My review of the most frequently cited extrinsic factors in the early and pronounced decline of Maria Callas’ voice (see last week’s post) has left us uncertain as to what might or might not with any confidence be declared causative. But what about an intrinsic one? That is, might there be something inherent in the way she sang that could have been a significant contributing element, if not the sole determinant? We should remind ourselves that singing, like any other discipline (especially one with a strong physical component), is best learned when young, and not easily re-learned later. Once set, the laying-down of tracks, the engagement of a complex of co-ordinations in a very particular pattern organized for a very particular purpose, responds with confusion when asked to re-direct. So it is especially regrettable that we have not so much as a single sampling of her singing from her years in Athens, the years of intense advanced study and early professional forays. It’s always difficult to know what value to place on reviews and testimonials, even from professional observers, singers, or teachers, unless one has become very familiar with their knowledge, predilections, and motives. We may, though, draw at least tentative conclusions from an accumulation of such reports and their alignment (or not) with what we are able to hear for ourselves, via recordings from a few years later. There is a goodly collection of such reports sprinkled through the opening chapter of Michael Scott’s book, and I think that with all due caution we can conclude that Callas had from the beginning “you know, the big voice,” and that at times she drove it overly hard in the exclusively spinto-to-dramatic roles she sang (no others were on offer). She was also evidently a very quick learner who had already acquired crack musicianship, and was in possession of enough florid capacity and range to embrace the challenging big-but-mobile Weber and Beethoven arias she essayed. The sopracuti were not really on display in her recital and concert programs, unless they poked through in the “Bel raggio lusinghier” or a Trovatore aria she sometimes programmed (which one is unspecified).

It is also difficult to know what has passed between teacher and pupil, not necessarily with respect to the teacher’s “method” or principles or declared goals, or with the pupil’s talent and dedication to them, but with respect to what has really been absorbed into the pupil’s network of reflexive activations at the functional level of technique I spoke of earlier. When Callas auditioned for lessons with the distinguished coloratura Elvira de Hidalgo in 1939, the latter heard “a violent cascade of sound . . . dramatic and moving;” it was as if she had been “waiting for that voice for a very long time.” In other words, there was already extraordinary material to hand, many tracks already laid down from this 15-year-old’s previous study, from her ambition and her imagination, her obsessive silent singing. Still, at that age the imprints are yet fresh, and more easily re-routed. It is clear that in Callas’ five years of work with de Hidalgo, at least two things were emphasized. One was the development of both ends of the range, but in particular the lower end by means of the chest register, which de Hidalgo herself, in company with all the Southern European high sopranos of her day, deployed. (We can hear it in especially enlivening form on her zarzuela recordings.) True, Callas was at the age where that function is emerging anyway, but de Hidalgo unquestionably summoned it and cultivated its uses; Callas herself referred to this. The second was mastery, in the form of an infinitely repeatable precision of pitch and rhythm, in music demanding extremes of velocity and flexibility, including elaborate embellishment—which meant, first and foremost, music of Italian Romantic styles. (Mozart and Handel call equally upon that mastery, but the former was only lightly engaged by Callas, and the latter not at all, save for a lonely outing of “Care selve.“)^(I) Obviously, Callas’ singing reflected both these emphases. But the critical question with the chest register (apart from its very existence, at issue in contemporary pedagogy) is what working relationship it forms with the two-thirds-to-three-quarters of the female range lying above it. And the critical question with the time-honored methods of mastering velocity and flexibility, assuming they have been well taught and well learned, is whether or not the teaching and learning of them has remained congruent with the essentials of strength and balance in the given voice. Those methods, enshrined in traditional progressions of exercises, belong to the executional level of technique. In and of themselves, they have but a fortuitous agreement with functional requirements, and even when they are to the keenest of perceptions successful, they are replete with opportunities for the kinds of unrecognized compensations, or overrides, I referred to earlier.