Of all the projects Callas undertook in occupied Athens, the two that would most fascinate us to hear, I think, are her Fidelio Leonore and her Marta in Tiefland. She surmounted the daunting challenges of the former, and was well received. With the latter, she was excited by the part’s veristic dramatic content, and had her most unequivocal triumph to that date. With the end of the war came her fruitless trip back to the States, singing for promising contacts that proved unhelpful and going down with the collapse of Eddie Bagarozy’s United States Opera Company before a note had been sung. Only her signing by Giovanni Zenatello for the Arena di Verona La Gioconda got her to Italy and the start of her international career. For the first three years of that, she sang  exclusively as a dramatic soprano, the sole exception being the famous spring to the Puritani Elvira from the brow of the Walküre Brünnhilde^(I) in January of 1949. She had just then introduced Norma into her repertory, singing it very much in dramatic soprano mode. Otherwise, her roles during this period were: Isolde, Turandot, the Forza Leonora, Aïda, Abigaille, Kundry, Tosca, and the Trovatore Leonora. She sang her first Rossini part, Fiorilla in Turco in Italia, in October of 1950 at the Eliseo in Rome, and her first Violettas in January of 1951. From that point on, roles requiring more agilità, more frequent use of the high range extension (if not necessarily higher tessitura), and less of pure power, began to predominate in the mix. With the La Scala Lady Macbeth (Dec. of 1952) and a final fusillade of Giocondas (including her Cetra recording of the role), we are brought  to early 1953, and her first recording for EMI—Lucia, in January of that year. Those sessions, you’ll recall, also saw the beginning of her diet regimen. So we might pause at this milestone to survey the state of her vocalism in these years (1949 through 1952), as nearly as we can reconstruct it from the evidence. Trigger warning: this will necessitate argumentation about vocal technique, and a certain amount of detail; there’s no other way to pin things down. Please bear in mind that I will not be trying to arrive at judgments about artistic effect (a few may sneak in, but they are not the point), or to use technical analysis to in any way undercut this unique singer’s artistic stature. I’m searching for causes, in hope of edification.

The recordings I have considered include the Cetra studio aria releases; three of her Mexico City performances (1950-52); her RAI/Rome Kundry (1950); and five more 1952 performances (a RAI/Rome radio concert, the Cetra studio Gioconda and Traviata, the Covent Garden Norma, and the La Scala Macbeth. This isn’t exhaustive, but I believe it’s sufficient to give a good sense of how her voice was behaving throughout the time when, out from under tutelage but in under early scratch-and-claw pressures, she felt it incumbent upon her to maintain the calibre of sound she had brought with her from Greece, and sang, for better and worse but mostly for the better, with the least restraint. Control, though, is on display in the relatively cool atmosphere of her first studio recordings, the Cetra aria records of Nov.,1949, with the RAI/Torino orchestra under Arturo Basile. And from a purely technical standpoint, she never sang better. In the Puritani aria (“Qui la voce,” starting with the offstage “Rendetemi la speme” and continuing through the double aria, with some cuts) the tone reflects clear, open vowel formation; the line moves with no trace of restriction; the constant presence of the messa di voce is attested to by the easy drawing out of full tone on the ascents; and the almost arrogantly tripped-off cabaletta leads to a freely soaring high E-flat. It’s the sort of singing that evokes a smile and a tear at once. The Liebestod is tenderly phrased, building to an outpouring of beautifully shaped tone that certainly suggests sufficient amplitude for the music. Two reservations: first, the lower-middle range doesn’t sound quite plugged in—it coasts. Callas intones the lower E-flat at “immer leiser,” for example, beautifully, and it’s understandable that she wouldn’t want to introduce an Italianate voce di petto in this context. But the treatment does not reproduce the filled-in solidity of the High Dramatic Wagnerian soprano—I wonder how she sang this in the theatre. Second, that final sustained upper F# betrays a slowish, regular beat, not too obtrusive but distinctly there. (Many a good soprano has found this note troublesome. It’s the exact nature of the trouble that we note.) The remaining disc of this group (originally three double-sided 78s) affords our earliest peek at Callas’ Norma, the role she was to sing the most often, with the “Casta diva” on Side A and the “Ah bello, a me ritorna” on Side B. It shows all the same virtues as the “Qui la voce,” allowing for the fiercer uses of the volleys of strong coloratura in the cabaletta, everything clicking right into place. All told, quite a showing, and the records are clean-sounding, ungimmicked late monophonic, the voice favored in the manner typical of such, but not unreasonably so.