Word: scala
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...those years, tawny, big-eyed Maria Callas established herself as undisputed queen of the world's opera. From London to Naples her presence in even the tiredest old operas packed the house. At Milan's La Scala she has, almost singlehanded, increased the season's attendance half again over prewar records. In critical Vienna, 10,000 people clamored for the 2,000 tickets available when she sang Lucia de Lammermoor. In Chicago her presence successfully launched a new opera company in a city which has been death on opera companies for years. Hundreds of ear-hardened operagoers...
...contralto as if they had never been created. She can negotiate the trills and arabesques of coloraturas as easily as she trumpets out a stinging dramatic climax. Like her operatic sisters of a century ago, La Callas can sing anything written for the female voice. Because of her, La Scala has revived some operas (Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio, Verdi's Sicilian Vespers, Cherubini's Medea) that it had not staged for years because no modern diva could carry them...
...first Aida at La Scala in 1950, she startled the crowd by stalking about like a hungry leopard instead of taking the usual stately stance for her Act III duet. In the death scene of Fedora, in which sopranos tend to expire stiffly on a divan, Callas staggers from it, sags to her knees, drags herself up, crawls towards her lover's room, collapses again before she finally rolls down and dies. In Norma she has cried real tears. Operagoers. long reconciled to the classic, three-gesture range of other prima donnas, are astounded and delighted...
...enemies and has left her few professional friends. Some have helped her on her way. But from the first the lonely, fat girl from Manhattan saw herself pitted single-handed against a world of enemies. In her triumph, she takes fierce pride in her defiant self-reliance. At La Scala supporters of a rival diva hiss her regularly. It only arouses Callas to cold fury...
...blew up when the company went broke. For two years she remained in New York, studying, practicing and eating, but never singing in public. Discouraged and despondent, she sailed for Italy, where she got a job in Verona (at $63 a performance), an audition but no job at La Scala (the director told her that she had lots of faults...