Maria Callas’s father changed the family name from Kalogeropoulos to Callas in 1929, when he opened a pharmacy in the Greek quarter of Manhattan. Both her parents were Greek, arriving in the USA in the year of her birth. Having received her first piano lessons as early as 1932, she was later able to prepare roles without the assistance of a repetiteur. Her parents separated in 1937 and together with her mother and sister Callas returned to Greece.

Here she entered the National Conservatory in 1938, studying singing with Maria Trivella and making her stage debut in a student production during the following year as Santuzza / Cavalleria rusticana, after which Elvira de Hidalgo became her teacher, concentrating upon coloratura training. Callas’s professional operatic debut took place in Athens in 1941 as Beatrice / Boccaccio (Suppé) with the Lyric Theatre company, with whom she went on to sing the title role in Tosca (1942), as well as Marta / Tiefland (1943), Leonore / Fidelio (1944) and Laura / Der Bettelstudent (1945). Following the liberation of Greece in 1944 she decided to return to America to seek her father and in 1945 gave her first recital in Athens to raise funds; she auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera, New York at the end of the year, but without success.

Despite a lack of work Callas practised rigorously and eventually was engaged to sing in Turandot in Chicago for a company that went bankrupt before the scheduled performances could take place. One of her fellow company members, Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, introduced her to Giovanni
Zenatello, then looking for singers for the opera festival at the Verona Arena of which he was artistic director; he engaged her to sing the title role in La Gioconda at Verona in the summer of 1947. Shortly after rehearsals began Callas met the industrialist Giovanni Meneghini, who in 1949 became her husband and subsequently her manager.

The Verona performances were conducted by Tullio Serafin, who became a key mentor, engaging Callas to sing Isolde / Tristan und Isolde at the end of the year at the Teatro la Fenice, Venice. This led to further engagements including the title roles in Turandot and Norma (Florence, 1948). At the beginning of 1949 she sang Brünnhilde / Die Walküre at La Fenice. In the same season Margherita Carosio was scheduled to sing Elvira / I puritani and when she fell ill Serafin persuaded Callas to substitute for her, which she did with such success that the Italian bel canto repertoire was to become a major focus of her future career on-stage.

During 1949 Callas sang the title roles in Norma, Aida and Turandot at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires with Serafin conducting; appeared as Kundry / Parsifal at the Rome Opera followed by Isolde in 1950, the year in which she made her debut at La Scala, Milan in the title role of Aida, substituting for Renata Tebaldi. In the same year in Mexico City, within the space of one month she sang the title parts in Norma, Aida and Tosca and Leonora / Il trovatore.

After singing Elena / I vespri siciliani at the 1951 Florence Maggio Musicale with Erich Kleiber conducting, Callas made her scheduled debut at La Scala, opening the 1951–1952 season with the same role. In the following summer of 1952 she signed an exclusive recording contract withthe Columbia label of EMI, negotiated by Walter Legge, who was the producer for the majority of her commercial recordings. These began with Lucia di Lammermoor, made in Florence during 1953, and strongly assisted the establishment of her global reputation.

At La Scala, where she was known as ‘La regina della Scala’, Callas became the focus for a process of extraordinary artistic renewal, predominantly led by the stage director Luchino Visconti who stated that it was largely because of Callas that he began to direct opera. He directed her in productions of La vestale (Giulia, 1954), La traviata (Violetta, 1955), La sonnambula (Amina, 1955), Anna Bolena (Anna, 1957) and Iphigénie en Tauride (Iphigénie, 1957). Other extraordinary performances at La Scala included Lucia / Lucia di Lammermoor (1954), Maddalena / Andrea Chénier (1955) and Amelia / Un ballo in maschera (1957). Through Callas the bel canto repertoire was rediscovered; and in addition, with Visconti directing, a new standard was established for opera as dramatic truth.

Callas’s international career was swiftly launched. She made her debut at the Royal Opera House, London as Norma in 1952 and returned regularly: notable appearances included Aida (1953), Violetta (1958), Cherubini’s Medea (1959) and Tosca (1964). At the end of 1954 she returned to the USA to sing in productions of Norma, La traviata and Lucia di Lammermoor with the young Lyric Opera of Chicago. She opened the 1956–1957 Metropolitan Opera season as Norma, followed by Tosca, Lucia di Lammermoor and La traviata. Difficulties followed in 1958. In January Callas walked out of a performance of Norma at the Rome Opera in front of the Italian president. The reason was illness, but much hostile press comment ensued. She then quarrelled with both Antonio Ghiringhelli, intendant of La Scala, deciding not to sing there while he was in charge, and also with the manager of the Metropolitan Opera, Rudolf Bing, with whom she could not agree repertoire. However at the end of the year, following successful performances as Cherubini’s Medée (Medea) for the Dallas Civic Opera, she made a sensational debut at the Paris Opera, arousing the interest of the Greek shipping magnate, Aristotle Onassis.

