Hommage à Maria
Callas
A Draft1
I have
always been astonished that people who have heard Maria Callas have not been
able to get beyond hearing in her an extraordinary voice subjected to every
conceivable peril. She was never—oh by
no means—merely a voice in an age in which so many outstanding voices could be
heard. Maria Callas is no “vocal
wonder”; she is far indeed from being one of those, or very near indeed to
being one, for she is the only creature [Kreatur]
that has ever set foot on an opera stage.
A creation [Geschöpf] about
which the tabloid press must hold its peace, because every one of this
creation’s sentences, every breath it takes, its weeping, its joy, its
precision, its delight in producing art—a tragedy that one need not be familiar
with in the usual way—are obvious. What
is uniquely extraordinary is not her coloraturas—and they are staggeringly
magnificent—not her arias, not her skill as a singing partner; but rather her respiration,
her pronunciation. M[aria] C[allas] has
a way of pronouncing a word so that everyone who has not entirely lost his ear
for music owing to apathy or snobbery, who is not incessantly on the hunt for
fresh sensations of the lyrical theater [---] she will never make us forget
that there are such things as an I and a Thou, that there are such things as
pain and joy; she is great in hatred, in love, in tenderness, in brutality; she
is great in every mode of expression, and when her expressiveness misses the
mark, as it indisputably has done on many occasions, she has still merely fallen
short, but never been small. She can miss
a specific target of expressiveness, because [she] knows what expressiveness in
general is.
She was
great ten or more times over, in every gesture, in every cry, in every movement
she was great, which <…> is reminiscent of Duse: ecco un artista. She never
sang roles, but rather lived on the razor’s edge; she had a style of recitative
that seemed old-fashioned, newly made—ah, not newly made; she was so timelessly
contemporary that all the composers who wrote her roles, from Verdi to Bellini,
from Rossini to Cherubini, would have seen in her not merely their fulfillment
but something vastly superior.
Ecco un artista: she is the only person who has lawfully
acted onstage in this century in order to make the [listeners] in the stalls
freeze to death, suffer, shiver; she was always art—ah, art—and she was always
a human being, always the most wretched, the most haunted, of women, la Traviata.
She was, if
I [may be forgiven for] drawing on the stuff of fairy tales, the nightingale of
those years, and the tears that I have wept—I need not be ashamed of them. There are so many meaningless tears shed, but
the ones shed for Callas—they were not so meaningless. She was the last fairy tale, the last reality
whose blessings any listener can still hope to enjoy.
She always directly
confronted those detours around libretti, around characters, that one must truly
love in order to be able to accept them.
She was the lever that set in motion a world inside the listener; one
could suddenly listen through everything, listen through the centuries; she was
the last fairy tale.
It is very
difficult or very easy to acknowledge greatness. Callas—yes, when did she live? When will she die?—is great, is a human
being, is an alien in a world of mediocrity and perfection.
1. Bachmann’s editors remark
that she first heard Callas in a production of La Traviata by Luchino Visconti at La Scala in Milan in 1956 and
that the draft probably dates from a few years later.
THE END
Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2018 by
Douglas Robertson
Source: Ingeborg
Bachmann, Werke, edited by Christine Koschel, Inge von
Weidenbaum, and Clemens Münster (Munich: Piper, 1978), Vol. IV, pp. 342-343.