BOOK REVIEW : A Callas Biography That Veers Off-Key

Perhaps because 10 full-scale biographies of Maria Callas have preceded this one, Michael Scott has chosen to write something that might be called an “audiography.”

He cites, describes and criticizes all of Callas’ performances but scants a life that was often as melodramatic as the roles she sang. The founder and artistic director of the London Opera Society and author of two volumes of vocal history as well as a book on Caruso, Scott brings a formidable background to the job.

He not only discusses every part Callas ever played but includes scheduled appearances that never took place, reminding us that Callas was almost as famous for her cancellations as for her triumphs.

The problem is that readers have been spoiled by biographers who offer intimate revelations, startling insights and diverting anecdotes; who entertain while they edify. Opera, perhaps more than any other art form, arouses intense responses. Think of those ardent devotees who sleep on sidewalks in order to be first in line for standing room. Surely they deserve more than this 250-page compilation of roles and reviews.

In his determination to avoid the slightest hint of sensationalism, Scott depersonalizes his subject. In his hands, Maria Callas is only her “instrument,” a disembodied voice without emotion or passion, virtually inanimate until she sings.

Then there is the style itself, a slough of verbal quicksand. Writing about a 1957 trip to Paris made by Callas and her husband, Giovanni Meneghini, Scott says, “And there was something cryptic about the visit being to Paris, for here, 20 years later, she would be mewed up in the last days of her life, when she had long ceased to be a singer and, like a recurring character in a Balzac novel who had once been a heroine, she was reduced to looking on.”

Obviously Scott neither admired Callas’ work nor liked the woman herself. If so, one wonders why he embarked on the painstaking task of chronicling her career in such numbing detail. Pejoratives abound, overwhelming and eventually subsuming the praise, which in most cases seems to come from other, more sympathetic sources.

Early on, we learn of the “narrowness of her intellect.” A bit later, Scott adds that by the time of her triumphant “Lucia di Lammamoor” in 1953, she weighed “a colossal 92 kilos,” quoting with obvious relish a comment that Callas was “fat, ugly and half blind--but with a remarkable voice and stage presence.” Of her subsequent transformation into one of the most glamorous of all opera stars, a feat that required an extraordinary effort of will, he says coldly, “Though she never self-consciously decided to do so, the idea of becoming a beauty was in itself enough to strengthen her desire to slim.”

Once Callas is elegant and dazzling, Scott finds her voice sadly deteriorated. Reporting on her 1955 performance as Mimi in “La Boheme,” he says she was unsuited to the role and “towards the top of the stave becomes unsteady and insecure.” Later she’s “tired and uninspiring” in “Norma”; “fearfully uncontrolled and forced beyond the too-slim singer’s capacity” in her Chicago concert, “underplayed and pallid” in “La Traviata”; “thin and wobbly” when singing softly but “ugly and raucous” in dramatic scenes.

Even on the rare occasions when Scott lauds Callas’ musicianship, he equivocates. Of her Rosina in “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” he says, “Although her voice is not as powerful nor is her singing as limpid as it was . . . and it is not spontaneous . . . it is still remarkably adept.”

Callas merely adept ? Isn’t that rather like calling Stephen Hawking clever or Winston Churchill articulate? What we have here is a revisionist examination of Maria Callas; a grudging acknowledgment of a few glorious years during which she revived bel-canto operas so vocally demanding that few singers ever attempted them.

According to Scott, by 1954 the now-stunning prima donna had declined into mediocrity, reducing her heyday to four years. “Her voice too had slimmed away. There is a sad irony in the fact that having transformed herself, swan-like, into a beautiful woman, her voice quickly lost the bloom of youth.”

In 1954, Callas was 31, an age at which most divas scarcely reach their prime. Carping and chipping away at her genuine achievements, note by note, Scott has managed to demythologize a musical legend. If that was his plan, he has succeeded, but if he intended “an exhaustive biography of one of the 20th Century’s operatic superstars,” there’s plenty of room for an 11th foray into her life and times.

MARIA MENEGHINI CALLAS, by Michael Scott . Northeastern University Press $29.95; 312 pages