The Lyric Opera of Chicago enters its second half-century on September 24 with an 83-performance season of eight operas, including four new productions, over six months.
Fifty years ago, two young Chicagoans, against all odds – no successful opera company in the city for more 20 years, no quantifiable opera-going public nor tradition of guarantor support – established an opera company that became and remains among the world’s finest.
The story of its first two seasons is a fascinating tale of audacious adventure, considerable good judgement and lots of luck. Not least because it was the infant Lyric Opera of Chicago, not New York’s powerful Metropolitan, that acquired the sensational US début of Maria Callas.
For Chicago, Mme Callas ensured huge success. For Mme Callas, all ended in
disaster, in one of opera’s most notorious fiascos.
By R. L. Klinger
On the first evening of November, 1954, a capacity audience of 3,500 had come to the Civic Opera House to witness the return of grand opera to Chicago. The audience – dressed in a splendour not seen since the late 1920s, before the Great Depression robbed the city of world-class resident opera – paraded opera patrons from every state in the nation and critics from virtually all the newspapers and magazines that mattered to the musical life of the country.
In the first rows were some of the stars who had long served in the old Chicago Opera Company: Giorgio Polacco, the great Italian conductor whose ill-health had forced him into retirement some years before at the height of his career, the famous Polish soprano Rosa Raisa, who had, with her husband, the baritone Giacomo Rimini, established their singing school in Chicago, and Dame Eva Turner, the renowned English soprano who, since 1950, had been teaching voice at the University of Oklahoma. Also in the theatre were the two young people who had, against the odds, established the new Lyric Opera of Chicago: Carol Fox and Lawrence Kelly.
The opera was Bellini’s Norma, the conductor Nicola Rescigno. The Adalgisa was Giulietta Simionato, the famous coloratura mezzo who had been a leading singer at La Scala since 1939. The Oroveso was Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, the Russo-Italian bass and another La Scala star. The Pollioine was also a La Scala favourite, the tenor Mirto Picchi. Both Simionato and Picchi were making their US débuts. As was the young woman in the title role.
She was the 30-year-old soprano for whom operagoers from every corner of the US had flocked to Chicago. She was the Greek singing-actress who would become the latter part of the 20th century's most sensational, revolutionary and controversial diva. She was Maria Callas.
Four years earlier, Fox, the daughter of a wealthy Chicago office equipment manufacturer and herself an aspiring singer, had returned to the city from studies in Italy, to be approached by a group of people hoping she would join them in forming an opera company – one in which might wish to sing, in productions her parents might wish to finance. Miss Fox declined.
A few weeks later, on a routine visit to one of her New York signing teachers, Rescigno, who also was a former student of Polacco’s and knew Chicago well, their work was interrupted by a telephone call, after which, according to Ronald L. Davis in A History of Opera in the American West, the conductor turned back to his student and asked: “Do you know who that was? It was Fortune Gallo, and he wants to start an opera company in Chicago.” Fox, in another typically firm decision, replied: “Oh, Nicky, don't go in with Gallo. I'm thinking about forming a company myself.”
With Rescigno's encouragement, Fox, back in Chicago, began to solicit volunteer help from among her social contacts. She was soon joined by Kelly and Mrs. Betty McAllister. Kelly needed little convincing, being an absolute devotee of opera. More important for the future of the Lyric, however, he was also a well-connected businessman, in real estate and insurance, with training in both law and accounting.
On the other hand, Mrs McAllister was an example of what the enthusiasm of Fox and Kelly could inspire. At the time, the 25-year-old housewife told the Miami Herald, she had “about as much interest in opera as in water-skiing”. But she would go on to become a Lyric board member variously in charge of fund-raising, box-office, subscriptions and advertising.
