ACROSTICS
Marvellous
Aria
Range
Innumerable exquisite felicities
Achingly fragile
Chameleon Voice
Artistry
Larynx
Lulls
Astounds
Silky, smooth Legato
BOOK BITE
A fascinating centennial biography capturing the life of legendary operatic star Maria Callas with incredible insight, lyricism and meticulous care.
BOOK HAIKU
Maria aches to
create sublime notes with her
chameleon voice.
BOOK TASTERS
Twelve years in the making, this voluminous labour of love explores the singer with the reverence she dealt her heroines. The Callas imprint: A Centennial Biography reaps never before seen correspondence and archival documents worldwide to illustrate the complex of their multi faceted creator- closing in on her self contradictions, self descriptions, attitudes and habits with empathetic scrutiny.
extract from Publisher’s blurb
GOOD NIGHT TO READ MINI REVIEW
Before I read this remarkable biography, all I knew about Maria Callas was
- She was a famous opera singer.
- She was a notorious Diva who flew into rages.
- She sometimes sang flat notes.
- She was Greek.
- She was the girlfriend of Aristotle Onassis who was devastated by his betrayal of her with Jackie Kennedy.
Are any of these statements false?
Sophia Lambton’s meticulously researched, intense, lyrical magnum opus challenges the myths surrounding Maria fabricated by the press. This erudite biography doesn’t just explore her life. Lambton shines a spotlight on Callas’ craft critically evaluating the opera star’s singing with consummate care and precision down to the minutest detail and vocal technique behind each aria and dramatic role.
The book is divided into a prologue followed by 23 chapters, with headings taken from Maria’s musings. It sets the scene for the reader as it forensically examines her mythos, her psychology, her troubled upbringing, her discovery of her vocation, her insecurities, her perfectionism, her secret fears, the men she was unfortunate to become involved with, her struggles with her voice and how she inspired wonder and vitriol in equal measure. Above all it is a monumental testament to her art.
It’s vivid prose is informed by detailed primary and secondary sources including incendiary letters, vignettes, never before published missives and interviews discovered in library archives and digitised collections.
Lambton’s imagery illuminates Callas’ complex musicality so that the reader can visualise the performances and reflect on the beauty of her sounds when she was at the height of her fame. It crystallises each recording and opera performed by Callas, capturing the atmosphere, the highs and lows of being an acclaimed soprano and the dichotomy between victorious evenings of encores and fraught, tension filled nights when notes went awry.
Callas’ health was a rollercoaster exacerbated by personal problems and marital strife but above all what she wanted more than anything was to be true to the composer and the spirit of the piece. To contemporary critics listening to Callas was
“..like stumbling into the Sistine chapel.”
William Weaver, cited Callas, 11
She was
“Empress, queen goddess, sorceress, hard working magician…in short, divine.”
Yves St Laurent, cited Callas, 11
But in spite of the magical aura she cast on opera goers, she was immensely fragile, mercurial, self critical and prone to self sabotage.
Lambton’s work depicts a nuanced portrait of Callas, taking into account her habit of contradicting herself, trusting the wrong people and sacrificing herself for her art, just like her opera heroines.
This biography will appeal to opera fans and musical aficionados. It’s useful to read it along with a glossary of opera terms as it is abundant with them. It should be savoured over many nights like a languorous dream not hurriedly gobbled. Lambton’s use of alliteration, mellifluous language and evocative scenes adds to its sensory impact, just like Callas’ voice and dramatic presence elevates her performances.
GOOD NIGHT TO READ REVIEW RATING- 4.5 CHOCOLATE LIBRARIES
Q & A Extravaganza
Sophia kindly consented to answer all of my questions.
What inspired you to become a music journalist?
Lyrical expression is the closest to my own – which is another way of saying music gets to me more deeply than all other arts. I have a very particular writing process that treats creation like the stage: many more weeks are spent researching, preparing and planning than typing the text. In those long intervals I need to exercise my art in shorter bouts. At fourteen I already knew I wanted to report on at least one art. Music makes the most sense. I love it more than any other medium.
When did your fascination with Maria Callas start?
I listened to her through my teens and fell in love first with her voice (at fourteen-ish) and later with her as a person (seventeen). My first novel (an appalling work) was inspired by a giant misconception of her. I only got to know her after eighteen months (or so) of research.
What is your favourite Maria Callas recording and why?
Oh, the cruelty of this question! Well, I’ll narrow down to three:
1) Puccini’s Manon Lescaut (studio recording, 1957): Callas incarnates both the ravenous, spoilt girl Manon Lescaut and the languishing older seductress. The evolution – both in the music and her voice – exhibits shifts in characterisation that remain unparalleled throughout the Callas repertoire.
2) Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (studio recording, 1955): The “little girl” voice here is achingly fragile, and Callas curves the syllables to imitate a geisha’s accent. There is such a dreamy danger in her voice: when she believes Lieutenant Pinkerton has come back to her – before she discovers he has married Kate – she marvels, “White… white… the American Star-Spangled flag” (“Bianca, Bianca… il vessillo americano delle stelle”) in a near-inexistent voice. It’s a squeak and yet retains its musicality. No other soprano could effectuate this. It is almost anatomically impossible.
3) “Air des lettres” (“Werther… werther… qui m’aurait dit la place”) from Massenet’s Werther, live in concert at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on June 5th 1963.
This is a mezzo aria. Callas dissolves into her dusky register in tremulous surrender to the fate of Charlotte, whose beloved one Werther will kill himself. She slenderises certain phrases – like “je vous écris de ma petite chambre” (”I’m writing to you from my bedroom”) to exude fragility whilst salvaging the ebbing body of her voice: an instrument by this point semi-tarnished. The French critic Marcel Schneider wrote of this performance, “Nothing is more moving than this struggle of one of the greatest singers of all time against Nature, which seems to want to rob her of the voice it has given her.” But she conquered that night.
Why do you think Maria married Meneghini?
She said it herself in a letter to Eddie Bagarozy, shortly after she and Meneghini met: “God has given me this angelic person.” There are two reasons for this marriage that must be explained to a (much savvier) modern audience. The first is that Maria Callas did not really have a concept of a “hot guy”. She was not a very sexual woman and, having been deprived of paternal love from the age of thirteen – when her mother had taken her and sister Jackie to Athens – she was looking for a guardian. I also believe some people, regardless of their libido level, have taste when it comes to faces, and some don’t. When most people see Meneghini – including Callas’ cousin Ninon Dimitriadou-Kambouri – it is impossible to understand how a twenty-three-year-old woman would be drawn to this owl-faced, much older signor. We have to imagine she’s seeing someone else.
The other reason that must be explained is her naïveté. It didn’t occur to her that Meneghini, as a shrewd businessman, might be looking for an investment in her as a singer, even though he volunteered himself as her manager suspiciously early on in their relationship. When I consider it, I can’t envisage Joan Sutherland, Renata Tebaldi or most other sopranos agreeing to such an arrangement. Callas was just so uneducated. She wasn’t much of a reader, and certainly hadn’t been in her youth. Her teen years had been lived through World War II Athens: a frightful atrocity. Her formal schooling had ended in New York, when she’d been just thirteen.
Today we learn of social norms at school, in books, tv, podcasts, articles, movies etc. She had news on the radio and no good parenting. And she wasn’t street-smart, contrary to what she might have thought.
Why do you think Maria eschewed performing modern opera?
This is where I empathise with her: I likewise am averse to modern opera. As a critic it’s my job to analyse performance, so I shut off those personal preferences when I have to. I can see the quality of an interpretation irrespective of my feelings for its music. Callas didn’t take to atonality and dissonance, and neither do I. So she couldn’t possibly consider singing Alban Berg’s Lulu or Samuel Barber’s Vanessa, both of which were suggested to her.
What was the most fascinating fact that you discovered about Maria Callas during your research process?
Onstage: She liked to bring her own costumes for performances when she felt the theatre’s were subpar. This ties in with a control freak-nature that would vet the stage designs before production could begin, and do her own make-up, and argue with directors like Luchino Visconti about when to take off a bonnet in character. Her contribution extended far beyond the part of the soprano soloist.
Offstage: This is bizarre, but I haven’t mentioned it elsewhere in press about this book, so I’ll go ahead: Callas would study music in her bathroom, which was her haven. She had a bookcase there where she kept opera scores, as well as a sofa, a telephone and flowers. The faucets were cherry-coloured dolphins and the bath itself was pink and white marble.
What’s your favourite opera performed by Maria Callas & why?
I have two: La traviata and Madama Butterfly, but Manon Lescaut is close. My other favourite operas were never performed by Callas.
Both Traviata and Madama Butterfly preface their heroines’ state early on; drawing in their listeners with ominous foreshadowing. They juxtapose the jubilance of love with its lethality. They also allowed Callas to manipulate her voice to dangerous degrees – she talked about playing the consumption victim that is Traviata’s Violetta with a voice “on a little thread. It can break from one minute to another.”
Butterfly’s über-vulnerable heroine, Cio-Cio-san, leads Callas’ extremely malleable timbre into risky territory. There is a trill-like sound created from vibrato across many top notes that don’t have trills; it’s simply an exuberant effect made to portray the naïve youngling.
Both roles enabled Callas to display a psychological erosion in strong women left irreparably damaged.
Do you have a favourite photograph of Maria Callas?
