Callas or Tebaldi?

By the force and tempestuousness of her personality, Maria Callas has captured the imagination of the public. She is, to many, the great soprano. And there is no doubt that she is a singer in the grand manner, who has restored to the once-glamorous world of music some of the excitement it had before opera became a polite evening’s entertainment. Framed by the proscenium, she is overpowering—and in another day her carriage would have been drawn through the streets by ecstatic crowds. But judging her merely as a voice and as an artist, does she deserve the unqualified superlatives which tumble out of the critics’ typewriters? I think not. In these years of her triumph, her stature has not increased, nor has the depth of her interpretation. At the height of her powers, moreover, she still compared unfavorably to Renata Tebaldi and, in some ways, to Victoria de los Angeles—though it may be heresy to say so. Two newcomers, Leontyne Price and Joan Sutherland, though not yet fully tried, are beginning to draw the attention of the music buffs away from her.

These are conclusions arrived at after many hours of listening intensively to five collections of operatic arias—two by Callas, two by Tebaldi, and one by de los Angeles.¹ Because there is a certain amount of overlap, what each of these sopranos does with, let us say Si, mi chiamano Mimi from Puccini’s La Bohème, offers contrasts in style and capability. And the choice of the arias in each album, though frequently imposed by the recording directors, is also indicative of musical bent and repertory.

By the force and tempestuousness of her personality, Maria Callas has captured the imagination of the public. She is, to many, the great soprano. And there is no doubt that she is a singer in the grand manner, who has restored to the once-glamorous world of music some of the excitement it had before opera became a polite evening’s entertainment. Framed by the proscenium, she is overpowering—and in another day her carriage would have been drawn through the streets by ecstatic crowds. But judging her merely as a voice and as an artist, does she deserve the unqualified superlatives which tumble out of the critics’ typewriters? I think not. In these years of her triumph, her stature has not increased, nor has the depth of her interpretation. At the height of her powers, moreover, she still compared unfavorably to Renata Tebaldi and, in some ways, to Victoria de los Angeles—though it may be heresy to say so. Two newcomers, Leontyne Price and Joan Sutherland, though not yet fully tried, are beginning to draw the attention of the music buffs away from her.

These are conclusions arrived at after many hours of listening intensively to five collections of operatic arias—two by Callas, two by Tebaldi, and one by de los Angeles.¹ Because there is a certain amount of overlap, what each of these sopranos does with, let us say Si, mi chiamano Mimi from Puccini’s La Bohème, offers contrasts in style and capability. And the choice of the arias in each album, though frequently imposed by the recording directors, is also indicative of musical bent and repertory.