Maria Callas, La Divina Box Set
Featured Album
No other singer on record has made opera a more volatile, life-giving art
Maria Callas could swerve between doomed tenderness, wistful charm, vindictive ferocity, girlish giddiness and regal aloofness more quickly and totally than most singers can find a pitch. This three-disc set can't cover the full extent of her mercurial musical personality, but it comes close. In "Un bel dì" from Madama Butterfly, she focuses her sound into a hot beam of longing. In "Sempre libera" from La Traviata, she merges the Violetta's slightly manic hilarity with a foretaste of the despair to come. She pumps "O don fatale" (from Don Carlo) full of buzzing rage; nobody ever sang the words "ti maledico" ("I curse you") with more bloodcurdling conviction. There was always a hint of calamity in her voice. You can hear that total embrace of danger in the high notes that threaten to spin off into the ether, in her willingness to risk an ugly sound, in the way she sprints and slips through filigreed passages, less concerned with perfect execution than with the emotional extremes they represent. No other singer on record has made opera a more volatile, life-giving art.
