Remembering Maria Callas

On December 2, 2023, we celebrate the centennial of the legendary American-born Greek soprano Maria Callas. She appeared with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on two occasions — on January 15, 1957, and January 22, 1958 — both benefits for the Alliance Française de Chicago at the Civic Opera House.

For Callas’ first appearance, Karl Böhm was scheduled to conduct, and the program would include several opera arias and a few orchestral selections. However, as reported extensively in the press, there were several disputes between soprano and conductor, and they were unable to come to an agreement regarding the program. Four days before the concert, it was announced that Böhm had withdrawn, having “reached a stalemate in program arrangements with the soprano.” Fausto Cleva, a house conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, was quickly engaged as his replacement; Callas arrived in Chicago three days before the concert, but by some accounts was more than two hours late for the first rehearsal.

The concert was notable for a variety of reasons. “Returning to the still reverberating scene of her American opera debut [in the title role of Bellini’s Norma in November 1954] to sing her first American concert on that same Civic Opera House stage, she knew the audience was wondering what really had happened to that stratospheric voice, of late winning headlines for the wrong reasons,” wrote Claudia Cassidy in the Chicago Tribune. “So she took that voice, rammed it down their throats, and looked justifiably triumphant when they cheered.”

Cleva and the Orchestra began the concert with Rossini’s Overture to Semiramide, and Callas performed arias from Bellini’s Norma and La sonnambula, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Meyerbeer’s Dinorah and Verdi’s Il trovatore (not all of the program is confirmed, as there are discrepancies between the program book and newspaper accounts). Near the end of the first half of the program, “Callas showed her mettle. She put down her bouquet, rested a foot on the podium, folded her arms, and sang ‘In questa reggia’ from Puccini’s Turandot, [which] as all operagoers know, is plain dynamite,” continued Cassidy. “It meant that a superb singer who is also an artist, and so doubly valuable, sang that cold, cruelly beautiful aria with every ounce of strength she could summon, driving it like nails into the consciousness of the audience. It was not beautiful, for it was forced to a degree altogether perilous to the human voice so mistreated. But it was, for sheer courage and determination, for winning at all costs, magnificent.”

On January 2, 1958, Callas was engaged to sing the title role in Bellini’s Norma for a gala performance at the Rome Opera House, with Italy’s president Giovanni Gronchi in attendance. According to some accounts, Callas was feeling ill and had advised the company to have an understudy standing by. Even though she was able to get through the first act, during intermission she canceled the rest of the performance. Callas was soon viciously attacked in the press, accused of being a temperamental diva and walking out on the president. (She sued the Rome Opera House, and, in 1965, the company was found to be at fault for failing to provide an understudy and canceling her future performances.)

Following the incident in Rome, Callas’ next performance would be her return engagement with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on January 22, 1958, again at the Civic Opera House. (Just three days earlier, on January 19, 15-year-old Daniel Barenboim made his debut in Chicago, giving a solo piano recital on the Allied Arts series in Orchestra Hall.)

Under the baton of Nicola Rescigno, Callas performed selections from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, Boito’s Mefistofele, Thomas’s Hamlet and Verdi’s Macbeth and Nabucco, among others. Chicago “turned out in droves . . . and it also heard some magnificent singing that in our time only Callas can achieve,” wrote Cassidy in the Tribune. “There are beautiful voices in the world, never too many or even enough, but some. Callas takes a beautiful voice and goes on from there. She has a marvelous technique, a deeply probing, vividly projected sense of drama, and the widest range of any singer I have known. . . . Was everything perfection? Of course not. Great things are seldom perfect. But this was Callas at her crest except for some notes more bold than beautiful, and even those had the beauty of courage, of the indomitable will to win.”

This article also appears here and portions previously appeared here.