Harriet Harman on Maria Callas

0:07The Paris Opera, 1958. The great and the good are gathered, including Brigitte Bardot, Charlie Chaplin and the French President, all to watch one woman who walks on stage in red velvet gown and dazzling jewellery and starts to sing.

1:07CHOIR SINGS and is now the mother of the House of Commons, a title given to the female MP with the longest continuous service. Harriet, maybe I have tunnel vision and maybe you don't, but I think of you as so focused on politics. I really didn't expect you to nominate an opera diva as your great life. Why have you chosen Maria Callas? Well, I think Maria Callas reached everybody, really. She was so exceptional. and when she was singing Casta Diva there, I was eight and when she was in her heyday, I was in my teens and when she was struggling and having difficulties, I was in my 20s and it was the early part of the women's movement but I do remember all the time that on the one hand we were all spellbound with this great star with that instantly recognisable voice which just touched your heart.

2:05It was almost beyond singing. It was a sort of artistic communication, peerless artistic communication. That was on the one hand. But on the other hand, there was this undercurrent of criticism and disrespect. And looking back on it, and as we went through the women's movement, we could identify that as, you know, disrespect for culture with a big dose of misogyny. So I just wanted us to celebrate Maria Callas and diss her critics, who were such small people in the face of such great art, and hopefully learn lessons that we're not doing that today and just being in awe of great artists, especially women opera singers.

2:46It strikes me something that distinguishes her is that all through her life, you just sense that she was on her own. Absolutely, but she was not just on her own It was almost like people were celebrating her amazing achievements but waiting for her to trip up so they could all fall down on her and her achievements were beyond singing they were, as people said at the time, of being a great actress because, I mean, if you think of that bit in Tusca where the awful Scarpia is trying to have sex with her because she's in a weak and vulnerable position One of the clips that we've got, thankfully, on film is her sort of imperceptible shudder as his awful hands go on her.

3:34And every woman who's been in that situation, which is probably every woman, will know that shudder of revulsion. She was a great actress. She was born in New York in 1923 to Greek immigrant parents. Do you know anything of her early life, Harriet? Well, there's quite a sort of caricature of this very oppressive mother and she says that her mother gave her a hard time and exploited her and pushed her. And her mother took the family without the father to Greece when she was about 13. Well, she went to Greece to study and I think she was not supposed to be in that course until she was 17. Maria, yes.

4:17Yes, and I mean that was the age limit. And I think that they falsified her age because she was tall and very mature. I mean, it could have done terrible things to her voice to have brought it on that early. Here she is, a clip of her talking some years later. I think the programme was set not by myself in life, in the very beginning. It was set by my family, my mother mainly. The programme was that, of course, I should become a singer, I should become an artist in any case. usually what parents say is, well, I sacrificed myself for you, but you will do what I was supposed to do in life. I suppose that's general.

5:00I think she said later that I would have preferred a family and children and that it was, she said, forced on me. Do we take her at her word? Well, I feel, you know, commensurate with my wanting to respect everything about her. I feel it's a bit invidious to second-guess her, but it does sound a bit odd that somebody... The amount of work and the amount of energy you have to put into every moment, the idea that she would have given it all up... I mean, she might have been made to give it all up if she'd have got married and had children. I think it was very difficult to combine in those days. Probably still is very.

5:37But I sort of find it hard to believe. But anyway, it didn't happen. She obviously had a huge natural gift, but also very rigorous vocal training. And to tell us about this, we're joined by Nina Horrocks, a singer, musician, researcher, teacher, also known by her stage name, Ziazan, who specialises in bel canto technique that Kallas trained in. Welcome, Nina, and tell me what I have been unable to discover despite reading endless definitions. What is bel canto? Well, as Kallas said often, It does not mean beautiful singing. It's often translated as beautiful singing, but she was always very keen to point out that it was a technique and a school.

6:25It was a way of training, which was developed in the early 17th century at the same time as opera. It really dominated the singing of opera and classical music until the 19th century. There were a lot of new schools and new ideas coming in, which started to challenge the old way. And by the early 20th century, it was considered to be a dying or lost art. Do you understand Belcanto? Well, I was just going to ask Nina to just remind us, what is the difference between bel canto and what came after it? The main purpose of bel canto was expressive singing rather than just beautiful singing. So the technique took, depending on the teacher and the student, between five to ten years because there was so much that it encompassed.

