“My” Callas Forever

“I immediately felt an instinctive dislike for this woman, and I asked who she was. The name seemed strange, a Greek I had never heard of before.”

This was the 25-year-old Franco Zeffirelli’s first feeling about the still little-known Maria Callas and the tantrums in which she was often the protagonist.
It was a young seamstress, a fanatic in love with the new Greek star, who revealed the identity of this overwhelming new phenomenon.

Instead, it was Visconti who led the young Zeffirelli into the salon of the famous conductor Tullio Serafin where the divine voice of that still somewhat awkward and overweight girl enchanted everyone present: “one cannot fully render the storm of emotions she aroused in those who heard her for the first time.”

Zeffirelli follows Callas’ triumphant rise in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the conquest of the world and the siege at La Scala where she returned triumphant by opening the ’51-’52 season in Vespri Siciliani under the baton of Victor De Sabata.

The young Zeffirelli was enraptured by the strong and overwhelming voice and personality of the Soprano, by then a worldwide “phenomenon”: “When I worked at the Piccola Scala in Milan, I often happened to join Maria in the fifth row during one of her performances, before she went on stage. She would nervously argue with the devout Bruna about household chores, the most insignificant ones…when they called her because it was her turn, she would take a deep breath, make the sign of the cross in the orthodox manner, and enter the stage; exploding into the role from the first moment. That voice that had just been discussing trivial everyday problems with the maid suddenly became the voice of another creature, came from another universe. You were witnessing a prodigy that dragged you into a state of enchanted exaltation, without your being able to define it.”

Zeffirelli likens Callas’s singing to a kind of ecstasy, able to take in the divine and then to show it through her voice, in a tension between strength of character and despair: a creature without peace, destined to peer into the tensions of the universe, without ever being able to give peace to it, through the stability of earthly love that appeases everything. Hers appears to be a continuous irreducible cry of love: “Mary was ready to pour hurricanes of love on others, but never reciprocated. Admired, respected, adored certainly, but never loved by anyone. And no one ever allowed himself to be loved by her.”

The opportunity to work with Maria Callas finally arrived for director Zeffirelli as well. In 1955 with Il Turco in Italia, the Maestro oversaw the direction, sets and costumes. During the opera’s production, the relationship between Maria Callas and Zeffirelli became more solid and complicit.

The opera buffa in which Maria Callas shows off “an unsuspected comic vein” inaugurates an intense collaboration between the two that will take shape in the great successes of Dallas (La Traviata in ’58, Lucia di Lammermoor and the Barber of Seville in ’59) until, several years later, Tosca and Norma in ’64.

“For me Maria was the opera,” and to see her ”now venturing to shores so foreign to our world, to her world, in which she had touched goals thought unattainable, made me feel betrayed, almost like poor Meneghini.”

Soon the extremely wealthy Greek shipowner Aristotle Onassis came overbearingly into Maria Callas’ life, overshadowing her glowing public image and marking the beginning of her emotional and artistic decline.
Out of affection for the woman, but also out of respect and veneration for the Soprano, Zeffirelli worked for Maria Callas’ return to the stage. It is the passionate and instinctive Tosca with the many similarities to her personal story that again lead the Divina “to reign, sovereign of unparalleled dimension, in the world and in the history of opera.” In 1964 in London, Puccini’s Tosca restored Maria Callas’ greatness to the world.

Nevertheless, a few months later, with the difficult interpretation of Norma, “Maria sadly understood…, and we with her, that the absolute and total Callas no longer existed.”

The attempts that followed, in the early 1970s, by friends and primarily Zeffirelli, to bring Callas back to the stage were in vain. The Coronation of Poppea, to be staged in Capitol Square, and a new “colossal” production of Lehar’s Merry Widow at Covent Garden never came to fruition.

Maria Callas died Sept. 16, 1977, in her Paris apartment, putting an end to two completely different women: “Maria, the woman who wanted to love and be loved, and Callas, the lonely diva, a vestal sacrificed on the altar of art.”

Initial requests to make a film about Maria Callas, by virtue of the Maestro’s long friendship with the Soprano, revolved from the outset around the desire to portray the Divina’s personal and emotional drama: the Callas-Onassis-Jacqueline triangle would surely have satisfied the audience’s curiosity.

Zeffirelli’s reading, however, wanted to be completely different, choosing fiction, inducing the dream that was never realized: what if Callas had agreed to film the Carmen opera that the Maestro had proposed to her so many times?

It would have been beautiful, it would have been perfect, it would have consecrated and given to the world the interpretation of the mature artist with the perfect voice of the record recording 12 years earlier (1964), it would have fulfilled the Maestro’s desire to want to imprint the miracle of such perfection on film forever.

But such was not the case and such could not be.

“Mary, with her all-Greek arrogance, refused to accept that her spirit was overwhelmed by the decline of matter. So she made it wither away, moment by moment, day by day.

This was his real tragedy, and it is not easy matter to narrate in a film. But I chose precisely to go down this very difficult road. It was my “leading idea”: how to stop a decline with the help and complicity of technical means. A hope, alas, fallacious, because nothing and no one will ever be able to stop the ruthless march of time.”