Over the years, the accomplishments of Fox and Kelly have taken on a somewhat breathless mystique, as if their success was due to some wonderful wand that conjured up victory from air. It is true that much of what they did was exceedingly
audacious and on a meagre budget, but press reports and Lyric documents tell of no miraculous wand: what Fox and Kelly possessed was the ability to make correct artistic and business decisions underpinned by diligence and, most of all, constant work. Their biggest problem was that there had been no successful Chicago opera company for more than 20 years, and, since 1946, no regular opera seasons at all. There was no longer a quantifiable opera-going public nor tradition of guarantor support.
Even the Civic Opera House had lost it glamour. In 1948, James Kemper, chairman of the Lumbermens Mutual Casualty Company, bought the 45-storey art-deco skyscraper that contains the opera house across its lower storeys for $10.7m, about half of what it had cost to build in the late 1920s, installed at its top a huge blue neon sign reading “Kemper Insurance”, was widely quoted as saying “we bought the building in spite of the fact that the opera house was there, not because of it” and would lease the theatre to some fairly bizarre enterprises, including a wide-screen film company called Cinemiracle.
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Later, Kemper, befriended by Fox, would take pride in his opera house, providing as much as $50,000 a year in financial support over 10 years, and even, after his move towards retirement in 1969, stipulate that the building not be sold during his lifetime. James Kemper died in 1981, aged 95.
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The Fox-Kelly team at first operated from the McAllister home, Fox typing press releases and delivering them in her mother's car. They had won over the Kemper executives, eager to obtain tax advantages by staging opera in their building, but were opposed by the directors of the old opera company, who were reluctant to hand over $12m-worth of sets and costumes to an unproven enterprise. Eventually they agreed to lease the house and some sets and costumes for a single trial performance of Don Giovanni.
The amazing cast assembled by Fox and Kelly included Rossi-Lemeni in the title-role, the Canadian Mozartian tenor Léopold Simoneau as Don Ottavio, the
Metropolitan's Australian baritone John Brownlee as Leporello and the celebrated Brazilian soprano Bidú Sayão as Zerlina.
Rescigno conducted an orchestra of mainly off-season Chicago Symphony members. The sets were old and dingy, but nobody seemed to mind. Ticket sales demanded a second performance, after which the overall deficit was a mere $922, and the Lyric was in business. The company, now legally incorporated on a non-profit basis with Fox as general manager and Kelly as business manager, was given office space in the Kemper building to launch a campaign for guarantor support and plan its first season. Fox, Kelly and Rescigno began assembling a cast of non-Met-based stars who would focus attention on Chicago.
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A little later, in May 1954, another young woman, who was studying voice at nearby Northwestern University, telephoned the Lyric. The girl, who had not long before temporarily lost her singing voice and occupied her time by learning to type, wanted a job before going off to study in Europe. The girl was Ardis Krainik, who would go on to succeed Fox as general director of the Lyric in 1981 and remain in the post until 1997, when ill health forced her to end a remarkably successful 43-year career with the company.
Krainik, writing in Lyric Opera News in the autumn of 1989, said that, when she telephoned, she asked to speak to the personnel manager. The voice at the other end said that she was speaking to the personnel manager. Krainik then asked to speak to Miss Fox. “This is Miss Fox”, Fox replied. Krainik became the Lyric’s clerk-typist; Danny Newman became press officer. He, too, would remain with the company for well over 40 years, while attaining global fame in the performing-arts world as the architect of the modern method of increasing ticket sales through the subscription series.
“It was the first year of the company,” Krainik continued, “and so it was an entire season of hyperbole put forth by Danny Newman. He gave us all instructions as to what to say on the telephone, including the fact that we were to talk about a fabulous newcomer named Maria Callas. I'd never heard of Maria Callas, but I was happy to be a Newman sales disciple.”
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Strangely, fate could have had Callas's US début in Chicago, or in New York for that matter, as much as seven years earlier. The last attempt to establish a resident Chicago company was in the mid-1940s, an effort led by Edward Bagarozy, a New York lawyer who had long fancied life as an impresario. In early 1946, he and his wife, Louise Caselotti, a mezzo-soprano and respected voice coach, had auditioned Callas, then aged 22 and living in New York with her mother, and soon afterwards the Bagarozy flat would become like a second home to the aspiring soprano.
