The Afterlife of Maria Callas's Voice

Music and Culture The Afterlife of Maria Callas’s Voice Michal Grover-Friedlander I. Bygone Voices It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators . at bottom no one believes in his own death, or, to put the same thing in another way, that in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality. —Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” [Maria Callas’s] record company has succeeded in making people think she is still alive. It’s a little bit like conversations with the other world. —Manuela Hoelterhoff, Cinderella & Company Am I hearing voices within the voice? But isn’t it the truth of the voice to be hal- lucinated? Isn’t the entire space of the voice an infinite one? —Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice” Callas Forever, Franco Zeffirelli’s 2002 film, abounds with references to comebacks, second chances, reclaiming one’s life, mourning over one’s lost voice, and questions of immortality.1 It is a surprising film. Rather than reconstructing Maria Callas’s life twenty-five years after her death, it depicts what could have happened in the last few months of her life. The fictionalized account is not intended to correct Callas’s biography in any simple sense: in fact, it tells of failures. To Callas Forever’s invented plot–– a Callas comeback on film––Callas herself ultimately objects. Callas Forever is not set at the diva’s prime, but in 1977, when she no longer possessed a singing voice.2 When, in 1970, Pier Paolo Pasolini cast Callas in Medea, the diva’s one and only (real) appearance on film, Callas famously did not sing.3 Catherine Clément argues that Pasolini captured doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdi005 88:35–62 Advance Access publication January 11, 2006 © The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. 36 The Musical Quarterly something essential to opera and to Callas precisely because he did not stage her singing.4 This approach, Clément claims, is an attempt to separate Callas from her voice, as though extracting something from her that is not overshadowed or violated by her song. Interestingly, Zeffirelli, narrating for Callas: A Documentary (1978), authoritatively informs us that Pasolini’s casting of Callas was unsuccessful. Pasolini, he says, misused the singer. Of course, by recreating Callas after her death, Zeffirelli also separates the singer from her voice, but in contrast to Pasolini, he uses only Callas’s voice. Zeffirelli thus raises the question of whether any representation of Callas––as herself, not in a role––is possible apart from her singing. But can the human voice exist independently of the singing body? Sound recordings, at times, are voices surviving the body that once produced them; invisible and devoid of body, the singer is somehow there in the presence of voice. Documentaries capture a sense of presence different from that preserved in sound recordings. Fragments of biographical informa- tion and interviews construct a different Callas from that heard in a role, a Lady Macbeth for instance. But Callas was dead when Zeffirelli set out to make his film; how could he recreate a sense of her presence? Could Callas be conjured, summoned, called back? And if so, what form of afterlife would that be? What is forever lost, and what is always and repeatedly preserved of the operatic voice after the singer’s death? Could a different body seemingly produce the bygone voice, thereby trying to recreate Callas, re-animate her, or would the new body refashion the voice? Or, more uncannily, would the voice affect the image sounding it? Zeffirelli’s film addresses these complex questions and oscillates between acknowledging the threat of the singing voice and abandoning itself to the ontology of cinema. The use that Callas Forever makes of Callas’s voice emanating from recordings is not an obvious choice in films representing great dead opera singers. In The Great Caruso (1951), directed by Richard Thorpe, for example, the “remains” of Caruso’s voice are not used. What replaces the sound of his voice is the act of singing; that is, Caruso is portrayed “in” the voice of Mario Lanza, another very famous singer: one singer is thus portrayed through the singing of another. Caruso’s presence is invoked not through the sound of his own voice but through the performance of operatic singing as such, as though presence was recreated by an acoustic memory from the past. The Great Caruso and Callas Forever present very different conceptions of the relationship between the voice and the body of a dead singer. There are a number of other films that, like The Great Caruso and Callas Forever, deal with the gap between the life of the voice and that of the singer’s body, with operatic voices outliving the body that had once produced them, or with bodies longing for the voices they had once produced. These films interpret the notion of life sustained in or preserved through The Afterlife of Maria Callas’s Voice 37 the voice. Daniel Schmid’s Tosca’s Kiss (1985) is one such example. The film follows elderly musicians in Casa Verdi in Milano, an old people’s home for musicians established in 1902, in accordance with Verdi’s will. The musicians, mostly singers, have been largely forgotten; they no longer perform and have long since lost their singing voices. They are shown lis- tening to their own voices emanating from old recordings, a striking testi- mony of the inevitable severance of the singing voice from the singer’s body. Tosca’s Kiss is a documentary about singers outliving their voices. Another example, Federico Fellini’s E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On) (1983), is even more extreme in thinking through the conjunction of the singer’s operatic voice and the cinematic body, since Fellini dispenses with the singer’s body altogether.5 The film depicts a sea voyage to dis- perse a diva’s ashes. We hear her voice only once, originating from a gra- mophone, as her ashes are blown away in the wind: her voice is “attached” to her disappearing body. Thorpe, Schmid, Fellini, and Zeffirelli offer different solutions to the problem of representing the disembodied operatic voice. Thorpe substi- tutes one singer for another; Schmid separates singers from their singing; Fellini demolishes the singer’s body; and Zeffirelli, as we shall see, has an actress mime the dead singer’s song. Each cinematic attempt in its own way makes manifest a fundamental problem with the embodiment of the operatic voice, as though the mismatch between voice and body brings out a haunting quality of that voice. There are, in operas themselves, several instances of representing a dead voice haunting the present. In Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, conjuring the voice of the dead mother causes another death. Hearing the voice of the mother, and answering it in kind, brings about the death of the daughter, herself a silenced prima donna. In its comic thrust, Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi stages a manipulation of the dead voice by parading its displacement in dub- bing. A character onstage is dead while another character sings “through” him as though the dead were still among the living. These examples raise complex issues as to the manner of representing a voice from the dead and the quality of the voice necessary to invoke the beyond. But these examples might also be taken to signify something in opera itself that is haunting and unresolved. That is, they serve to present something uncanny about the operatic voice. Instead of exploring this possibility directly through a consideration of the operatic medium, I suggest here refracting it in cinema. Paradoxically, it might be in the attempt of another medium, such as cinema, to inherit the operatic realm that the uncanniness of the operatic voice becomes most manifest. The relation between the two media must be elaborated bearing in mind a fundamental attraction of cinema to opera, as to a past to which it returns but which it cannot quite incorporate. For sure, the transformation 38 The Musical Quarterly of opera into cinema occurs at times in cinema’s self-effacement, in its merely reproducing operatic productions. But cinema is at its most ambi- tious when it is aware of the tension between the two media and allows those tensions to be revealed and to work in favor of the self-understanding of both cinema and opera. Which is to say that cinematic attempts to come to terms with the operatic legacy often eventuate in the failure of the cinematic transposition and, in the most interesting cases, such as Zeffirelli’s Callas Forever, lead to cinema’s own staging of its failure of returning the operatic voice from the dead.6 In Callas Forever, Zeffirelli fictionalizes Callas’s last few months––when she no longer possessed a singing voice––and invents her cine-operatic comeback. The making of the film and its plot mirror each other: recordings of the (real) dead diva emanate from the mouth of an actress resembling Callas (Fanny Ardant), and at the same time Callas the fictional character relearns the gestures and motions that produced her former singing voice. Originally, the singer Teresa Stratas was asked to play the role of Callas, but she was replaced, at her own request, by an actress. The part, as Stratas understood it, required an actress rather than a singer: someone who makes believe she is singing rather than someone who really sings.

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