7:19And you really have to be so sure in your technique that you don't have to think about it anymore. and it really does become effortless and like second nature and then you can focus on expression and just communicating to the audience. Let's hear an example of Maria Calla's singing which demonstrates that bel canto technique. This is very early in her career from Bellini's Ippuritani.

8:16Well, perhaps in that short burst, Harriet, she has defined bel canto for us. Absolutely, and what a great range as well and how long she keeps that top note. but you never used to feel anxious when she was going up the range as to whether or not she would hit the top. It was all so effortless. You could just go with the flow without worrying about whether or not things were going to crack further up and that was obviously fiendishly difficult but she made it sound completely easy so you can just get to the character and get to the heart of the art. One thing that amazed audiences at the time was that that role and others like it which required a lot of this very fast, rapid vocalising, which is often called coloratura, was mostly, well, entirely at that point, sung by lighter voices.

9:08And here was a big, dramatic voice, not only singing it with perfect technical precision, but also making it so expressive so that it wasn't just mere virtuosity. There's been criticism over the years of her voice. Not everybody likes it. Harriet obviously does. Nina, in your opinion, was she a great singer? Was she the greatest soprano of her day? Well, I think possibly of her day, she said that she had no rivals because nobody else could do what she was doing, which is true. I wouldn't perhaps say she was the greatest of all time. That's something that people have talked about a lot, but as we can't really hear all the great singers that came before her, I think it's not really possible to say that.

9:57But she certainly was exceptionally gifted. But without the presence, the stage presence which she had, just hearing her as a voice, is anything lost if you don't know who Callas was and hadn't seen her act on stage? I think she instantly speaks to any listener, even on the first time not knowing anything about her. And that was always her magic as well because she made opera exciting again because people were not really so invested in it as they had been. And a lot of people would hear her on the radio or on a record and they might have never listened to opera before but they wanted to go and see her because this voice just captured the imagination.

10:48I think that's so true for non-musicians like me, listening to pop music. And she did suddenly throw open the world of opera to us. So then we did listen to Kiwi Te Kauanai. We did listen to Angelo Giorgio. She did open up the doors of opera to millions of people. After the Second World War, Callas returned to the US and then went to Italy, where she was mentored by the leading Italian conductor, Tullio Serafin. She was increasingly in demand. She made triumphant appearances at La Scala in Milan, Covent Garden in London and the Metropolitan in New York. Looking at footage from that time, she was also extremely glamorous, Harriet.

11:35Should that matter? Well, she was very beautiful, which is all part of the kind of icon that she was. The fact that she was very beautiful and playing very beautiful women obviously added to it. But she also had a kind of difficult to describe dignity and grace about her, which she brought to everything. She is a commanding figure as well as a beautiful one. She was in command of everything she did. Yes. Well, I think she's sort of the ultimate diva, really. and in that she was in every sense a throwback really to the stars of the 19th century who were very glamorous and had this magic and that's when the title of diva was invented which means goddess in Italian because they thought these women were just so divine and magical up on the stage.

12:34She famously lost a lot of weight in the early 1950s. Let's hear a clip of her talking about that. I was tired of playing a game, like, for instance, playing a beautiful young woman, and I was a heavy, uncomfortable woman to move around. And I felt now if I'm going to do things right, I've studied all my life to put things right musically, why don't I just die out and put myself into a certain condition that I'm presentable? Your response to that, Harriet? That's just very poignant, hearing her talking about that. You know, it wasn't enough, apparently, for her, and there was criticism. even though she was such a great artist, she had to be a thin great artist as well.

13:17Some have described her as a rediscovered feminist icon, but we've got a clip here from an interview later in her life where her ideas about women's roles seem very old-fashioned. I thought that when I met a man I loved that I didn't need to sing because I think that a woman, the most important thing in a woman is to have a man of her own and to make him happy. And here we come on to Aristotle Onassis. Could you, in a nutshell, Nina, run through that well-worn story? Yes, so she was already married to Meneghini, who was her manager. Then she met Onassis and they started an affair and she tried to get a divorce, but Meneghini wouldn't allow it.