Towards the end of the year, Bagarozy formed the United States Opera Company, intending to base it in Chicago for a five-week season and then tour. Bagarozy, with almost literally only a shoestring for a budget, managed to put together a good cast, led by Rossi-Lemeni and Callas, and set off for Chicago. The company's first production, Turandot, was announced for the Civic Opera House on 6 January 1947.
However, just before the opening, the trade union for singers demanded a large down-payment to guarantee fees for the chorus. The curtain never rose on the United States Opera Company, and, by the end of the month, Bagarozy was bankrupt. Back in New York, back in the Bagarozy flat, Callas, with the help of Rossi’s contacts, was offered her Italian début in the Verona Arena for that summer.
Meanwhile, she and Rossi signed contracts naming Bagarozy as their sole agent for 10 years. Why Callas signed is not clear. It has often been suggested that she did so in return for the cost of her passage to Europe, but Giovanni Battista Meneghini, the Italian businessman who would not long afterwards become Callas’s husband and manager, has successfully refuted this. Another suggestion is that she signed out of gratitude to the Bagarozys’ past support. A third is that, in spite of her instincts, she simply could not think of a convincing reason why to refuse. When Bagarozy sued the two artists for breach of contract, Callas would say that she signed under duress. Rossi settled out-of-court for a reputed few thousand dollars. Callas regrettably did not.
However, a year earlier, her instincts were in full cry and would astonish the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, Edward Johnson, many of his staff and, outside the opera house, all of her acquaintances and confidantes. Having finally secured an audition at the Met, she was offered on the spot the leading female roles in Madama Butterfly and Fidelio for the 1946-47 season. And, on the spot, she turned them down, a decision that would soon figure large in the Callas legend. Both Irving Kolodin, in his history The Metropolitan Opera, and Arianna Stassinopoulos in her biography Maria Callas, say that she decided that she was not suitable, with her 180-pound bulk, for a fragile Japanese teenager, nor for a Leonora in the German Fidelio sung in English.
By the time of her arrival in Chicago in October 1954, the Met, by that time under general manager Rudolf Bing, was again trying to engage her.
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She told the Chicago Tribune: “I have been called crazy to turn down offers at the Metropolitan, but I always have known how to wait for things. By waiting, what you want will turn out sooner than when you hurry. Too many singers had appeared at the Met before they were ready, and they break their bones.” Asked why she did not sing there now, she gestured airily: “Trifles. Little things like repertoire sometimes and sometimes roles.”
“Two years ago,” she added, in reference to what was already a big part in the now-established Callas legend, her seemingly miraculous loss of weight, “I weighed over two-hundred pounds. Now I am one hundred and thirty-five. I am very pleased to wear this Dior suit. Do you like the H-line?”
“She was monstrously fat, and awkward,” Bing wrote in his 5000 Nights at the Opera of his first sight of Callas, at Florence's Maggio Musicale in 1951. By the time she reached Chicago she had been transformed into what Bing described as that “astonishing, svelte, striking woman who conquered the operatic (and more than the operatic) world”
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A year earlier, Bing had heard of Callas's successful débuts in Verona, Venice, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, and had instructed his Italian agent to open negotiations with the soprano and Meneghini. The Meneghini-Callases wanted $700 for each of eight performances over a month. Bing wanted the soprano for 12-to-14 weeks and would not pay “an artist unknown in America” more than $400 per performance. “An illustration of how little was known about Maria Callas in New York in 1950”, Bing wrote, “I ended my letter by asking her nationality”. The overall time-period seemed acceptable, but a fee of $500 was demanded, plus two return fares Milan/New York. Bing could not agree “to give Miss Callas, alone among all our European artists, transportation for spouse.”