By the following year Callas and Onassis were lovers and her marriage to Meneghini ended. From 1960 she led an extremely full social life with Onassis, performing very little. Although persuaded to return to opera by Franco Zeffirelli, who directed her in a legendary production of Tosca at the Royal Opera House in 1964, mounted in minimal time but with maximal results, by now Callas’s performing career was almost over. She gave a series of performances as Tosca in Paris, returned to the Met for a further two and then essayed further performances of Norma in Paris, which she was unable to complete. She made her final operatic appearance at Covent Garden as Tosca in July 1965 at a royal gala performance.

When Onassis married Jacqueline Kennedy in 1968, Callas’s relationship with him was effectively ended. During 1971 and 1972 she gave a series of master-classes at the Juilliard School in New York, where she rekindled her friendship with the tenor Giuseppe di Stefano. Although she undertook a world tour with him during 1973 and 1974 to raise funds for the medical treatment of his daughter, her severe vocal decline was evident. Following Onassis’s death in 1975 Callas became a recluse in Paris, where she died two years later. Subsequent analysis has suggested that her death was ultimately caused by dermatomyositis, a disease that causes muscle failure including that of the larynx, and the treatment for which may trigger heart failure.

Callas possessed a voice of great range and power, with which she was able to generate a formidable dramatic intensity. At her peak her identification with the characters she portrayed on-stage was so complete as to mesmerize entire audiences. Setting herself extremely high standards, she expected the same of those with whom she worked. She left a vast legacy of recordings, her studio performances being supplemented by a huge catalogue of live performance recordings. Her achievement has been well summed up by the conductor Carlo Maria Giulini who commented of her: ‘If melodrama is the ideal unity of the trilogy of words, music and action, it is impossible to imagine an artist in whom these three elements were more together than Callas.’

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Patmore (A–Z of Singers, Naxos 8.558097-100).

Born into a poor family at Motta Sant’Anastasia near Catania in Sicily, Giuseppe Di Stefano entered a seminary in 1934. After three years, a fellow student encouraged him to take singing lessons and he subsequently became a pupil of Luigi Montesanto and Mariano Stabile, who emphasized the importance of clear diction. In 1938 Di Stefano won a singing competition in Florence but his career was interrupted briefly by the outbreak of war in 1939. He was conscripted into the Italian army, but being seen as of greater value as a singer than a soldier, he was discharged and earned a precarious living as a singer of popular songs in Milan, performing under the name of Nino Florio. Following the German defeat in Italy, Di Stefano escaped to Switzerland, where he was briefly interned before being taken up as a tenor by Radio Lausanne. Here his repertoire extended from popular songs to complete operas.

After the end of the war, Di Stefano returned to Italy and made his official stage debut in 1946 at Reggio Emilia as Des Grieux in Massenet’s Manon. In 1947 he took the same role at La Scala, Milan, where he enjoyed immediate success. His American debut came in 1948 as the Duke in Rigoletto at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York and was quickly followed by appearances in Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago.

Di Stefano soon became one of the most sought-after tenors of his generation. Until 1953 he sang lighter roles, such as Elvino / La sonnambula, Fritz / L’amico Fritz, Nadir / Les Pêcheurs des Perles and Wilhelm Meister / Mignon; with these he enjoyed great success as a result of his warm tone, expressive phrasing and lively personality. His singing of traditional Neapolitan songs also demonstrated his talents superbly. During the early 1950s he was a favourite singer at La Scala and the Met, although his cavalier attitude towards contracts caused him to be barred from the latter by Rudolf Bing between April 1952 and December 1955.

For Walter Legge and the UK Columbia label Di Stefano took part in numerous recordings made with the forces of La Scala. The most famous of these was Puccini’s Tosca, conducted by Victor De Sabata, with Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi (with both of whom Di Stefano sang frequently). Other distinguished recorded assumptions from this period included the Duke and Arturo / I puritani, both again with Callas, conducted by Tullio Serafin.