14:06But Anasas wouldn't get a divorce from his wife. And when she died, instead of marrying Callas, he married the lately widowed Jackie Kennedy. Yes. Which broke Callas' heart quite publicly. He was a super rich shipping magnate, a Greek shipping magnate, which in those days was, you know, the absolute top of the rich list. and as your clip showed, at those times, and I remember this being born in the 1950s, the summit of a woman's achievement was to get a good husband. Yes. That above all. And if you failed in that by getting a not-so-good husband or even worse, not getting a husband at all, then there was something very lacking in your life and pitiful.

14:56So she was reflecting in a way that social expectation that she was still somehow questing for love and a husband. Yeah, I think for Callas, she was perhaps torn between this conventional upbringing and then the call of her art. And in the old Belcanto school, it really was considered a kind of devotion, which was similar to entering the church, becoming a nun. And in fact, a lot of singers were encouraged not to marry and just devote themselves entirely to singing. OK, I'm going to play devil's advocate here for just a minute. She had been sacked by the Metropolitan Opera for wanting to choose what she sang and what she didn't sing.

15:46She was beginning to worry that her voice was deteriorating. And her critics would say she got too caught up in the world of celebrity and vast wealth that in the end diminished her as an opera singer. From what I understand it, she was having problems with her voice. That was the problem, which she was very frank about. But really, so any weakness in your professionalism had to be jumped on and commented on and criticised. And I remember her being characterised, I remember it so clearly at the time, her being characterised as kind of flaky. and me thinking at the time, how can she be kind of flaky and unreliable?

16:32Look how much work she's done. Look what she's achieved. So I put that down to good old misogyny going on. She was having difficulties, for heaven's sake. I mean, Nina even thinks that she might have had endometriosis, which at that point is now a very commonly recognised woman's health problem. But at that point was not even a thing. She was constantly being told that her symptoms were all in her head. and that there was nothing really wrong with her. But clearly there were a lot of things that just hadn't been addressed. And she said in 1957 that she didn't enjoy singing anymore because she was so frightened going out there.

17:14She didn't know how the voice was going to perform and didn't know why it would be so different from one night to the next. So I think that there was so much pressure on her She said that she didn't want to give in to feebleness and kept trying to push herself even when she was on the point of nervous breakdowns. She said, Harriet, that there were two women. There was Maria, the person, and Callas, the legend. Do you recognise the tension between being a person and having private thoughts and a private life and private interests on the one hand and on the other, needing to present, as a politician does, a certain facade to the public.

17:59Have you found any tension there? Well, certainly there is that difficulty of trying to keep your private life private. But in a way, and I remember, sorry to name drop, when we're talking about Maria Callas, I'm now going to name drop Tony Blair, because I remember when he was on a breakfast television show and he was talking about his children. And I was like, oh, Tony, you're talking about your children. Because I had children of the same age and was thinking about that. And he said, you know, if you expect everybody in the country to be voting for you, you've got to let them know who you are.

18:38And I thought that was quite an important moment, that you do have to be as open as you can bear it because you're asking people to trust you and to believe in you. One person who saw this dual personality that she describes, and really up close, was Robert Sutherland, a pianist who toured with Maria Callas at the end of her career. He is now 93, and he spoke to our producer, Beth, from his home near Glasgow. I can remember for instance at the Royal Festival Hall, we were standing behind the curtain waiting for it to be opened and she said to me, I'm scared Robert. and she was like a little Greek girl standing there trembling.

19:27And as an accompanist, of course, I'm used to encouraging the singer, but I couldn't think what to say to her. She was such a great singer. And I just looked in her eyes and smiled and she smiled and then the curtain opened and the most extraordinary change took part. It was as though an electric light had been switched on. That little trembling Greek girl was suddenly la callas and the audience was screaming. Well, that's such an interesting insight, isn't it, of what it took for her to be on, which is about courage as much as anything else. I hear in that the experience as well of a true performer.