However, even though Bing had decided in Florence that Callas still had “a lot to learn”, he offered her Traviata for 1952-53. This proved impossible because the Met could not, as requested by Callas, provide a US visa for Meneghini. The Italian industrialist, due to alleged Fascist links, had been denied entry into the US, a ruling, however, that was soon reversed.
But after Callas' weight-loss, the Metropolitan felt it was urgent to engage her for 1954-55. Bing offered 12 or 15 fifteen performances over 10 or 12 weeks respectively and instructed his agent that, while he would “not like to pay more than $750 per performance ... if she at last agrees with no strings go to $800”.
The Met had not reckoned on Fox and Kelly. They had gone personally and directly to Callas in Verona and, after lengthy but cordial discussions, agreed to her choice of repertoire, two performances each of three operas, over four weeks, and at an overall fee of $12,000, plus transportation for self and spouse.
Fox then went on to the Rome home of Tito Gobbi, the great baritone-actor who later, as the infamous Scapia, would, with Callas, give their generation’s most memorable Toscas. Fox went on to Milan to sign Guiseppe di Stefano, the noted, velvet-voiced Italian tenor, then Picchi, then Simionato, who had sang Adalgisa opposite Callas' Norma in Mexico City, forming a partnership they would repeat over the years around the world. Fox said, only half-jokingly, that her policy during the Lyric's early years was simply to go to Italy and sign up the 10 best singers available.
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However, while she might be prepared to give Callas the Earth, she was no spendthrift. Gobbi – who, after his 1954 US debut with the Lyric, would sing in Chicago every season but one until his retirement from the stage twenty-five years later – gave this account, slightly condensed by me, in his memoir Tito Gobbi: My Life:
“When Carol arrived I tried, not very successful at first, to interest her in my discovery: Anita Cerquetti, a somewhat large and unromantic figure, I have to admit. But she had a beautiful stage face and her voice was absolutely stunning.
Carol said she was not thinking of engaging anyone unknown; she was not prepared to travel around, and so on. But I assured her that she could hear the girl right there in my drawing-room. So, with Carol's rather reluctant consent, I telephoned Anita and asked her to come immediately.
“When she walked into the room Carol gave me a rather disparaging glance, but when Anita opened her mouth and began to sing Amelia's first aria from Ballo in Maschera she nearly jumped off the sofa with excitement. Then, containing her enthusiasm and prudently remembering the opera company's finances, she leaned towards me and asked in an urgent whisper: ‘Do you think we could get her fairly cheaply?’
“ ‘Don't be mean’, I retorted, well pleased with the reaction. ‘You pay her what she's worth.’ ”
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With many of the Don Giovanni cast retained for the planned autumn season, Fox and Kelly had secured one of the finest combinations of leading singers that could be found at the time.
Despite the old sets, some notable weaknesses in supporting roles and a 75-member orchestra assembled by Rescigno that would need considerable more time to gel, the three-week, eight-opera season was a thunderous success, so much so that, after a disappointing Carmen late in the season, the Lyric, Davis reports in his Opera in Chicago, received this note from a man who had contributed $10 to the company’s fund-raising campaign: “I was beginning to think you were infallible when I saw your Carmen. Thank God you're not. Here's another $5.”
But, above all, it was Callas who put Chicago firmly back onto the map of the wider operatic world: her astounding performances as Norma, Lucia and Violetta repaid the Lyric's $12,000 many-fold. The rave reviews would fill a book, and her effect on the audiences was truly amazing.
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A few days after she opened the season with her spectacular Norma, she attended a performance of Bohème. As she entered the auditorium, the audience burst into applause.
“Nothing like that had ever happened to me before,” Stassinopoulos quotes Callas, “I must have seemed stupid, but I didn't know what it was all about. I was delayed getting there, and when I heard the clapping I thought the maestro must be entering the orchestra pit. When I realised they were applauding me I didn't know what to do.”