By 1957 Di Stefano had added Canio / Pagliacci, Don Alvaro / La forza del destino, Don José / Carmen, Osaka / Iris, Radamès / Aida and Turiddù / Cavalleria rusticana to his repertoire. He made his British debut in 1957 as a member of the La Scala ensemble that visited the Edinburgh Festival, singing one of his most famous roles, Nemorino / L’elisir d’amore (a part he also recorded for Decca). In the same year he and Callas opened the 1957–1958 season at La Scala with an account of Un ballo in maschera which is one of the most intense ever to have been committed to disc, officially or unofficially. The assumption of heavier parts during the latter part of the 1950s, however, caused Di Stefano’s singing to become more effortful; and by the time of his 1961 first appearance at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (in Tosca), time and good living had also begun to take their toll, exposing technical weaknesses in his voice-production.

Di Stefano’s last appearance at La Scala was in 1972 with Carmen, after which he undertook some less than wholly successful recitals with Callas. He made his final stage appearance with the Rome Opera in 1992 as the Emperor Altoum in Turandot.

In addition to his operatic repertoire, Di Stefano was a highly accomplished singer of lighter music. He enjoyed success in operetta, recording the role of Prince Sou-Chong in highlights from Lehár’s Das Land des Lächelns with the forces of the Volksoper in Vienna.

Despite his personal unpredictability, Di Stefano at his best ideally matched tonal warmth with dramatic conviction, and his many studio and live recordings represent a remarkable testimony to his art.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Patmore (A–Z of Singers, Naxos 8.558097-100).

Panerai studied singing at the Florence Conservatory with Raoul Frazzi and then in Milan with Armani and Giulia Tess. After winning first prize in the Adriano Belli Singing Competition at Spoleto, he made his operatic stage debut in 1946 as Enrico / Lucia di Lammermoor at the Teatro Dante in Campi Bisenzio, followed the next year by the role of Faraone (Pharaoh) in Rossini’s Mosè at the San Carlo, Naples. During 1951 he undertook a number of leading baritone roles, notably those in Aroldo, Giovanna d’Arco, and La battaglia di Legnano, in Italian radio broadcasts marking the fiftieth anniversary of Verdi’s death; sang in several of the major Italian opera houses; and made his debut at La Scala, Milan as the High Priest / Samson et Dalila.

During the following quarter century Panerai sang frequently at La Scala, both in the main house and in the Piccola Scala. Roles included Enrico, Sharpless / Madama Butterfly and Apollo / Alceste; and in contemporary opera, the Husband in Menotti’s Amelia al ballo (1954). Panerai took part in the premieres of Pizzetti’s Il calzare d’argento (1961), Turchi’s Il buon soldato Svejk (1962), and Rossellini’s Il linguaggio dei fiori (1963, Piccola Scala), as well as in the first Italian performance of Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler (1958). He sang Figaro / Il barbiere di Siviglia in the first opera broadcast to be made by Italian Television, in 1954; and the following year Ruprecht, in the Italian premiere of Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel, given in Venice.

At the Salzburg Festival Panerai first appeared in 1957 as Ford / Falstaff. He returned often: as Guglielmo / Così fan tutte (1958–1959), Masetto / Don Giovanni (1960–1961, 1968–1970), Paolo / Simon Boccanegra (1961), Malatesta / Don Pasquale (1971–1972), Don Alfonso / Così fan tutte (1972, 1974–1977) and Ford once again (1981–1982). He also appeared at many other European festivals, including Aix-en-Provence, the Caracalla Baths in Rome, Glyndebourne, the Florence Maggio Musicale and Verona.

In 1958 Panerai made the first of many appearances at the Vienna State Opera and in the same year made his American debut with the San Francisco Opera, singing Marcello / La Bohème and the Figaros of both Mozart and Rossini. He first sang at the Royal Opera House, London in 1960, as Rossini’s Figaro with Giulini conducting, returning there to sing Don Alfonso and the title roles in Falstaff and Don Pasquale in 1984 and Dr Dulcamara / L’elisir d’amore in 1985 and 1990.

Panerai’s career was very long-lasting and took him to many international opera houses, including those of Amsterdam, Athens, Barcelona, Berlin, Frankfurt, Johannesburg, Lisbon, Monte Carlo, Munich, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, Stuttgart and Zürich, as well as all the principal Italian houses. His repertoire featured most of the great Verdi baritone roles, including the title part in Rigoletto, di Luna / Il trovatore, Posa / Don Carlo, Amonasro / Aida and Germont père / La traviata. He sang the title role in Gianni Schicchi at the Florence Maggio Musicale in 1988, in Chicago in 1996, and again in Florence in 2006; Count Douglas in Mascagni’s rarely-heard Guglielmo Ratcliff at Catania in 1990; Dulcamara in Barcelona in 1998; and Germont père for Italian television in 2000, with Zubin Mehta conducting.

