Word: scala
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Prima Donna Maria Callas, past mistress of the grand operatic exit, did it again last week. After her closing performance in Bellini's Il Pirata, she stalked out of Milan's La Scala-for good, she said-and probably out of Italian opera as well. "I leave La Scala with deep pain," she said. "It is no longer compatible with my dignity as a woman and an artist...
Soprano Callas' exit looked to some operagoers like a retreat in her six-year-old war against Soprano Renata Tebaldi. Callas won the first battle in 1955, when her rival disappeared from La Scala; Tebaldi has not sung there since. But while Tebaldi began a brilliant new career at Manhattan's Met, her fans made things hot for Callas in Milan. When hissing Tebaldi rooters pelted Callas with radishes, Manager Antonio Ghiringhelli put up to 150 cops into La Scala, soothed Callas with public kisses and bales of flowers...
This season La Scala's new Artistic Director Francesco Siciliani began needling Ghiringhelli about pampering prima donnas. Even before Callas' celebrated walkout on a Rome audience including Italian President Gronchi last January (TIME, Jan. 13), Ghiringhelli pointedly skipped his ritual of meeting her at the airport with flowers...
...words that appear in Verdi's last and perhaps greatest work, Falstaff-"Cammina! Cammina!" (keep going, keep going)-were already his maxim in his null and he kept going at the rate of more than an opera a year. Verdi hated Milan, hated the power of La Scala's management, hated "the rule of the foreigner and the secret police." But to "keep going." he pruned, cut and distorted "his rugged talent to suit the conditions of the time." With peasant toughness. Verdi awaited the day when he would call the tune as well as write...
...held on to her Manhattan bar job while she took singing lessons. In 1951 she won a Fulbright scholarship to study opera in Italy, became a member first of the Zurich Stadt-theater, later of the Stuttgart Staatsoper. In her seven years in Europe. Grace has appeared at La Scala, Covent Garden. Florence. Bayreuth. With her 2½-octave range she has sung 20-odd roles, including Carmen. Gluck's Orpheus, Dora-bella in Mozart's Cosí fan Tutte, Ulrica in Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera, plus mezzo and contralto parts in the Ring cycle...