Favourite Diva

Three or four years now it has been regular listening & watching of Callas' Casta Diva performance, where she just stands centre stage on the checkerboard floor and belts it out before the chorus. Completely transfixing.

 

 

https://youtu.be/s-TwMfgaDC8

 

Maria Callas sings "Casta Diva" (Bellini: Norma, Act 1)

The great Maria Callas performs an aria from her signature role, Bellini's druid priestess Norma, with the Orchestre de l'Opera National de Paris and Georges...

youtu.be

 

 

 

Following which there was a progression to the more familiar O mio babbino caro, in an early recital where the face and figure of the young Callas were completely unrecognisable. It came as a great surprise at first.  After some further thought on the matter it was understood as perfectly common—the semblance of youthful bloom was impossible to recognise in old age, and vice versa.

What to say about that delivery of the young Maria in Paris in what must have been the early 60s? How does the young woman work herself up in that way? The player king in Hamlet had nothing whatever on her, this strikingly young and beautiful Maria. 

Some of the WikiP entry touching on relations with her mother and father gave hints.

Lately the iPad was raised up on the stand in the bathroom evenings for the teeth-brushing, standing close and often having to come to a complete stop. It was a short piece, only two minutes and usually needed repeating.

In lockdown with borders closed, 1.5 metre distancing and the past with its many departed rapidly retreating, one recalled what was commonly remarked in the case of this or that masterly artwork—music, literature, film and sometimes painting too: under the sway it was the memory of emotion that deeply stirred.

In the last year of high school a jock who was school and neighbourhood football captain, for whom schoolwork had become very much a sidelight, heard something surprising from the English teacher in one of the classes talking about a book on the syllabus one was supposed to have read. The title comes back, though without the author: Talking To A Stranger. In that drama it must have been, a theatre script, at some point a character reached up to touch a lighted bulb, burning his fingers in the process. The character had reached for the hot bulb intentionally, for the same reason as that stated above, suggested Mr Mullane in the middle of the roundtable seating arrangement: in his particular straightened circumstances, whatever they were, the character needed to feel something.

Odd hearing for the late-teen jock in the mid-70s. Even now recalling it the matter seems a trifle far-fetched; a little over-dramatic. However, something rather less easy now to discount.

In both cases the black & white archival films of the young and older Maria Call leave something to be desired. They do however capture a good deal, especially in the case of the latter, the young performer only just beginning to make her mark.

 

https://youtu.be/l1C8NFDdFYg