Saturday, November 3, 2018

The Immortal Maria Callas

Maria Callas was one of the greatest opera singers of the Twentieth Century. What made her unique was her ability to bring life to the tragic heroines as no other artist could. No one else, to me, could convey the power of the joy and anguish of love.

As this Atlantic appreciation of her art makes clear:

IN a Callas performance no syllable of the text, no note of the score, went unexamined. Singers so attuned to dramatic nuance -- there are not many -- are liable to come across as nervous and infirm of purpose, like writers who italicize everything and thus stress nothing. Art means choices, as we all know: to play up A, we give up B. In defiance of this incontrovertible theory, Callas could on occasion sculpt a passage instant by instant without losing sight of her target. At the opening of Act Three of the studio recording of Medea, taped in 1957, she honed each word of the invocation of the gods of hell to an edge of ferocity. Her usual practice, though, was to set the mood and then place expressive accents sparingly. Lucia's frisson by the fountain was only that, and that was all it needed to be. In the part of the doomed Anne Boleyn, in Donizetti's Anna Bolena, Callas fired off bull's-eye zingers at Henry VIII, well aware that Anne is on thin ice, as the tremor in her anger showed. In the "Miserere" from Il trovatore she smiled at grief. The finale of Medea, in contrast, had to be tremendous, and so it was. In a live performance in Florence in 1953 Callas rode the last phrases as if they were tidal waves surging to the abyss. (The passage is a bonus track on the complete 1958 Dallas Medea, on Gala, an excellent budget label.)

However deep their gifts of sympathy and self-transformation, actors privileged to test themselves against a gallery of the great roles reveal over time the bedrock of their own hearts and souls. As the constant in Callas we discover a rare nobility, a proud, unflinching submission to fate. How apt, one might say: according to a dictum espoused notably by Puccini, the very essence of opera is to torture the heroine. But Callas never conveyed masochism, still less some cold-marble high-mindedness. The worlds of her heroines turn upside down in a moment, in many cases several times in short order. As Callas played them, they waste no time sniveling or frittering away their lives in second thoughts. Always her element was the unconditional.
 ***
Most mysterious among her many gifts, Callas had the genius to translate the minute particulars of a life into tone of voice. Her Cio-Cio-San, in Puccini's Madama Butterfly, is a marvel. As the child bride of the first act, Callas worked in fragile, chiming timbres that she was able to maintain even in the swelling raptures of the love duet. In Act Two a veil of grief descends, but still her voice was the voice of a child. Only in the final scene, in the prelude to Cio-Cio-San's suicide, did Callas disclose her full, tragic richness. By way of contrast, consider the final act of La traviata, in which Violetta hangs on by a thread, singing in blanched sounds already brushed by death. For the thought of death, the singer had a quite different color, audible in the second studio Norma (1960) and in her Carmen. We hear it again in the Dallas Medea, where Callas fulminated in cries so clipped, so dark, so wild with rage, that they scarcely seem human.


Thanks to 21st century technology Callas' art lives in a way one wouldn't have thought possible. There were too few filmed or videotaped performances of Callas but Base Holograms has found a way to bring her back to the stage over forty years after she died.

Here is a video excerpt of the the Base Hologram concert and I hope it comes to more cities so that a generation never blessed to see her in concert has a new opportunity to do so. Of course the recordings are wonderful but Maria's artistry was most apparent on stage.






I have a social Media account here on UtterZ.

I'm just getting used to it. Here's the link

Yvonne Lorenzo

Saturday, June 16, 2018


Follow the White Rabbit?

Read my latest post discussing the "Q" phenomenon here on Lew Rockwell's site:

"Follow the White Rabbit?" 

I hope this gets followers to think and not trust blindly. 


 




Wednesday, March 21, 2018

 Black Hole

The Black Hole in the Heart of Stephen Hawking

 This is my latest for LewRockwell.com on an alternative to Stephen Hawking's perspective on the universe.