A few nights later, after Lucia's mad scene, Davis reports that Chicago critic Claudia Cassidy wrote: “There was an avalanche of applause, a roar of cheers growing steadily hoarse, a standing ovation, and the main aisles were full of men pushing as close to the stage as possible ... calling her before the curtain 22 times in an ovation than lasted 17 minutes.”
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The Lyric's fund-raising campaign had sought $250,000, but a dubious Chicago provided only $56,000. Fox and Kelly considered at one time that they might have to sustain a large deficit from their own pockets. However, the young impresarios, by deftly pruning their planned four-week season to three and by mounting a successful sales drive that reached 83 per cent of capacity, contained the deficit to only $14,000. The press saluted them for their unbounded competence and urged the city to meet in full the company's new fund-raising appeal for $300,000.
In the Lyric's files, among the cards recording the long Chicago careers of the many stars who sang there year after year, is this one:
CALLAS, MARIA
AVENUE FOCH 44
PARIS, FRANCE
Year Opera Role
1954 Norma Norma
Traviata Violetta
Lucia di Lammermoor Lucia
1955 Puritani Elvira
Trovatore Leonora
Madame Butterfly Madame Butterfly
That's all. Callas' disappearance from Chicago was as sensational as her appearances.
At the end of the 1954 season, Callas returned to Milan, to La Scala, from which, after Callas' recent ascendancy, her only serious rival, the vastly celebrated Renata Tebaldi, had left the previous year. Tebaldi would not return until Callas's departure in 1958. The Callas-Tebaldi relationship had started well-enough: at a 1948 Rovigo performance, Tebaldi's salient “Brava!” was what Callas treasured most. However, by 1954, their famous feud had reached its peak, with Callas
having uttered her bombast to the Chicago American that, “if the time comes when my dear friend Renata Tebaldi sings Norma or Lucia one night, Violetta, La Gioconda or Medea the next, then and only then will be rivals. Otherwise it is like comparing Champagne with Cognac. No, with Coca-Cola”.
After Tebaldi's quiet retreat from La Scala, the feud was largely finished on a personal level and really only maintained as a heated quarrel between their vociferous partisans. However, it still seems surprising that Callas, when Fox and Kelly were again in Italy recruiting for their second season and again agreeing to Callas’s every requirement, that she would turn matter-of-factly to Kelly and say, according to Davis: “You should sign up Renata Tebaldi. Then your audiences will have the opportunity to compare us, and your season will be even more successful.” Fox and Kelly did, and the season was. “They're incredible,” one critic said. “They don't know these things can't be done, so they do them.”
Upon her arrival in Chicago, Tebaldi, who would perform regularly at the Lyric for the next 10 years, told the Chicago Sun-Times that she would not be going to the
opening-night ball (Callas would) and, as was her custom at La Scala, she would not be at the opera house when she was not singing (Callas would and, reports Davis, politely applaud Tebaldi, saying, “Renata is in very good voice tonight”).
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“Some people,” Tebaldi said, “like Tebaldi more, some people like Callas more. It's the fans that have aroused this feud and its publicity. We are completely different people. I do not want to be the absolute prima donna. There is room for everyone in the theatre.”
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Callas and Tebaldi shared a dressing-room, but, because they sang on different nights, never met. Callas' Elviras, Leonoras and Butterflys alternated with Tebaldi's Aidas and Mimis, and both the public and the critics were deliriously happy.
And their happiness was only made happier by the US débuts of [ED: If the above Gobbi/Gerquetti cut has been made, “ the Italian Anita”, must be inserted here] Cerquetti, who not long after would become recognised as one of the world’s finest dramatic sopranos, and the Italian tenor Carlo Bergonzi, who would from the following year become a regualr at the Met, and the first appearances in Chicago of the Swedish tenor Jussi Björling, the US soprano Dorothy Kirsten, the Verdian baritone Ettore Bastianini and the revered conductor Tullio Serafin. But no one, not even Tebaldi, whom the press hailed as a vocal giant, could generate the excitement of Callas.
