We have recently (on Dec. 2) celebrated the 100th birthday of Maria Callas. For an artist so long departed (she died in 1977, and her last performances of a complete role were in 1965), there’s been a remarkable amount of attention paid. Warner (now the curator of both the EMI and Cetra catalogues) has released a 131-CD box that purportedly contains every known scrap of her recorded legacy. There’s a new documentary covering her Paris debut (1958) and the events surrounding it. Opera devoted the entire feature-article section of its December issue (seven articles) to her, and followed up with two more contributions in January. There was even a two-page spread in the heavily popcult-oriented Sunday New York Times and, more predictably, a festive smorgasbord of events and exhibitions in Athens, sponsored by Greek National Opera. On a more modest scale, there was also a full-day discussion, workshop, and concert event  here in New York under the sponsorship of Teatro Nuovo, in which I had the pleasure of participating as a member of the severely attrited cohort who saw and heard Callas in live performance with at least nominally adult eyes and ears.

There is just cause for celebration. Maria Callas was a great artist, and an enormously influential one. Michael Scott, in his artistic biography of her, ^(I)calls her “one of the three greatest opera singers of this [the 20th] century,” the other two being Caruso and Chaliapin. I’m not sure I’d rate her above all other contenders—where would that leave Lauritz Melchior, for one?—and so much depends on what each of us values most highly in singing—but she certainly belongs at that level of consideration. There cannot be much argument about her influence, except to note that it was confined to the operatic sphere. She did not, in addition to her operatic triumphs, elevate a folk-derived song genre, as did both Caruso and Chaliapin, or dominate an art song literature, as did Fischer-Dieskau, or penetrate down into music of the entertainment culture, in the manner of a Tauber or Tibbett, and by that means broaden appreciation of the classical voice. I think we are also entitled to assume that, in opera’s midcentury scramble to expand its repertory in the absence of viable new candidates, some restoration of the so-called “bel canto” part of it, and of the singing practices associated with that, was bound to take place. But of her status as primary catalyst, the single artist without whom such restoration would not have happened so quickly, embraced so much, or endured so well, there’s really no doubt. In my judgment, the restoration has not been without its underside, with respect both to operas deemed repertory-worthy and the direction some voices (beginning with Callas’ own) have been taken. But that, along with an evaluation of net gain or loss, is an argument for another time, and in any event is hardly Maria’s fault.

Callas’ unique artistic identity had three commonly attributed aspects: first, that she wedded the power and color of the best late-E-19 soprano voices with the agility and precision of embellishment of earlier styles (or, as I like to put it, the prismatic voice with the ornamental one), thus uniting two schools of technique and expression that had come to seem mutually exclusive; second, that she infused this vocality with a sense of dramatic purpose that rang true to a modern ear, and so relieved those older styles of the burden of seeming only aesthetic; and third, that this sense of dramatic purpose was also evident in her onstage physical presence and behavior (commonly referred to as “acting”), and fused with that element in her singing to create an unusually compelling unity of interpretive intent and effect. I believe those observations are accurate, though sometimes overly valorized. But what struck me upon first hearing her recorded voice, several years before seeing her, was a beckoning in its timbre that sounded ancient and modern at once, as if she were channeling something bygone, drawing us back toward it, yet also making it immediate to us. The something was embedded in the voice because it was embedded in her, and at her best she brought it forth directly, almost guilelessly, all the hard work involved notwithstanding. One of my fellow panelists at the birthday event, Peter Mark, observed that nearly all the masterpieces of 19th-Century opera are tragedies, and that Callas’ voice was uniquely suited to them because of a tragic quality in the tone itself. That’s getting close to the nature of her genius. With the advantage of hindsight, and staying for a moment with romantic notions about the sort of artist she represented on the highest plane: Maurice Maeterlinck—writing, if I recall aright, of the early passing of a brother—spoke of a certain look that marks those who are destined to die young, and Ernest Hemingway, writing of men in battle, of a particular smell that signals the same fate. If there is such a thing as a shade of the singing voice that sends that message to those attuned to it, it was there in the voice of Maria Callas. And that essence was there to the end, instantly recognizable even when the executional skills were severely compromised.