On Maria Callas

Listening to Maria Callas sing is a pleasure one has to experience in order to believe. That there is a sensation as intense as the kind that her voice is able to draw, is as amazing a discovery as the knowledge that all this is as concrete, as human, as a pinch on one’s palm.
In “La Mamma Morta”, one can practically feel the misery emanating from the voice. This is not to say that I understand the lyrics—I don’t even pretend to—because I don’t. But the tension just about seizes you, and tightly; the voice unravels the story whose words, in turn, seem to crawl into your skin and, deeper, permeate your being like some unseen spirit. The potency in the voice—and the effect of this—can be described as superhuman and yet, ultimately, its greatest achievement is that it is able to touch the core of one’s humanity, to stir dormant feelings of sadness, whose cause one can’t seem to trace, exactly. It is, I believe, the primeval sense of loneliness that lives in each of us, and it is this that “La Mamma Morta” gropes around for, and then raises for us to see, if not to acknowledge.
It is, however, the kind of song that gradually grows on you. Listening to it for the first time is less an emotional experience than an aesthetic one. Initially, what strikes one is Maria Callas’ superbly trained voice, the artistry in her technique, the flawless rendition, her mastery of her craft.
This mastery can just as adequately be illustrated by her version of “Queen of the Night” which is from Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. It is in stark contrast to “La Mamma Morta,” the former being immensely lighter (though not in vocal difficulty) in mood than the latter. When I heard “Queen of the Night” for the first time, one of my lingering thoughts was that this amazing soprano had, herself, become the magic flute.