"I would not kill my enemies, but I will make them get down on their knees. I will, I can, I must."
"Art is domination. It's making people think that for that precise moment in time there is only one way, one voice. Yours."
"I was always too mature for my age — and not very happy. I had no young friends. I wish I could go back to those days. If I could only live it all again, how I would play and enjoy other girls. What a fool I was."
"Well, what did you expect in an opera? A happy ending?" — Bugs Bunny
Opera singer Maria Callas (1923-1977) described herself to David Frost like this: "There are two people in me actually, Maria and Callas... if someone really tries to listen to me, he will find all of myself there." She stated the same split more precisely elsewhere: "I would like to be Maria, but there is La Callas who demands that I carry myself with her dignity." The division between the private person and the historical figure — between the woman who wished she could go back to playing with girls her age as a child, and the artist who told the Metropolitan Opera at twenty-three that one day they would beg her to return — is typical of EIE's constitutive self-consciousness.
The narrative of Callas as tragic icon — abandoned by her lover, the shipping magnate Onassis, voice failing, dying alone — has been challenged by critics like Daisy Goodwin, who note that it reduces a decade of world-historical artistic achievement to a footnote before a rather banal (definitely a word Callas would hate to be applied to herself) love story gone wrong. She was, as Goodwin argues, "highly self-aware", a woman of "unwavering belief in her own talent" who turned down the Met's offer of supporting roles at twenty-three because she knew she deserved the leads — and proved right when Rudolf Bing had to pay her an unprecedented fee ten years later. The tragic icon framing is maybe not something Callas would totally object to, but she'd point that it underrates her historical significance and her approach to her art: the conviction that one's artistic mission matters, that the standard must be maintained regardless of cost, that the audience deserves the full emotional truth of what the music requires. Her quote about art is EIE's Fe-broadcast function (with a touch of activator Se) stated with unusual directness — not sharing but domination, the temporary suspension of the audience's own subjectivity in the face of an overwhelming emotional presence.
The artistic perfectionism, with an elitist touch (see Talanov-style Qe) was specifically EIE's. "I want the best in everything... and it torments me." The torment is the key word — not the satisfaction of the craftsperson who has done the job well but the suffering of someone for whom the gap between the ideal and the actual has Fe's full emotional weight. She understood her own artistic process in terms that go to the functional core: "An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I've left the opera house." This is EIE's Ni at work — the temporal extension of emotional experience beyond its immediate boundaries, the past performance that continues living in the emotional world, the future performance already begun in imagination, combined with this function's characteristic masochism. Her advice from conductor Tullio Serafin — "when one wants to find a gesture, all you have to do is listen to the music. The composer has already seen to that" — described her own method: the total identification with the emotional truth that the score contains, which she then transmitted to the audience at maximum intensity. They say that Tito Gobbi, who regularly sang Scarpia, was always afraid that she, as Tosca, would stab him for real.
She described her stage technique as such: "I don't know what happens to me on stage. Something else seems to take over." The EIE's experience of the Fe-broadcast state — the moment when the personal dissolves into the transmission and the type is operating at its fullest functional capacity — is precisely this: a some sort of possession ("constructivist" unmanageable ethics), something that comes through rather than something deployed. And its purpose, as she revealed in her most vulnerable self-disclosure: "Only when I was singing did I feel loved".
The demonstrativeness also confirms the EIE typing. The press nicknamed her "the Tigress", and she had a reputation as a real primadonna. Her conflicts with opera companies, managers, and rivals were legendary. When confronted by a process server after a Chicago performance, the photograph of her snarl was sent around the world — though she disputed the "temperamental" label, since many of her cancellations were due to genuine illness, disbelieved by a press that had already decided she was difficult.
Her self-defense against the demonization that followed her everywhere was equally characteristic: "I am not an angel and do not pretend to be. That is not one of my roles. But I am not the devil either. I am a woman and a serious artist, and I would like so to be judged".
Her final self-assessment was surprisingly sardonic: "First I lost weight, then I lost my voice, and now I've lost Onassis". The three losses listed in the order they occurred, but in a kind of ascending weight that she deliverately inverted with the deadpan framing. The joke acknowledges the tragedy and refuses to be fully consumed by it. It is, in its small way, EIE maintaining its dignity through the knowledge that one's own story has the structure of an impressive drama, and that drama can be met with wit as well as suffering.
Comments
Post a Comment