The Fight for Operatic Justice: Callas performs "Lucia di Lammermoor" with Herbert von Karajan at La Scala
From "The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography," Chapter 8: "Extreme poetry."
The below is an excerpt from my upcoming book The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography that details La Divina’s clash with Karajan.
The scene: January 1954. Legendary maestro Herbert von Karajan is about to embark on his inaugural collaboration with the world’s most illustrious opera singer.
Herbert von Karajan had met Maria backstage at La Scala after his performance of Der Rosenkavalier on 31 January 1952.1 Having listened to “a little spool of tape” that Walter Legge had brought to his hotel room—an excerpt from Maria’s 1953 recording of Lucia di Lammermoor—the maestro had resolved to mount the work around her.
Stirring the ambience of the opera’s source material in his head, Karajan began to study Donizetti’s score and contemplate the Scottish Highlands of The Bride of Lammermoor; venturing to scribe Sir Walter Scott’s hometown to scrutinize its “architecture, iron-work and light.” Appointing himself both director and conductor of the imminent production, he was adamant to stop the opera’s devolution into yet another dusty staging. Karajan wanted the sets to embody the frost of the wintery North.2
“It’s not important,” Maria responded when critic Lanfranco Rasponi asked why she hadn’t read Walter Scott’s novel. “It is the music that matters. The mad scene is a result of Donizetti’s genius and not of the novel. These literary works are the springboard, but what really matters is what the composer does with them. There is nothing Scottish about the way Donizetti interprets her. She becomes a universal character. Try to translate ‘Ardon gli incensi’ into English, and much of the gripping drama is gone.”3
With these contrarian conceits the pair embarked on their inaugural collaboration. Stepping onstage in rehearsal, the soprano was enshrouded in a swath of dismal white and gray; an “all-pervading gloom” drenched in “dust from old gauzes”.4
“Could you tell me why I don’t see anything?” Maria asked co-star Rolando Panerai. Her sight was bad enough; now it was suffering additional impairment.
“You can’t see anything because there’s a veil that’s deflecting the light in the auditorium; it’s opaque so you can’t see anything.”
“That’s it!” Maria cried. “This is not possible—this veil’s affecting the acoustics. The vocal vibrations lose their characteristics.” Heading to confront the maestro, she found her argument did not gain steam: “Very well, then—you will be singing Lucia.”5
After half an hour the stage manager alerted Karajan that she was sitting in her dressing room and crying. Understanding it was high time to surrender, Karajan determined to placate his singer. The veil was scrapped.6
Set in the eighteenth century, Lucia di Lammermoor revolves around the titular young woman, who is forced by her brother to wed Lord Arturo to salvage her family’s fortune. Overcoming her love for Edgardo however becomes an impossible feat. Rather than confront her circumstances, fey Lucia descends swiftly into madness; first hallucinating that she sees a dead girl near the fountain—“the one stabbed by her jealous lover”—then marrying but murdering Arturo. The famous “mad scene” showcases Lucia’s final bout of consciousness. During a fantasy about a wedding to Edgardo the soprano’s voice pursues a fleeting flute’s cadenza. Shortly afterward she dies.
Compelled to ditch a doom and gloom aesthetic, Karajan illuminated Callas’ Lucia in the mad scene like a prima ballerina in a chasing spotlight.7 Director Sandro Sequi witnessed the production and recalled, “She was extremely stylized and classic, yet at the same time human—but a humanity on a higher plane of existence, almost sublime.”8
Although tradition mandates that Lucia come onstage after her husband’s murder brandishing a dagger in a bloodied bridal gown, Callas and Karajan relied on audiences’ imaginations to envisage gore. “I dislike violence, and I find it artistically inefficient,” the former would articulate. “Where it is necessary to include the shedding of blood, the suggestion of the action is more moving than the exhibition of it. I always eliminated the knife when singing Lucia: I thought it was a useless and old-fashioned business, that the action could get in the way of the art, and realism interfere with the truth.”9
When Ida Cook remarked that from the moment her Lucia surfaced at the steps, “everyone instinctively fell away from her, knowing that she had become a homicidal lunatic,” whereas other Lucias “just come in, holding the dagger. You’re just there, you poor thing,” “in a chilling voice” Maria leaned in to answer: “Do you realise? I don’t need a dagger.”10
In this role she wanted to evoke, in her description: “a very melancholy world and a very sentimental one, and in the mad scene you realize there is a world above ordinary life; a nice world; a dream-like world.”11
The little girl who would become a murderess.
A recording of this Milanese performance lays bare a Lucia very much enthralled in fairytales. When small, the voice is eerily curbed and disturbingly soured: the instrument of a Lucia so derailed, her world of make-believe has brainwashed her into defending killing as a logical resort. It’s the state of someone strapped down to a bed between four padded walls. And yet it is an elegant, enticing mania; the visions of an adolescent who confuses dreams with life.
Charged with crescendi in the crazed cadenza, Lucia’s mad scene isn’t a delusionary thirteen-minute episode split by a blazing bolt of vexed lucidity. Instead it is a fluent daydream whose veneer begins to splinter with crude fissures of reality. The quasi-fractured tone on “Spargi d’amaro pianto” (“Sprinkle with bitter tears”) is menacing not just for bystanders but for the lethal newlywed. If she retreats into real life… her death is imminent. The Callas version makes us wonder whether her demise occurs because of lunacy or its abrupt theft at the hands of sanity.
“A Rain of Red Carnations—Four Minutes of Applause for the Mad Scene” ran the headline in the Milanese La Notte the next day.12 A contrast of eminent colors: Lucia’s white wedding dress bestrewn with red streaks… where Maria had forfeited splotches of blood.
©Sophia Lambton 2023
The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography will be released this coming December 2.
Pre-order here.
R. Osborne, Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), 352.
E. Schwarzkopf & W. Legge, On and Off the Record: A Memoir of Walter Legge (London: Faber & Faber), 196.
L.Rasponi, The Last Prima Donnas (New York: Limelight Editions, 1998), 579.
Osborne, 352.
J.-J. Hanine-Roussel, Maria Callas (Paris: Éditions Carpentier, 2015), 225 (Interview with Rolando Panerai).
Richard Osborne, Conversations with Karajan (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1991), 73–75.
J. Ardoin & Gerald Fitzgerald, Callas: The Art and the Life (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974), 24.
A. Stassinopoulos, Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981), 124.
K. Harris, “Callas,” (Interview), The Observer, 8 and 15 February 1970.
I. Cook, Safe Passage: The Remarkable True Story of Two Sisters Who Rescued Jews from the Nazis (New York: Harlequin, 2008), 274.
D. Prouse, “Maria Callas Speaks,” The Sunday Times, 26 March 1961.
G. Jellinek, Callas: Portrait of a Prima Donna (New York: Dover Publications, New Edition, 1986), 106.