In strict calendar progression, the next item up would be the Mexico City Trovatore from the summer of 1950. But I’d like to skip ahead to the November of that year for her Kundry, then consider the three Mexico City performances, along with the others from this period, as a group. This Parsifal was a concert performance (she’d sung the part four times in full production), with the RAI/Rome Orchestra and Chorus, Vittorio Gui conducting. Parsifal in Italian certainly has its odd-sounding moments, and while the Liebestod takes well to cantabile treatment, that’s less true of this writing. Callas is surely the most lyrical-sounding Kundry I have heard. Among sopranos, she’s not the full, bright Helden sort like Flagstad or Nilsson, the dark, tortured kind like Mödl or Varnay, or the lush, sensual type like Crespin. Nor is she a mezzo (Thorborg, Dalis, Meier, et al .) She is, at this point at any rate, an Italian spinto/dramatic soprano with excellent musical and vocal manners. In the Klingsor scene, the anguished tone is inner, marked by beautiful connections into a blended chest, and the “Ich sah das Kind” has an open, youthful set not far from what was to become her adjustment for Violetta. Later in the act, she summons plenty of power, and overcomes the minefield of the final pages with almost too little sense of struggle. Whether or not one finds this convincing (at minimum, it takes some getting used to), no red flags are waved with respect to technique—the vowels are clean, nothing is pushed past the framework set, and everything sounds well supported.

And so to Mexico City. The monster is out of the cage. There is no teacher, no recording studio, no authoritative conductor to monitor the proceedings. There is instead a collection of big voices and bigger egos competing in full blood-sport mode—even Giuseppe Taddei, normally an orderly artist whose large, burnished baritone and firmly grasped line required no over-emphasis, rants his way through the part of Amonasro in hope of standing his ground. I’ve taken one performance from each of Callas’ three summers, plus a fragment of one more. They show Callas at her most uninhibited, which means that they show her at times running into roadblocks on the way to her presumptive standing as “prima donna absoluta del siglo“^(I), and the rest of the time doing her freest, most directly impactful singing. The roles: Leonora in Il Trovatore (1950), the title role in Aïda (1951), and Gilda in Rigoletto (1952). The first of these she was singing for the first time, and retained in her repertoire sporadically till November of 1955; the second she had sung with some regularity since October of 1948, but phased out altogether after two London performances in 1953; the third she was displeased with and never sang again. (She later recorded all three for EMI.) If we add these live performances, along with the La Scala Lady Macbeth and the two complete studio recordings she made in this same period (Gioconda and Traviata) to our consideration of the Cetra aria records, the Rome Kundry, and some selected bits and pieces, we should get a fairly accurate fix on the condition of her voice before the great do-over of 1953-55.