20:13That's why I don't think she'd ever really have been happy if she'd just had the domestic life that she dreamed of because I think there's that coming alive once you get on stage is an experience that people who are kind of born to perform really understand. But it didn't come easy, did it? That's the point. And that's why we should be super grateful. Yeah, it's often difficult. There are a lot of great performers who are absolutely terrified and need to be pushed onto the stage. Lily Ponce who was a great star of the 1930s said that she was always sick before every performance That's another reason why we should be very appreciative we don't have to do something which requires us to feel absolutely sick before we do it Yeah but it's still worth it as a performer myself and I sometimes can get very nervous but then you get out there and you feel more alive than at any other time and you wouldn't want to miss that feeling for all the nerves that you have beforehand.

21:22I'd like to return to something that Harriet has highlighted, the vilification. She did gain a reputation for being difficult, for being a diva in the pejorative sense. in Rome in 1958, there'd been a great scandal because she pulled out of a gala performance after the first act. Was that reputation fair, Nina? No, I think people enjoy a scandal. In that instance, she was actually diagnosed with bronchitis. The thing is, I remember that. I actually remember the scandal. and when you think how far away I was from it, the fact that we all knew about it. I mean, you know, everybody can get bronchitis.

22:13It's a normal thing for people to have to be substituted before an opera or halfway through it. And yet on her, it was an international opprobrium. We have another clip here from her friend Robert Sutherland on how he felt about spending time with her. Well, I have great admiration. but I must say it was tense to be around her always. She drew one into her feelings. If she was feeling depressed, you were depressed. She didn't have a great sense of humour. I think it was because she was striving always for perfection. She was working always to get better and better. I suppose that was one of the reasons why it was so difficult to be with her.

23:08Difficult to be with her, yet you didn't want to leave her. Well, I think it probably was more difficult to be her than to be with her. And what he's describing is the toll it took on her and what it takes to be at that pinnacle. Did she make money? I chuckled at her remark, look, I'm not really interested in money, but it must be more than anyone else gets. But it was her belief in her value. Yes. So I'm going to defend her on that as well. You know, there's no point underselling yourself if you're a goddess. Is there anything you wouldn't defend her on, Harriet? Not really, because there's been so many people, even when she had the bravery to come back, then people piled in again and said, well, she wasn't what she was like when she was 35.

23:56Well, she wasn't. So I'm not going to join those detractors. She had withdrawn completely from public life in 1974 and lived alone in her apartment in Paris, died in 1977 from a heart attack aged just 53. Let's hear from Robert Sutherland one last time. I think she found the audience loved her. Well, she told me my audience loved me. And I think she believed that they were the only people who loved her. any other love she ever had was trouble. The funeral, the funeral was when the coffin was brought out into the street. The street was lined with people. Then as a hair strobe of, a man lifted his hands in the air and started to applaud and called Bravo Callas.

24:51The whole street exploded into applause. and diva Maria. It was a wonderful sound. It's a sound that I think Cass would have loved.

25:09It's so strange, isn't it, that one can be so emotionally upset after all these years. That's a measure of the depth in which she got into my soul.

25:26What's her legacy in the world of opera, Nina? Sorry, that last clip made me want to cry. Oh dear. Give me a moment.

25:37I think she made opera exciting and relevant again. But what I hope that her ultimate legacy will be is the revival of the Bel Canto School, which she cared so much about. She was always very keen to point out that a lot of what amazed people in her singing and that they thought was so exceptional was actually the old schooling, as she would call it. The idea that actually we could have stars like her again with that level of training and that focus is very exciting. Harriet, we heard Robert Sutherland say, that's a measure of the depth she got into my soul. Has she got into your soul? Oh, absolutely.

26:23And I think she got into millions of people's souls. But I'm very gratified to hear that, that she knew her audience loved her because that must have been a great comfort and joy to her. But it's just a reminder not to wait until that coffin is being carried through the streets, but to appreciate them while they're alive rather than just, oh, my goodness, wasn't she amazing after they're dead? My thanks to Harriet Harman and to Nina Horrocks and Robert Sutherland. How else should we finish but with La Divina herself singing a piece chosen by Harriet, Tosca's Visi d 'Arte, I lived for art, I lived for love, she sings.

27:09How fitting that seems.

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