The next step back in time is a short one, just a little over eight years. It’s to another in-house recording, but one of far more listenable quality, and to a world-class pit orchestra, that of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. You will probably have guessed that this is a Callas performance, that of June 20, 1958. ’58 was a busy year for her, and a fraught one. It had begun with the notorious “walkout” Norma before a gala audience in Rome, when for vocal reasons she refused to continue after singing Act 1. Then, besides this series of London performances, it included her first Violettas at the Met (in the Tyrone Guthrie/Oliver Smith production initially staged the previous season for Tebaldi), runs of Anna Bolena and Il Pirata at La Scala, the later-celebrated “Lisbon Traviata,” and the Dallas Medea mentioned earlier. I did not see her as Violetta (I can’t think now how I could have missed it), but did get a good sense of her in these seasons from her Norma, Tosca, and Lucia. She’s always complicated to write about—unquestionably a great artist, but one with whom it was impossible to feel completely at ease. Part of the electricity always felt in the house at her appearances (at least by this time in her brief prime) was an apprehensiveness about the state of her voice, and not only from purely aesthetic considerations, but from the interference with her vocal interpretations it sometimes caused. She had magnetic presence, but her physical acting often showed a constraint, seemingly necessitated by a search for poise, which I did not see her cast off till she returned for her re-studied, what-the-hell Toscas in 1965. The response to this performance was evidently a feverish mixture of adulation and dismay, and on this recording the first one-and-a-half acts give reason for both.

The reservations voiced about Callas’ vocalism usually focus on harshness and lack of steadiness on high notes, exacerbated by her assaults on the extension above the top C (available to her but never fully incorporated into her voice), plus occasional citations about the “hooded” timbre of her lower-middle range, which nevertheless had an intriguing air of mystery that counted as an attraction for many hearers. These symptoms, I believe, had a common etiology: a positional displacement between her vibrant, open chest register and the “cupo” notes immediately above it, the latter darkened, I would surmise, to disguise their relative weakness. This misalignment at the voice’s turning-point created a tilted underpinning for the energies thrown at the instrument as it ascended, and while it was manageable early on, it made increasing inroads on the voice’s structure, which were in no way mitigated by her attempted all-encompassing, artistically uncompromising use. All this, of course, accounts for only the technical/functional aspect of her difficulties. But for a singer, that’s a pretty important one.

Part of her “uncompromising use” was a search for the ideal vocal personality for a given part. And while many heroines of Italian opera have enough in common that finding that personality involves only minor, not basic, adjustments, there is quite a stretch of open country between, say, Violetta and Lady Macbeth, to say nothing of that between the Walkūre Brünnhilde and the Puritani Elvira (the early-career leap Callas was actually induced to make, and at a single bound. Tetrazzini herself, traveling in the opposite direction, wouldn’t have tried that). And Violetta is unique. Despite all those on-the-page resemblances to Leonora, in one direction, and Gilda, in another, Verdi never set another woman like her. Callas went looking for that woman’s truth just as Bellincioni had in her way, and Brooks in hers. Thus, in the opening act we hear her adopting a special lightening of tone, at times teasing and even coy, bordering on a childlike coquetry, or sometimes looking inward (“Ah, fors’è lui“), that is clear in intent, but sounds disengaged, “off the voice.” There is a puzzling avoidance of chest register, which she possessed in abundance. Whether this is an interpretive choice (as a preservation of maidenly innocence, it would be an odd one for this character) or a precautionary vocal one (because she could not risk the passaggio displacement in this music), I can’t be sure—and with Callas we probably shouldn’t use the language of “choice,” since she seems to have operated mostly at a borderline-liminal level. She and her tenor partner, Cesare Valletti, slip through the turnings of the “Libiamo” deliciously and responsively (they’d sung together often), and she works her way through the “Sempre libera” well enough. Intermittently, though, her tone, particularly on lower-middle pitches, is escorted by the strange occlusion (I’ve never heard precisely this distortion in any other singer) that could be called a “veil,” but is more of a mesh that produces its own nagging little sound and blots the clarity of her vowels, as if a clutching at the base of her tongue were creating its own acoustic chamber—a sure sign of sand in the vocal gears. ^(I)