Return of the Prodigal Daughter

He snapped: "The Metropolitan is grateful that the association is ended."

She spat: "Prussian tactics!" And six years passed. Finally, last June, at the instigation of mutual friends, the Metropolitan Opera's Rudolf Bing went a-courting in Paris. This time he said pretty please, and she said yes, and they made a date.

In Manhattan, news of Maria Callas' return -- for two performances only --threw opera lovers into agonies of anticipation. As opening night drew near, scalpers were commanding up to $800 for tickets. Bleary-eyed fans lined up and slept on the sidewalks outside the Met for three days to snap up 448 standing-room tickets. The buildup, and one of the most glittering audiences in memory, demanded a triumphal evening. Callas, singing the role of Tosca, made it so, not with her voice, but with every last ounce of her siren skill.

Supercharged. At the first offstage sound of her voice calling for her paramour, "Mario! Mario!", a wave of expectant murmuring swept the galleries.

Then she swirled onstage and the audience erupted in a three-minute ovation.

The prodigal daughter had returned.

Tosca is a jealous lover, and Callas played the part with pantherish intensity, purring innocently one moment, spitting hellfire the next. In the second-act encounter with the lecherous police chief Scarpia, splendidly portrayed by Baritone Tito Gobbi, Callas was at her supercharged best. When the soldiers carried off her Mario, they nearly buckled under her pummeling. She lurched desperately about the stage fending off Scarpia's advances, then in a violent flash drove a knife into his heart. Callas and Gobbi treated the Met to one of the best-acted performances it has seen in many a year.

Controlling an Animal. But Tosca is not a play; the singing's the thing. And even Callas could not make it otherwise. Never an instrument of luscious quality, her soprano last week was a thin and often wobbly echo of the voice that fled the Met in 1958. Her high notes were shrill and achingly insecure, and seemed all the more so by contrast with the rich, ringing tenor of Franco Corelli as Mario. In the poignant Vissi d'Arte aria, Callas relied almost wholly on dramatic rather than vocal brilliance to carry her through--which, in her case, is admittedly a compelling compromise. The audience certainly thought so. At the curtain, a shower of roses and confetti rained down from the galleries, and the house bravoed on for half an hour of curtain calls.

Shaken by her 1959 separation from her husband, Industrialist Giovanni Meneghini, Callas admits to having had a real "vocal crisis" a few years ago. Now 41, she explains: "My biggest mistake was trying to intellectualize my voice. I tried to control an animal instinct instead of leaving it as it was. It set me back years. Professionally, the world of Maria Callas has become a lonely world of a woman looking for her voice."

Whether it will ever return in full flower is a matter of conjecture. Meanwhile, Callas remains indisputably the most exciting operatic presence of her generation. Asked afterward how she thought her performance went, she could only say: "You find a word. I can't." But who could put Callas in a word?

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