twice commercially. You want the first recording, which is generally regarded as the best recording of “Tosca” ever and one of the greatest opera recordings ever, all 'round with the fabulous Tito Gobbi. He’s in a class of his own completely, as the evil Scarpia, wonderfully conducted by de Sabata. So we will have a couple of excerpts from that. This is the moment where Scarpia is going to claim his bargain of her body for the life of her lover. And he embraces her and sings . “You’re finally mine.” And she pulls out a knife and she stabs him, crying, “This is how Tosca kisses.” And then as he collapses, she snarls at him, “Die, die.” Nobody does it like Callas.

• I’ve really run out of time, but I want to talk just a little bit about Callas’ legacy and also about this controversy about her vocal state, why the career was so short. She was really, it was only really a 10 year career at the top of her form. And in the late 1950s, she began experiencing serious vocal difficulties and then retired in the 1960s at a far too young an age, really. So what caused all of that? Well, there is, I do think that the weight loss played a role, but it’s not the whole story. I think there were vocal problems, potential vocal problems you can hear, you know, from the very first. And there are things she did like, you know, some people would say abuse of the chest voice, but I love it. It’s absolutely thrilling and exciting. And so she changed everything and all the new upcoming sopranos wanted to sound like her. And I think she had a very, very bad influence on a number of sopranos. Leyla Gencer would be one. Most notoriously, actually Elena Souliotis, who you see here, who was emerging as a soprano just as Callas went into decline. She was another Greek and she was held as the new Callas. And she was particularly famous for the role of in “Nabucco” of Abigaille, which is a notorious voice breaker. And she sang it everywhere for five years and her voice was in tatters, so her career was even shorter. So I think there are a number of singers who, it was trying to be like Callas, use that chest voice, trying to be as dramatic as Callas. It wasn’t good for everybody at all. But I see I’ve completely run out of time, so I’m going to open up..

Q&A and Comments:

Thank you, Susan. I think it’s just, I’m just hoping it’s not going to really trigger all the sinus problems I had before, but it doesn’t feel like a bad cold.

Q: This is Jeff, “Isn’t it more the fact that Callas’ acting skill helped overcome her singing shortcomings?”

A: Yes. I think there’s an element of truth in that.

Hot tea and Schnapps? That sounds very good. Actually, probably a gin and tonic shortly.

Did her private love, I think so. I think at the end of the 1950s, as I said, I think she had in a way lost that focus. She was so determined, so ambitious in the early part of her career and very, very disciplined. And I think all that socialising probably wasn’t very good for her career or her voice. Hannah, you’re probably, yes. Richer tone definitely than Carosio. It’s a bigger, darker voice. Yes, I missed her too. I’m sorry, I never heard her live.

Q: “In which operas is Maria Callas performing?”

A: Look at my list. I can’t remember. I dunno which point you were asking that, but there was, oh that was, it must have been “I Puritani,” when I was comparing Maria and Margherita Carosio. I’m glad you like Carosio. I think she deserves more respect than she usually gets. And Barbara, she loves , good and bad. So do I, really. If Callas was born in the US, why is she and her sister and her mother- Because the father had dumped them and he stayed in America and the mother went back with the two daughters to Greece.

Thank you, Rose. My next tour is the Festival, my favourite tour of the whole year, I love that. That’s the beginning of October. And this is Joan, you were at the Met for her final performances as Tosca. Chapter one went wonderfully, but the singing, she actually was so offkey that the audience interacted with the chorus of “Boy,” but her clap continued cheering as she held arms up to receive the adulation.“ That’s very, very interesting. Thank you. That was in 1965. Herbert, you saw Callas and Fedora Barbieri, wonderful singer, at the Met.

Yes, Barbieri had the better voice, but she was also, I think Barbieri was an exciting singer.

No, Lorna, it’s not sacrilegious to say you dislike her top notes. I think a lot of people find her top notes quite grating. Callas 1958 Paris concert in colour started playing at cinemas today in Toronto. And of course, we’ve got this film coming out soon. Hannah and you’re a total Callas addict too. I think the weight loss is not, as this singer I was talking to was saying, you can be very thin and have a very powerful voice. I think it was probably that the weight loss took place too quickly. And when you lose weight, I mean, there’ll be doctors here who know this better than me, but I think if you lose a lot of weight very, very quickly, you can lose muscle support as well. So that’s what I assumed happened.

Callas singing "Carmen,” that’s very late in her career. And of course “Carmen” doesn’t need any top notes. So, and her voice, she’s very, again, she can do wonderful things with the chest register in the role of “Carmen.”

Thank you, Thelma. And thank you, Barbara. Joan Sutherland. Do you know, I’m not a fan. I have to say, I probably wouldn’t do a talk on Joan Sutherland. You know, I know what’s good about her. The only recordings of Sutherland that I listen to for pleasure on a regular basis are her early handle recordings. I do recommend those, they are so amazing, the sheer athleticism of her singing. But you know, in a role like Norma, she doesn’t cut the mustard for me. It’s not, although the top notes are much better than Callas and the coloratura is even better than Callas. She just doesn’t move me. But that’s a very personal thing. Ute Berling, yes, I could do something on him. Is there a young, I do think, I said she’d been a bad influence, but I think a lot of singers have also, not just trying to imitate her or outdo her, have learned a lot from her approach and yeah, there are exciting singers around today.

Q: Was the opera sung by the other Maria?

A: Yes, that was “Traviata.” Sorry if I didn’t mention that. That was Claudio Muzio in “Traviata.” This Barbara who saw “Tosca” in Covent Garden, lucky you. That must have been really something.

Q: “Can you comment on the chest message?”

A: Well, at this stage, I think not more than I already have done. That it’s a device that can be very exciting, but if you use it too much, it can actually cause a break in the middle of the voice. And there have been singers over the years that have really suffered from that. The last, yes, it was “Nabucco,” of course, with the Star of David in the background. Thank you all very much.

Thank you for your sympathy and thank you for listening and I’ll be back to my day job of art history next Sunday, embarking on three lectures on museums in the Marais district of Paris. Thanks, bye-bye.