released November 4, 2023

Maria Callas, soprano
Albert Lance, tenor
Tito Gobbi, baritone
Chorus and Orchestra of the Paris Opera
Georges Sebastian, conductor
Live recording of the performance given at the Paris Opera on 19 12 1958

Biographies of Maria Callas, Albert Lance, Tito Gobbi and Georges Sebastian may all be found at wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Maria Callas arrived in Paris fairly late (1958), though still in the full splendour of her career as a singer and interpreter, and the bond remained right up until her very last operatic performance: Norma in 1964. She alighted there with fame and laurels heaped upon her after other ports of call of fundamental importance: Norma and Macbeth at La Scala in 1952 (the latter conducted by De Sabata), Armida in Florence the same year, Medea at La Scala in 1953, Lucia in Berlin in 1955 (under the baton of Karajan), Traviata again at La Scala (Visconti directed, with Giulini on the podium), Norma at the Met in 1956 and, last but not least, Anna Bolena back in Milan. Paris, when all was said and done, represented the last rampart still to be razed, and Callas intended to take it by storm.

The Théâtre de l’Opéra, the evening of 19 December 1958. A concert, not a stage performance, and a concert whose programme might, at first sight, seem hackneyed (the usual items) but which was in fact ideally suited to capturing to the full the precise nature of the talent and legendary status of the performer: an anthology of arias from Rossini to Puccini via Bellini and Verdi; Gobbi and Lance were sharing the stage with her, and Sebastian was on the podium.

It was a ‘popular’ programme, riddled with opportunities for comparison. Gluck, Monteverdi, Spontini and obscure items from the early nineteenth century would have been less of a challenge but here we have Norma’s prayer, Rosina’ sharp nails, Leonora’s dilemmas, and Tosca’s panther-like eyes. It was of course a triumph, for that evening, in less than two hours of music, Callas told two stories: her own and , more importantly, that of opera. To modern, less ‘magnetic’ ears certain technical lapses do, it must be admitted, obstruct the fluidity and spontaneity of a number of vocal constructions that sound dull as far as rhythm and fluency are concerned. However, apart from these weak points, we can only marvel at a voice that succeeds in bringing into focus the ‘hidden accents’ of a piece, thus fulfilling the inmost desire of Rossini and Stendhal.

By working on the accenting of the individual syllables Callas recreates in just a few moments all the character’s fundamental urges and ideas, using unusual new vocal techniques. A dark timbre allows her to ‘mature’ Rosina, hitherto the province of light or coloratura sopranos, acrobatic enough in the upper register but weak in the central range and not much given to psychological analysis. The result was a different Rosina, not necessarily memorable, but it paved the way for the revival of bel canto that occurred a few years later. We have a striking, priestly Norma of statuesque vocal beauty, with dark streaks in the upper register, arabesques like mysterious nocturnal echoes in a forest flooded with the light of the full moon. Her Leonora from ‘Il Trovatore’ is almost as turgid and dramatic as some of the women painted by Leonardo, in whom iridescent purity of soul merges with the miry, murky abysses of the Dark Ages. And to end with ‘Tosca’, a character impersonated o the stage on various occasions and immortalised on record under the baton of de Sabata (one of the highlights of both their recording careers), and in Paris too. Callas’s Tosca is electrifying: we are in the thick of the action, on Act 2, and the baroque, papal Rome evoked by Puccini explodes in an intense spurt of fiery, diabolical colours. And Callas, the creator of it all, easily breaks loose from the far from negligible vocal stature of Gobbi in an incandescent finale. All the states of mind of a strong personality forced to bend to the lust of a burnt-out disciple of the Marquis de Sade are dissected, and the naked, horrifying drama is exposed to the last blood in which Callas rises, in this tragic, honourable Puccinian figure, as the indestructible Victor.

Adapted from the original Italian note by Luca Rebeggiani.