Maria Callas

She's controversial but you have to appreciate what she can do, and care little for what she fails to do because that is all overshadowed by what she gives. And, what she gives is unreserved guts and heart, she carries the suffering right out of the character and gives it to the audience in a big package. She sets a standard and if you listen to later soprano's they will say just that, she was the benchmark for everyone that came after her. Besides she is quite possibly the operatic soprano of the 20th century, if not for the purists then for a large majority. None of this is to detract from the greatness of, for example, a Renata Tebaldi, I mean she's up there too and I wouldn't argue against anyone promoting her achievements. Yet Maria Callas is a legend for a reason and I believe you observe it here in these clips. It is probably worth noting that by general reckoning she had peaked by 1954, the famous Tosca recording is 1953, her voice being damaged, particularly in the upper register and even still these clips are a tremendous archive. They are currently available in two separate DVD releases on EMI, (here in the UK, anyway):
Maria Callas - La Callas... Toujours - Paris, 1958,
Maria Callas - Live In Concert Hamburg 1959 And 1962

Callas & Gobbi in "Torture scene" from Tosca Paris 1958
Maria Callas "Vissi d'arte" Paris 1958
Maria Callas - O Mio Babbino Caro

Influences

The TV is flicking bright coloured dancing streams of light across the darkness. I sit in between two worlds pondering these impressions as they crash against the interior being. A World Music Award Ceremony spectacular with young sexy women dancing and posing. Music, speeches and glamour - a glittering confetti of moving image and sound. OK, television, so what? I listen to and enjoy a lot of popular music, though even the better stuff be only so much dirge. You sense it when you stop to consider it, the emotional quality appeals to a lower level of being. It's worse when it's mediated through the television, but it's still there in any case. You know it but, probably feel so acclimatised you think nothing of it, after all it's the whole of the shared culture we live in. I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, I do recognize there is some very worthwhile music 'out there' that falls well within the definition of pop culture. But, it is what it is and it does what it does, stirring emotions and passions, providing a soundtrack for the times, the day, the age, the event. You know it. Then it passes, left behind in 1981, (or any other year). Some of it outlives the times, rises above the contexts from which it emerged - certain artists have this type of legendary quality and it comes through in their music, or so we imagine. To prove a point to myself I just, more or less randomly, pulled from a shelf and put in the CD player Schubert's Trout Quintet. It's a cleaner, purer, more exalted form, touching completely different parts of my being to what I'd just heard through the television. Not having listened to anything much like this recently, I am able to feel the difficulties so associated with certain classical works and yet, the effort one makes to properly experience this music is working to our own advantage, opening parts of being otherwise shut off, shrivelled cold in the dark. These impressions coming through Schubert are so very different. I killed the television, it's just the tapping of keys as I now sit here writing, listening to the interplay action and response of the strings to the piano, harmonies mirrored in different octaves. I just forget, so it's worth writing it down: it's cleansing to the emotional parts of one's being to listen to this music. I hesitate to define it as classical because I am fully aware there is a great dirge of cheap emotional classical work that just scrapes the barrel of popular emotion. I'm not saying classical Vs popular music, but there are works evidently, and obvious upon hearing, that originate from a higher realm altogether, if not belonging to a soaringly celestial visionary realm of positive emotion then certainly inspired.

Regula

Unbeknown to me, although perhaps if I were to trawl through journal and diary entries something may exist to the contrary, I entered a whole new phase of Work at some unknown point, (though I assume it to have occurred earlier this year). Work efforts necessarily took on a different form and it niggled me that those efforts seemed lacking, not having the results I may have gotten used to. Yet I see now something far subtler was at work and my recent reading of Robert Reymond's The Lamb of God just brought it all together, connecting two branches of personal development to the same single limb. Yet now I'm thinking that this period is either closed as in completed or shutting down as in wrapping up. This uncertainty is not an issue, but rather needing a clear formulation - let's steal another's phrase, and call it - a rule of life, which we might call a goal or aim, but no that is something slightly different. My aim still stands: To live in the presence of the Work.

This rule of life however is something else again. It is the Latin regula - a yearning, a tool for spiritual growth. I'll develop this weblog along those lines, aware from the outset that I have never held too firmly to any single form in these matters, usually having different irons in the fire in order to hold continuity in terms of trajectory, if not in apparent outward appearance. So I'll use this format for as long as it proves worth the effort, and then until time restrictions, or war, insist on something more traditional - pen and paper in back pocket, which is always the bottom line anyway.