The hugely influential New York Times critic Howard Taubman sent this despatch after Callas's opening-night Puritani: “Miss Callas is the 31-year-old soprano who is credited with having restored the ancient lustre to the title of prima donna. Her voice is so wide in range and so flexible that she can be coloratura, lyric and dramatic soprano ... Tonight, they were waiting for her with palpable excitement. When she stepped out on the stage in the second scene of the first act, there was such an ecstatic greeting that the show was stopped dead in its tracks. Thereafter she could do no wrong. Chicago is that way about her. And you can't blame Chicago.”
With that, Bing and his close aide Francis Robinson were off to Chicago. “Fox and Kelly,” Bing wrote, “were not pleased to see us. (They feared, correctly, that once Callas signed in New York, Chicago would hear her no more.) We heard Miss Callas sing in Trovatore, with Björling as Manrico, and I remember saying that during ‘Ah si, ben mio’ in the third act, it was Callas's quiet listening rather than Björling's voice that made the dramatic impact. He didn't know what he was singing, but she knew. Then we went backstage, where I offered my very best version of the kiss-the-hand routine I had learned as a child, and the picture got into all the papers – and, finally, the Metropolitan signed Maria Callas.”
Bing said that, to engage Callas, he had “to take the mountain to Mohamet”; Fox said the hand-kissing Bing came to Chicago “crawling on his knees”. The press demanded to know how much Bing was exceeding the Met's well-publicised limit of never paying more than $l,000 a performance. “Come, come,” Stassinopoulos quotes him as responding, “our artists work for the love of art! Or sometimes for a few flowers ... Let's just say that this time she'll be getting a few more flowers.”
But the Metropolitan had raised its ante. Bing wrote: “Contrary to press reports ... the problem was never money. A year before, [Met president] Wadmond had denied my request to lift the top fee from $1,000 to $1,200, and Miss Callas signed for $1,000 a night – to which we added $2,000 for transportation, in effect paying Meneghini's way, too. When she actually came to New York in 1956, the board had relaxed the maximum fee rule, and we added another $3,000 to her contract for expenses for her 12 performances during the nine weeks of her stay.”
Bing correctly predicted that Callas would not return to the Lyric after signing with the Metropolitan, but he could not have known why. In fact, Callas would leave the Met after only two seasons. On 7 November 1958, operatic New York was shocked by this headline: “Bing Fires Callas.” The dispute involved a new production of Verdi's Macbeth. Bing – after, the critics complained, providing some shoddy revivals for her 1956-57 and 1957-58 seasons with shabby sets and inferior singers and several with a conductor she had specifically asked not to have – finally agreed, after pressure from Callas, to stage Macbeth, the Met's first. The soprano agreed to sing two Violettas in the interval between her first two Lady Macbeths but later asked Bing to delete the Traviatas. Bing refused.
“To her declaration ‘My voice is not like an elevator going up and down’ ”, Kolodin reports, “Bing replied that the eight days allotted between Macbeth and Traviata was a pretty long time for experienced artists to adjust their voices.” And, “to Bing's contention that ‘the issue boiled down to the question of whether the stars or the management ran the opera’, the only answer could be: bunk.”
Critics and historians tend to side with Callas, accusing Bing of a public abuse of power whose only result was to deprive New York of Callas's rare and enormously popular talent. It is pointed out that her replacement, the Austrian star Leonie
Rysanck, who was making her Metropolitan début, received virtually the same conditions that Callas had been seeking.
Others, however, point to troubles that Bing had in his dealings with Meneghini, with whom Bing annoyingly had to converse through intermediaries because the former did not speak English and he did not speak Italian. The New York author Martin Mayer suggests in his The Met: One Hundred Years of Grand Opera that Meneghini was actively seeking to goad Bing into cancelling the contract because Callas could earn more in concerts.