This is a very good question, because I actually dislike most of them. I really dislike the Angus McBean portraits (though I had his Vivien Leigh on my wall as a teenager). I really dislike the Cecil Beaton ones. Callas was very photogenic but a terrible model for the most part. Opera singers are used to making huge expressions (like expansive clownish eyes) for colossal auditoriums: I don’t think most of them respond well to photographers’ directions. My favourite photo is the one on my cover – Callas in a promotional shot as Anna Bolena (Anne Boleyn) in advance of her opening in the opera at La Scala in April 1957. It took me ages to select a photograph. I even considered capturing a still from a video at one point.
A. Which library archive did you find most insightful in your research?
The Victoria & Albert Museum had the collection of her manager from 1953 to 1977, Sander Gorlinsky: it was indispensable. I lived around ninety minutes away then, and for three days straight I went over their exchanges, taking photographs of almost everything. I then spent most of 2014’s summer transcribing all their letters and a great deal of the batch’s documents. When – in conjunction with other letters, telegrams, documents and interviews – you get to piece together a nearly day-to-day chronology, it feels like a worthful achievement.
Though I had always had faith in Callas’ continuing devotion to opera in the early sixties, unfortunately it is still falsely reported that she left that world for luxury aboard a yacht with boyfriend Aristotle Onassis. This is wrong. The quotations from these letters – together with those from others, documents and interviews from this period – absolutely prove this is a myth.
B. Critics have waxed lyrical about her. Do you have a favourite quote that describes the nature of her remarkable voice?
I’m so happy you asked because I’m going to use this opportunity to reproduce a quote I felt I had to cut down in the book. It’s more about Callas’ technique than her voice, and it’s not from a critic, so I’ll give a separate one for that.
Here is EMI Records producer Walter Legge on Callas’ vocality:
“Most admirable of all her qualities, however, were her taste, elegance and deeply musical use of ornamentation in all its forms and complications, the weighting and length of every appoggiatura [a grace note that immediately precedes the next note of a melody], the smooth incorporation of the turn [the expansion of one note into a musical four] in melodic lines, the accuracy and pacing of her trills, the seemingly inevitable timing of her portamentos, varying their curve with enchanting grace and meaning. There were innumerable exquisite felicities – minuscule portamentos from one note to its nearest neighbour, over widespread intervals – and changes of color that were pure magic.”
In 1954 the Chicago Tribune’s Claudia Cassidy gorgeously described Callas’ then new figure together with her instrument:
“Wand-slim, tragic mask of face, wonderful hands, and above all that voice. Formidable in range, dazzling in technique with the sound of the mourning dove.”
An unnamed critic for Kunst und Kultur, reviewing her Lucia di Lammermoor in Vienna, referred beautifully to the “glimmering limbs of her flawless range.”
It was remarkable the way Maria coped with her myopia during performances. Do you think that was why she insisted on such long rehearsal periods or did she have other reasons?
I actually don’t think that was why she insisted on long rehearsals. She was a compulsive perfectionist, and that cost her her blood pressure – which tanked to sometimes lethal lows, and it cost her her nerves, and it could lead to bad performances. When Maria was up at 3.30am rehearsing La sonnambula, was this a good thing? I don’t know. She needed to feel she had done her best. That is the foremost reason any control freak perfectionist stretches their work hours.”
FIVE FACTS ABOUT SOPHIA
- Sophia is a novelist. The fourth volume of her saga The Crooked Little Pieces comes out on 2 September, and she is currently working on the third part of her second literary series.
- She is a devoted figure skating competition follower, and has adored many skaters and teams over the years. These include Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, Ashley Wagner, Anna Shcherbakova, Javier Fernández, Jason Brown, and her current diehard favourites Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier.
- Sophia is a multi linguist. She has a command of French, Russian, German, Latin and Ancient Greek which enabled her to study “a global panoply of primary and secondary sources” as part of her extensive research journey. She also taught herself “just about passable Italian” to research, conduct interviews and translate documents in preparation for The Callas Imprint.
- She is half English and half Russian Jewish and has recently discovered Inuit blood in her family too.
- Sophia is interested in neurological studies, in particular the work of Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, author of the recently released Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Title: The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography
- Author: Sophia Lambton
- Publisher: Crepuscular Press
- ISBN: 9781739286323 [Hbk]
- ISBN: 9781739286347 [Pbk]
- ISBN: 9781739286392 [E-Book]
- Publication date: 2 December 2023
- Length: 704 pp [Including comprehensive bibliography, footnotes and index]
DISCOVER MORE
Lambton’s cultural Substack provides copious reviews of operas, concerts and recitals juxtaposed with vivid explorations of tv and film and literary snippets.
http://www.sophialambton.substack.com
sophia@thecrepuscularpress.com
CALLAS IMPRINT
http://www.thecrepuscularpress.com/the-callas-imprint
EXPLORE A GLOSSARY OF OPERA TERMS HERE
https://www.glyndebourne.com/opera-archive/introduction-to-opera/glossary
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