Callas Athene
By DAVID CAIRNS
singers who can act.) Reservations that one might have had -before the event now seem meaningless. Was Tosca the opera to celebrate the return of Callas to this theatre after five years and to the operatic stage after one and a half? Was Tosca the opera to choose for brilliant and expensive presentation out of all the works which are, literally or in practice, unproduced at Covent Garden, while the old sets dating from 1900 still stood, putting many a design a quarter the age to shame, and the old production, moribund though it was, still provided some sort of context for the very considerable performances of Regine Crespin and Otakar Kraus? Perhaps not. But such questions have no relevance now. The new production exists. What will become of it when the eagles are gone and the irresistible argument of Zeffirelli's presence is withdrawn may be fore- seen. For the moment its splendours shine un- dimmed, silencing doubts.
The most important doubts it silences are the doubts that everyone had about Callas, admirers included (indeed they doubted just as much, from a different point of view, as those benighted creatures, enemies of art and non-comprehenders of opera, who never could see what the fuss was about). The auguries had looked bad: increas- ingly infrequent appearances on the stage, conse- quent rumours of retirement that were not contradicted, an occasional grnmophone record in which her voice seemed happy only with the mezzo-soprano pieces, and here and there— clearings in the rank jungle of gossip, speculation and innuendo—the rare concert, fascinating but unsettling events which were both reminders of the biggest operatic talent of the age (in or out of the opera house) and warnings that it might be in decline: one seized on moments of genius, subtleties and beauties of musical colouring and dramatic inflexion, (like the sudden horrifying disclosure of a personality on the edge of the abyss in the sound of the voice and the timing of the phrase at the words in Lady Macbeth's 'La luce langue'); but one was anxious, and not convinced.
Callas has changed all that. She has triumphed over her vocal problems, which were also prob- lems of nerve and spirit She has taken the first and most crucial step. We may continue to hope that she will be seen and heard in some of the great mezzo roles—Carmen, Dido, Orfeo—but it is no longer vital to believe that she will. It was Obviously necessary for her to prove that she was still a dramatic soprano. She has done so con- clusively. She has, one feels, come to terms with her own weaknesses and got them in hand, and can now move forward to other, vocally more taxing roles.,There will always be a tendency to flawed tone and excessive vibrato on sustained high notes (the climax of `Vissi d'arte' was an example of this on the first night last week) but she, and we, will surely now take it in the stride of her tremendous and total mastery of every other aspect of the opera singer's art. Tosca was a shrewd choice for the re-establishing of con- fidence. It has relatively few exposed high notes; most of the fortes above the stave are supported by the full power of the orchestra. But she can still ride the pit and dominate. The voice is strong, carrying, and brilliant. The lower register is rich and imperious and beautiful, the middle has that unforgettable slightly curdled quality, thick yet pungent like smoke, which sounds ugly when described but when heard is the most thrilling sound in the world. It is a far from perfect voice; but its effect is to blot out and render futile and inadequate all ideas of mere perfection. It is simply the instrument that is used by Callas; and a, such it is enough.
From the moment when the cry rang through the Chiesa Sant' Andrea—'Mario, Mario!'—and then she appeared, moving rapidly with quick, soft gestures (and once catching her stole in one of Renzo Mongiardino's altar rails, from which she jerked it free with a twitch of divine impatience), the theatre was filled with an electrid excitement. It began partly as a feeling of tense uncerttinty about the outcome; but it developed into an awareness that we were witnessing a performance such as only Callas could once have given and such as Callas can now give again. It is clearly and consistently imagined, worked out to the last musical and dramatic detail, and infused with an incomparable fire. Her Tosca is not the great diva, consciously charming, sophisticated and commanding that we know from the extremely distinguished interpretation of Madame Crespin (whose most interesting recital at the Festival Hall the other day contained an account of 'When I am laid in earth' in impec- cable English—a lesson not, I hope, unheeded by Covent Garden). Callas shows a Tosca still young, instinctive, awkward with even a touch of gawkiness in the drooping, graceful stance and movements, naive, quick to piety as well as to fiercely tender love, and to humour too, jealous, generous, touchingly vulnerable. She is a Tosca who might do anything at any time, but whatever it would be, she would do it with passion and utter conviction. Every act of hers in the drama, however much we know it is coming, is invested with this quality of unpredictability, and with a terrifying force. Her sudden intense stillness as she looks down at the table and sees and under- stands the presence of the knife and remains poised as if suspended in time over the enormous question, a figure of avenging justice formed out of the body of a mortal woman, has a classical grandeur and eloquence that for an instant lift the work on to a different plane of dramatic art. When Cavaradossi is dragged from Scarpia's room, her struggles to free him are breathtaking in 'their violence and disregard of everything but her lover's fate : a single, devouring impulse seems to carry her in one .movement through the whole complex action—leaping from the couch, wrestling with the guards, and being herself half- dragged by them, and beating on the doors against which her demented body flung her as they closed. One could go on singling out such details the rasping scorn of her 'Quanto,' the enormity of decision -and sacrifice expressed in the barely perceptible nod of agreement to Scarpia, the fiery softness of her caresses, the beauty and rightness of her singing of phrase after phrase. But it is above all in the sense of completeness, the realisation of a whole part in itself and in relation to the total work, that Callas at her best is unique, and so it is here.
One dwells on Callas because we have been waiting for her so long and the renewed impres- sion of her greatness, after several years without it, is so overwhelming. But the rest of the per- formance is worthy of her. Zeffirelli, without doing the impossible and elevating splendid theatre into tragic drama, has seized the oppor- tunity for a staging of.cornucopean magnificence; and he draws its riches out of the work itself.
In this his Tosca is the opposite of much of his Fal.staff. Where he invents, he either does not
interfere with the work or helps it by some atmo- Spheric stroke of crowd background and, in one case, by brilliantly solving an old problem : the awkwardly long time for which Puccini has obliged us to watch Angelotti searching' for the key to the Attavanti Chapel—Zeffirelli cuts it ' in two by making Angelotti crouch behind the font while a priest crosses the stage in conversation with a parishioner. The setting of this act is admirable, with a superb apotheosis as the cardinal appears in a cloud of incense turned gold in a great shaft of sunlight. But Mongiardi- no's Act 2, a large Renaissance room .lurid with the flames of an unseen log fire, with great heads in blackened bronze flanking Scarpia's massive desk and a very much lived-in air of squalid mag- nificence, is even better. Carlo Felice Cillario conducts sumptuously. Renato Cioni's Cavara-
doSsi suggests not much more than animal health and spirits, but he sings with fine lyrical fervour and most sensitively (only wanting the lung power to bring oil' Vittoria' and the curiously Edward German-like `L'alba vindice appar'); and Gobbi's Scarpia is a performance .of magis- terial panache and subtlety, the equal of Callas in Act 2.
We shall surely see Callas come -back again to Sing in a revival of this production (and in others); and Gobbi too, many times; incredibly, though fortunately for us, he is said to have settled in Maidenhead. As for the production, one can only entreat Covent Garden, even if only this once, to do everything possible not to betray their own ,stiperb achievement.
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