Callas did not return to the Met until 1965, then for only two Toscas, after which she would effectively withdraw into an uneasy retirement.
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But, of those two Toscas, Kolodin would write that, when Tosca’s lover, Cavarodossi, “had been dragged off in Act II, and the stage was cleared for action, it was no longer Callas and Gobbi matching trust and riposte, but Tosca and Scarpia at their immemorial contest. Inevitable as the outcome had to be, when the curtain fell on the retreating figure moving silently from the room where Scarpia lay dead, everyone knew why Callas was Callas.”
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Fox and Kelly also had to increase their ante to secure Callas for their second season, reportedly paying $20,000 for six performances and even agreeing, bizarrely, to protect her from the long arm of the law.
On the third day after her 1954 Chicago opening Norma, Bagarozy sued Callas for $300,000 (more than $2m at today’s rates), which, he claimed, represented $85,000 in expenses to promote her career, fees for 18 months of coaching by his wife and commissions arising from the 1947 contract. Callas denied all the claims and left the US for Milan before due-process could force her into the courts.
However, in 1955, federal marshalls lay in wait, but the law required them to serve their subpoenas personally, physically. This is what Fox and Kelly agreed to prevent. There ensued strange days when opera staff and the diva's admirers formed a flying-wedge to speed her from her apartment building, strange evenings
when she would be spirited from the opera house down the freight elevator and out dark riverside exits, and strange nights she spent with relatives of opera house officials.
In the meantime, in spite of all the inconvenience outside the opera house, everything inside seemed wonderful. Callas and Tebaldi behaved themselves. The audiences were thrilled. So much so that Callas, unlike her practice in later years, gave in to the Lyric’s pleas to add an extra performance of Butterfly for November 17 (a role she introduced in Chicago but would never sing on stage again). Chicagoans queued for blocks, and the box-office sold out within an hour and 40 minutes.
“That last night her death scene was pure Callas distilled into heartbreak,” wrote Cassidy. “As she struck the fatal blow her coiled hair flew out like a wild thing to shield her face. When the faithless Pinkerton called her name from outside, joy
touched her, meeting death on the journey. The audience, many in tears, burst into continuous, rapturous applause, calling her before the curtain many times. Finally, a limp, visibly exhausted, tearful Callas retired to the wings, and almost literally collided with Mr Stanley Pringle, US Marshall.”
What happened next was chaotic, and like every event, especially chaotic ones, accounts differ. But this in the next day's Chicago Daily News, even though rather irreverent, sums up events, with even the quotes supported by most other reports:
CALLAS IN WONDERLAND (An Uproar in One Act)
SCENE: Backstage at the Opera House.
PLOT: Nefarious.
STAR: Mme Maria Meneghini Callas, the Grecian spitfire.
DIALOGUE
Mme Callas: “I will not be served! I have the voice of an angel! No man can serve
me!”
Attorney I. Harvey Levinson (the villian): “She may have the voice of an angel, but
she has to answer to man on earth for her contracts!”
Larry Kelly (Lyric Opera official and knight to the rescue): “After seeing this I'm
ashamed to being an American!”
Carol Fox (ditto above): “This is inhuman! We don't have to be treated like this in
our own theater!”
Mme Callas (the mad scene): “I will not leave here if I have to stay all night until the
newspapermen – especially the photographers – leave me alone.”
During Callas' fury, photographs of which whisked around the world, the officers' papers seemed to drop through the thin air between the diva's flailing arms, while she hurled verbal abuse, according to eyewitnesses, in English, Greek, Italian and “several lesser-known languages”. One photograph showed a folded summons lying on the floor near Crate No. 20 stencilled FLOWERS BUTTERFLY. Another showed a second subpoena lying in the light shining out from under the locked door of the dressing-room to which she was sprinted by Fox and Kelly. The New York press reported that, in the mêlée, the process-servers dropped their papers but reported that the serving officers said the subpoenas had touched the hem of Butterfly's kimono and therefore Callas had been legally served.
