Maria Callas: La Divina

CD 1 shows why Callas played such a vital part in restoring the bel canto repertoire of Bellini and Donizetti to the repertoire and proved that it still had the dramatic viability that the composers originally intended. After the era of Puccini and the verismo operas, the works of Bellini and Donizetti had become empty showpieces for light-voiced coloratura sopranos with little or no attempt to perform them as meaningful dramas. In Bellini’s three great operas La sonnambula, Norma and I puritani, Callas brings fully rounded characterisations of the three very different heroines and sings their music with three totally different musical styles as befits the simple village girl Amina in Sonnambula, the imperious Druid priestess Norma and the unfortunate Elvira in I puritani, who is prone to bouts of madness during the English Civil War. Callas gives equally distinctive performances of Donizetti’s unfortunate Lucia of Lammermoor, who is forced into an unwanted marriage by her brother and murders her bridegroom after losing her mind on her wedding night, and the tragic English Queen Anne Boleyn (in Anna Bolena) as she awaits her execution. CD 2 begins with one of Callas’s most famous LP recitals, originally called Lyric and Coloratura Arias, which displays Callas’s enormous dramatic and vocal range in a selection of widely different arias. Although Callas’s natural voice was a powerful dramatic one, her principal teacher in Athens was the Spanish soprano Elvira de Hidalgo, who made sure that Callas was fully schooled in the technique required to sing the most florid music. This is vividly demonstrated here with a dazzling performance of the Bell Song from Lakmé encompassing the most taxing coloratura display at the very top of the soprano range, alongside the heartbreakingly dramatic aria ‘La mamma morta’ from Andrea Chénier as Madeleine describes how she watched her mother die during the French Revolution. The CD ends with arias from Medea by Cherubini and La vestale by Spontini, two neglected operas that Callas revived with enormous success at La Scala in the 1950s. The third CD demonstrates Callas’s supremacy as a Verdi soprano. We have here arias and duets from six of Verdi’s most popular operas, all of which Callas sang on the stage and all taken from complete recordings of the operas. Again Callas finds a different voice for each of the characters and presents a fully convincing gallery of contrasting interpretations for the six different heroines. On CD 4, Callas remains with Verdi, but ranges more widely across some roles that she didn’t play in the theatre such as Desdemona in Otello, Elvira in Ernani and Eboli in Don Carlo. Her musicality and dramatic understanding is such that she never fails to create a complete interpretation of every different character that she sings, even when she encounters it only in the recording studio. The next CD brings us to Callas as the perfect Puccini heroine. Again, she did not sing all of these roles on stage, but that in no way detracts from her superb interpretations of characters like Mimì in La bohème, Liù in Turandot or the eponymous Manon Lescaut, all of whom are vividly re-created by her unique vocal artistry. Towards the end of her career, Callas moved to Paris and discovered that she had a great affinity for the French language, which she exploited to the full in the recording studio with a series of recordings, beginning with the LP originally entitled Callas à Paris. As with her first recital album, her programme consisted of a group of coloratura arias for high soprano and a group of arias for the more powerful dramatic or even mezzo soprano. Among the first group are dazzling performances of the Waltz Song from Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette and the Polonaise from Mignon by Thomas, but it is her superb interpretations of arias like ‘J’ai perdu mon Eurydice’ from Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice, and ‘Printemps qui commence’ from Samson et Dalila by Saint-Saëns that make these recordings so treasurable. Despite many requests from opera houses around the world, Callas refused to sing Bizet’s Carmen on stage, but she made a memorable recording of it in 1964 and it is with the three principal arias from it that this collection closes.

Price: $38.98