To Maria Callas

Harrison Bacon, central character in RJ Huddy's The Verse of the Sword, is a little obsessed with Maria Callas. Here's what Arthur Silber wrote on this day in 2005:

Had she lived, Maria Callas would have celebrated her 82nd birthday today. It is only fitting that, in a life filled with controversy, the first dispute should concern this usually simple fact: Callas herself insisted she was born on December 2; other records indicate the fourth to be the correct date. She left us in 1977, when she was only 53 years old. She once remarked: "First I lost my voice, then I lost my figure and then I lost Onassis." She lost the ability to make her artistic vision real, which was her soul's reason for being, then she lost what she believed to be her physical allure -- an attractiveness she achieved at great personal cost, in service to her art in the first instance -- and then she lost perhaps the only man to make her feel truly feminine, and genuinely like a woman. When it was all gone, Callas felt there was no reason to go on -- so she died. Some of her friends still believe her death was largely self-willed. (Here is a site with a wealth of information about her.)

Callas was indisputably a supremely great artist, one of the very highest and most demanding rank -- an artist who comes along only a very few times in a generation, if we are extraordinarily lucky. This obviously does not mean that a listener has to love Callas's voice, in terms of its basic quality alone, above all others. With regard to lushness, richness, timbre or what is often referred to simply as beauty (a term which is unhelpfully most often left very vague in terms of a more specific meaning), one may prefer Renata Tebaldi, for example. In certain moods, I prefer to listen to Tebaldi myself, if what I want to hear above all else is a sound of almost inhuman, ineffable purity. Very early Tebaldi, up to the late 1950s, is what you want for such occasions. Callas's severest critics will sometimes gleefully point out her many technical failings, especially in the later stages of her very brief career.

 The rest, an indispensable tribute, is here.