Diva in Disgrace

WE DON'T WANT CALLAS IN ROME! was scrawled over the posters. Said others, in tribute to Soprano Callas' famed rival: VIVA TEBALDI! On Via Nazionale, before the Hotel Quirinale--where Callas stayed in her suite--truncheon-swinging police again and again charged shouting demonstrators. On the floor of Parliament, a Deputy introduced a motion that would bar Maria Meneghini Callas from all of Italy's state-subsidized opera houses. Her offense: on opening night at the Rome Opera, Callas had walked out of a performance of Bellini's Norma after the first act, leaving behind her a glittering audience of notables, including President Giovanni Gronchi.

Diva Callas could scarcely have picked a worse evening to stage a walkout. Rome had not heard her for two years, while rumors floated about that her voice was going; for her return, she had chosen one of her outstanding roles, and one of the most challenging in the repertory. As Norma, the Druid priestess, Callas came before her audience looking strikingly handsome in flowing robes, her dark hair aglitter with silver leaves. Midway in the first act, when she launched into the opera's most famed aria, Casta Diva, the house was hushed in taut expectancy. All of the familiar intensity was there, and the first notes were luminously clear. But as the aria moved into the upper registers, the voice seemed to darken and tremble. The audience responded with a mixture of hisses and bravos. Callas lifted one thin arm in a furious gesture of contempt.

At intermission she locked herself in her dressing room with her friend, Gossipist Elsa Maxwell, and sobbingly told opera officials outside her door that she could not go on. Because Callas herself had refused to have an understudy at rehearsal, the management had no choice but to cancel the rest of the performance. Cracked an American in the audience: "After this Casta Diva, they may just cast a diva into the Tiber."

Maria Callas' husband, wealthy retired Manufacturer Giovanni Battista Meneghini, announced that "she is very, very, very sick." Callas herself apologized to President Gronchi, spoke to the press of a "lowering of the voice" ("It has happened to many singers before me, and now it was my turn"). The manager of the Rome opera house had still another explanation: Callas had celebrated New Year's Eve at a Rome nightclub "without due precautions."

None of the explanations satisfied the critics, some of whom were sure that Callas was simply losing her voice. Said the Paese Sera: "Let's be truthful. She started badly and got worse. Her voice appears threatened by changes in timbre and variations in the lower registers. In the high registers Callas is an acrobat who lacks breath."

For the second scheduled performance of Norma, the Rome Opera brought in hefty, promising Italian Soprano Anita Cerquetti. "She sang like a peaceful cow," said one critic, but she won a tumultuous ovation. Meanwhile the Opera management withheld Soprano Callas' fee (rumored close to $2,000). The week's last word belonged to a maid at the Quirinale, who said: "She cannot have lost her voice. I heard her screaming at the waiter."

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