A most engaging and versatile stage presence enhanced Panerai’s voice, a relatively light high baritone. He recorded extensively, and can be heard on several major recordings featuring Maria Callas.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Patmore (A–Z of Singers, Naxos 8.558097-100).

The Coro del Teatro alla Scala is synonymous with prestige and artistic quality. Notable previous chorus masters include Vittore Veneziani, Norberto Mola, Roberto Benaglio, and Romano Gandolfi who worked alongside Claudio Abbado, Giulio Bertola, and Roberto Gabbiani who worked with Riccardo Muti. Current chorus master Bruno Casoni has developed a powerful and moving sound.

Although the Chorus’s main focus is opera, it also performs a wide variety of repertoire, including choral symphonies, chamber music and contemporary 20th-century pieces. Notable works include Mottetti and Tres sacrae cantiones by Gesualdo, Luca Marenzio’s Missa Super iniquos odio habui, Missa L’homme armé by Carissimi and Verdi’s Requiem. The Chorus, alongside the other companies of the Teatro alla Scala, has participated in numerous European and world tours, and has visited Russia, the United States, Canada, Japan and Korea.

Composed of 135 musicians, the Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala is considered one of the world’s best orchestras for opera productions, although it is equally revered for its symphonic repertoire.

At its genesis, the orchestra was ‘conducted’ by the First Violin orchestra leader, including the eminent violinist and teacher of Paganini, Alessandro Rolla. In 1854 Alberto Mazzuccato became the first conductor of the orchestra, and the orchestra has since been led by Franco Faccio who conducted the premiere of Othello in 1887, Leopoldo Mugnone, Edoardo Mascheroni who conducted the premiere of Falstaff in 1893, and Arturo Toscanini who, during the 1921–22 season, transformed the Teatro alla Scala from being a private theatre to having an autonomous board.

Other great conductors to have led the orchestra include Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan, Guido Cantelli, Leonard Bernstein, Carlo Maria Giulini, Claudio Abbado, Riccardo Muti, Daniel Barenboim and Riccardo Chailly.

Herbert von Karajan’s father was a doctor at the Salzburg hospital and his mother was of Slav descent. He began to take piano lessons when he was four, and studied chamber music, composition, piano and theory at the Salzburg Mozarteum for ten years from 1916. His tutors included Bernhard Paumgartner, who conducted his first concerto appearance in 1919 and encouraged him to become a conductor. After graduating from the Mozarteum in 1926, Karajan entered the Vienna Academy, where he studied piano with Hofmann and conducting with Wunderer. At the beginning of 1929 he conducted the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra; as a result he was offered the chance to conduct a trial performance by the director of the Ulm Municipal Theatre, and subsequently was appointed as chief conductor, a post he held from 1929 to 1934. During this period he also conducted the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and joined the Nazi party not once but twice, in Ulm and also in Aachen, where from 1934 to 1942 he was chief conductor, conducting both opera and symphony concerts. He made his debut at the Vienna State Opera in 1937 conducting Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and during the following year appeared with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. After performances of Beethoven’s Fidelio and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Berlin State Opera he was hailed as ‘Der Wunder Karajan’ (‘The Karajan Miracle’) by the Berlin music critic von der Nüll, and was offered a recording contract by Deutsche Grammophon; in 1939 he was appointed as ‘state conductor’ at the Berlin Staatsoper and as conductor of the Staatsoper orchestra’s symphony concerts.

During most of World War II Karajan was active in Berlin and in certain occupied and friendly territories such as France and Italy and was seen as a potent rival to Furtwängler, then at the head of the Berlin Philharmonic; but as the war drew to a close he fled from Germany and lived primarily in Italy. Because of his membership of the Nazi party Karajan was not permitted to conduct in public in Vienna after hostilities had ceased, but he was allowed to record for Walter Legge and the British Columbia label. The ban on conducting was lifted in 1947, and during the following year he was appointed as chief conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and of the Vienna Musikverein Choral Society, began to work as the de facto chief conductor of Legge’s Philharmonia Orchestra, and appeared at the Salzburg Festival and La Scala, Milan. In addition he accepted many guest engagements in Austria, England, Germany, Italy and Switzerland.