For the next two years, Callas and Meneghini would fight the case exhaustingly, with the soprano flying to court appearances in Chicago and New York between engagements. The issue was finally settled out of court, with the terms undisclosed but presumably no better than those obtained long before by Rossi.
An intriguing mystery is how and why the process-servers were literally standing in the wings. Some say that they were admitted by Lyric staff angry that Callas’s agreed dates at the Metropolitan prevented her returning for Chicago’s next season. Others say that Fox and Kelly agreed with the legal authorities that they would “deliver” the soprano if the officers allowed her to complete her engagement before serving the summonses.
A high-level member of the Lyric's administration at the time told me on condition that the source would remain confidential “there was no way to keep them out, they were, after all, federal marshalls. Fox and Kelly did do a deal with the government that Callas would not be served on her arrival, but at the end of the engagement, after the final Butterfly. Callas would lose nothing and collect her fees for all of the performances of all of the operas she did. Willy-nilly, she would have been served anyway.”
However, this version presupposes that all the chasing-about in the streets and the
hiding of Callas was a planned sham. Attorney Levenson, who was representing Bagarozy, told the press that Fox had “promised to surrender the star gracefully” on the day before the last Butterfly. Stassinopoulos says Kelly believed to his death that the outcome had been planned by Fox in an effort to wean Callas's affections away from him. Stassinopoulos then dismisses the idea because the incident produced the opposite effect.
[ED: If the above Gobbi cut has been made, please make the following para read: “Gobbi’s is probably the find word. Gobbi – who, after his 1954 US début with the Lyric, would sing in Chicago every season until his retirement from the stage 25 years later – wrote in his marvellous memoir Tito Gobbi: My Life that … ]
Gobbi's is probably the final word, again from his memoir: “Sometimes she was undoubtedly in the wrong, sometimes the stories were complete invention, and sometimes she was fully justified in her reaction – as on the much-publicised and photographed occasion in Chicago when some fellow without even the manners to take off his hat tried to serve a writ on her as she came from the stage.
“She was perfectly justified in thrusting him from her path with words of furious contempt. How dared this oaf lay a hand on someone who had just given 99 per cent of everything she had and was, in her effort to serve her art and her public? Suppose she did owe money – the matter could have waited for a couple of hours. To attack an artist at such a time is contemptible.”
[ED: Here there have been cut about 600 of Gobbi’s words that I would aim to obtain permission to use in book form.]
Callas left Chicago vowing never to sing for the Lyric again, and, genuinely feeling betrayed, kept her word. She returned professionally to the city only three times, and only in concert. Still, aside from a few grumbles, the city remained grateful for her extraordinary help in re-establishing it as an operatic presence, and, after her lonely death in September of 1977, the Lyric would honour her in many ways.
A memorial Lyric concert on 1 November 1977, 23 years to the day of her first Chicago Norma, was attended by 5,000 people, live in the Civic Opera House and via closed-circuit television in the Grand Lobby and the adjacent Civic Theatre. From the stage, Carol Fox said: “Maria Callas could have made her American début anywhere in this country. But she chose us. She loved a challenge.”
• The Lyric Opera of Chicago’s 2005-06 season opens with Bizet’s Carmen (eight performances from Sept. 24 – a further five from Mar. 9), then continues with Rossini’s La Cenerentola (ten from Oct. 5), Puccini’s Manon Lescaut* (ten from Oct. 31), Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage* (nine from Nov. 19), Mozart’s The Magic Flute (eleven from Dec. 9), Verdi’s Rigoletto* (ten from Jan. 21), Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (eleven from Feb. 4), Gluck’s Orfero ed Euridice* (nine from Feb. 25), Carmen (five from Mar. 9). *New production. www.lyricopera.org
© 2005 R. L. Klinger
Larry Klinger is writing histories of the world’s leading opera houses.
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