Dame Joan Sutherland Talks about Maria Callas' Voice

This is a sound byte from a nearly hour long interview Joan Sutherland did with BBC radio days after her retirement. She brifely talks about Maria Calls' voice and personality and the changes she witnessed at Covent Garden in the 1950s.

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Music

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• Joan Sutherland
• Maria Callas

[coolmamac]

@weightfeather1 She was the only soprano who could drown out Pavarotti.

[calaftheeast]

I guess to be a great soprano, you have to have cheekbones as high as Mount Everest - Callas, Sutherland, Caballe, Nilsson...

It seems like a pattern.

[assindiastignani]

@cuoredeinidi The men you mention above are/were all ardent Callas fans, and they took as gospel anything and everything Callas said (most of it bad) about anybody who she felt treated her unjustly. Bing and Adler were gentlemen who did not believe in airing dirty laundary in public. Besides, they both greatly admired Callas and wanted her back in future seasons. Read the Cederna book if you can get ahold of it.

[assindiastignani]

@cuoredeinidi Bing and Adler were justified.Callas cancelled an engagement in San Francisco beause of "laryngitis" but when Adler called Milan, he discovered she was singing Medea at Scala in the same time period. Bing was six weeks before rehearsals of a new Macbeth production (a relatively unknown opera at the time, very hard to find last-minute replacements for the main roles) Callas after a year still hadn't signed her contract, nor would she answer his telegrams. Ghiringhelli was personal.

[Ariadne7710]

@cuoredeinidi ...she just wanted a normal life like we all do. A marriage and family. But whatever she did was exaggerated out of all proportion. She didn't cancel any more than anybody else. We all get colds, flu,throat infections etc. When she cancelled it was headline news. Her vocal defects were blazoned in every publication. Others go on singing for 10 years or more with horrible wobbles but nobody minds. When I was in NYC last Susan Graham cancelled. It didn't make front page news!!!

[Ariadne7710]

@cuoredeinidi  I don't know of any others who could change the timbre of their voices. Callas did it with all her performances. She herself said in interviews that for every role she studied the character she was going to sing to find the "right voice" for it. Of course whenever she sang with Gobbi they were amazing together. I agree, her relationship with Onassis was a disaster. He was a complete peasant. Very uncultured, uncouth and ignorant. but I can sympathise with her.......

[Ariadne7710]

@cuoredeinidi I heard her Lord Harewood interviews (he was a good friend of hers by the way - he was very knowledgeable on opera and on the board of the Royal Opera House for many years) and also a very old interview with Bernard Levin which was extremely serious and very good. He was a Times columnist and Wagner specialist. She did the change of voice timbre deliberately because she believed that the voice had to fit the character which I happen to believe is the correct way to sing a role

[Ariadne7710]

Just for academic information to anyone who might be interested, Beethoven rated "Cherubini" very highly as an operatic composer and "Medea" his great masterpiece and the most accomplished opera composed. And so did Brahms.

[Ariadne7710]

@cuoredeinidi She attended the same performance as me and did some marvellous sketches immediately after the performance which capture the core of the whole thing very skilfully.The thing with Callas was that she changed the timbre of her voice to fit into the role. Medea needed a scary voice. In Traviata in act 1 she was a vivacious good time girl. By act 3 you could hear in her voice that she was dying. That is why audiences found her so riveting. And of course her technique was flawless.

[Ariadne7710]

@cuoredeinidi From her first entrance she was electrifying, mesmerising. Standing at the far end of the stage wrapped in her cloak with only her eyes showing for quite a few minutes before she speaks. Then when Creon asks who is the woman who wants to enter she calls out in an ominous voice "Io Medea" sending shivers down your spine. The burning robes scene is pretty terrifying but the worse is the scene when she kills her childen. it is gruesome. Look up CharlotteinWeimar's channel.....