Well, I hadn’t. I’d heard her Elvira (Puritani), Tosca, Gioconda, and Santuzza, thought they were all pretty terrific, and wondered just how this superb verismo voice and temperament managed to bring off that beautiful Elvira. And of course I had often heard tell of her Norma (and Lucia, and Lady Macbeth, and even Brünnhilde) in reports from the important Italian venues and Covent Garden. I wasn’t at the ’56 opening night, but did catch up to the Norma of November 10th. That season I also saw a Lucia, the very matinee performance that proved to be her only Met broadcast and the end of Enzo Sordello’s abbreviated Met career, over a good top G luxuriated in a measure or two too long. The following season I took in a Callas Tosca, a role I saw her in once more when she returned to us a final time, in the spring of 1965. So I attended four of her meagre sum of 21 Met performances. And a word of due precaution regarding my recollections: I was 22 when Callas came to the Metropolitan—a precocious 22 when it comes to opera and singing, but 22 nonetheless. The performances of 1956-58 were seen and heard from the eye/ear perspective of Family Circle standing room; by 1965 my critical career was six years old, and I had nice orchestra press seats. Of the operas I saw her in, I was very familiar with Tosca (recorded and live), and reasonably so with Lucia. Of Norma, I’d listened often to the old extracts by Ponselle, Telva, Martinelli, and Pinza, had heard divers other “Casta divas” (Muzio’s the most emotionally compelling) and one Met broadcast with Milanov, plus one hearing of the prewar set starring Gina Cigna. I was seeing the opera for the first time. I trouble to lay all this out partly because I have encountered recountings of Callas performances from some, no older than I at the time, that quite amaze me with their confidence of description and evaluation, and I recommend a pinch of skeptical reservation when reading them. So, while I wish I could tell you of the never-to-be- forgotten stare, the baleful intonation, with which she transfixed Mario del Monaco at “In mia man alfin tu sei,” or how the house was held breathless at “alfin son tua, alfin sei mia,” I think that to do so would in large measure be to project in retrospect from all I’ve learned since—though it’s quite likely that both those things occurred.

I can pass along this much: Callas’ physical command of stage and auditorium was powerful, and different from that of the comparable sopranos we’d seen since the war (Milanov, Tebaldi, Welitsch) in that it did not rely on histrionics (gestural choreography, plastique) or an energetics of personality. It was at once a classic-seeming centeredness, as if aware of bringing with her something beyond herself, while typifying the very modern actor’s rule: make no movement that is not inevitable under the circumstances. It was the physical analogue of the call in her tone I described earlier. Her oft-cited stillness was alive, and was not a pose. It was operatic, in that it was immediately sensed from afar. It had in it, though, an element of caretaking, or caution, and I felt from the start that this was part of an effort to maintain a vocal poise that was under threat.    Others felt this too, I think, and that added an unacknowledged tension to the proceedings. I tried to convey some of this mixed sensation the first time I wrote about Callas, reviewing the release of her second Lucia recording, in 1960, when my recollections of her living self were still quite fresh. I wrote that whereas the popular image of her was of “. . . a fiery, abandoned actress, gifted with a voice remarkable for its size and range, if not for its beauty; the woman I have observed is a controlled, conscious actress, who by the most ingenious calculations elicits astounding results from a voice only moderate in size and practical range.” I go on to note that many of her finest moments came by doing “exactly those things we have come not to expect from a prima donna,” and that these were “achieved not through fire or abandonment, but by the most painstaking attention to note values, vowel shadings, dynamic markings, ornamentation, etc.”