By the beginning of the 1950s Karajan’s star was definitely once again in the ascendant. At the first post-war Bayreuth Festival, held in 1951, he conducted both Wagner’s Ring and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, followed the next year by an incandescent interpretation of Tristan und Isolde. His numerous recordings for Legge established and confirmed his international reputation through their undeniable quality. Following the death of Furtwängler at the end of 1954 Karajan was appointed as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, a post which he was to hold until 1989, touring internationally with the orchestra from 1957 onwards. Next he was appointed as artistic director of the Salzburg Festival, from 1956 to 1960, and of the Vienna State Opera, from 1957 to 1964. Here he promoted co-operation with La Scala, and sought to introduce the Italian stagione system in place of the traditional repertoire system with its concomitant difficulties with rehearsals. In 1959 Deutsche Grammophon signed a long-term recording contract with Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the significance of which cannot be over-estimated in terms of generating reputation and income. At one point recordings by Karajan constituted twenty-five percent of the label’s classical catalogue, and during his lifetime more than one hundred million copies of his recordings were sold world-wide.

The new concert hall in West Berlin, the Philharmonie, was inaugurated by Karajan in 1963, and the following year he joined the board of directors of the Salzburg Festival, where he exerted considerable influence. In 1967 he established the Salzburg Easter Festival with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra as resident, and inaugurated it with his own production of Die Walküre, which was shared with the Metropolitan Opera in New York; the Salzburg Whitsun Concerts followed in 1973. He founded the Karajan Foundation in Berlin in 1968, a significant legacy of which was a conducting competition which helped to identify the major conductors of the following generation. Between 1969 and 1971 Karajan acted as musical counsellor for the Orchestre de Paris, created to replace the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra. In 1978, the year in which he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Oxford University, he suffered a severe fall which was to affect his mobility for the rest of his life. He conducted the traditional New Year’s Day concert with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1987, and his eightieth birthday was marked in 1988 by Deutsche Grammophon with the issue of a one hundred-CD Karajan Edition. He died of heart failure the following year while preparing Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera for the Salzburg Festival.

Karajan was an extraordinary conductor, who possessed an unusually high degree of personal charisma which was almost tangible when experienced directly in the concert hall and opera house. He often conducted with his eyes closed, generating a high level of concentration and tension, and was able to exact performances of remarkable technical accuracy and control from his orchestras. He combined these traits with a love of the smoothest legato and subtlest phrasing. Taken all together these characteristics could result in slightly ‘soft-centered’ or mannered performances. His discography was vast: towards the end of his life his recordings, generally made under his own control, were auctioned to EMI and Decca as well as to Deutsche Grammophon, thus furthering their international distribution. Karajan is perhaps best experienced in the repertoire by which he was most popularly known, the Viennese classics, such as the symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner. A relatively late convert to Mahler, he was nonetheless an impressive interpreter of this elusive composer. His operatic recordings, especially those made with Walter Legge for EMI, are of a very high quality. A keen supporter of technological innovation, he allied himself closely to the introduction of the compact disc, first unveiled to the public in 1981, and to digital recording. He also recorded opera and concerts on film, with himself conducting, from 1965 onwards, and so has left an impressive visual musical legacy which has subsequently been made available on DVD.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Patmore (A–Z of Conductors, Naxos 8.558087–90).

Verdi dominated the world of Italian opera from his first considerable success in 1842 with Nabucco until his final Shakespearean operas Otello, staged at La Scala, Milan in 1887, and Falstaff, mounted at the same opera house in 1893. His career coincided with the rise of Italian nationalism and the unification of the country, causes with which he was openly associated.

Operas

The best known of Verdi’s 28 operas are Nabucco (‘Nebuchadnezzar’), Macbeth, Rigoletto, Il trovatore, La traviata, Les Vêpres siciliennes (‘The Sicilian Vespers’), Simon Boccanegra, Un ballo in maschera (‘A Masked Ball’), La forza del destino (‘The Force of Destiny’), Don Carlo, Aida, Otello and Falstaff.

Church Music

In addition to settings of the Te Deum and the Stabat Mater Verdi wrote an impressive large-scale setting of the Requiem, its origin stemming from the death of Rossini in 1868 and the death of the writer Manzoni. The Requiem is a work of operatic magnificence, none the less moving for its theatrical elements.

The Quattro pezzi sacri (‘Four Sacred Pieces’) were written at various times in Verdi’s later years. The first, Ave Maria sulla scala enigmatica, written in 1889, was followed in publication by Stabat mater, Laudi alla Vergine Maria (on a text from Dante), and Te Deum for double chorus and orchestra. The Quattro pezzi sacri were published in 1898.