Exit La Callas

Prima Donna Maria Callas, past mistress of the grand operatic exit, did it again last week. After her closing performance in Bellini's Il Pirata, she stalked out of Milan's La Scala--for good, she said--and probably out of Italian opera as well. "I leave La Scala with deep pain," she said. "It is no longer compatible with my dignity as a woman and an artist."

Soprano Callas' exit looked to some operagoers like a retreat in her six-year-old war against Soprano Renata Tebaldi. Callas won the first battle in 1955, when her rival disappeared from La Scala; Tebaldi has not sung there since. But while Tebaldi began a brilliant new career at Manhattan's Met, her fans made things hot for Callas in Milan. When hissing Tebaldi rooters pelted Callas with radishes, Manager Antonio Ghiringhelli put up to 150 cops into La Scala, soothed Callas with public kisses and bales of flowers.

This season La Scala's new Artistic Director Francesco Siciliani began needling Ghiringhelli about pampering prima donnas. Even before Callas' celebrated walkout on a Rome audience including Italian President Gronchi last January (TIME, Jan. 13), Ghiringhelli pointedly skipped his ritual of meeting her at the airport with flowers.

La Scala began peace talks with Tebaldi this spring, hoped she would sing at a special performance this summer at the Brussels World's Fair. Last week her fans were still throwing radishes at Callas, and so were some critics. "[Maria Callas'] well-organized claque," said Milan's Il Giorno, "does not prevent her voice from damaging well-formed ears." The final blow came when Manager Ghiringhelli, who had avoided her for months, cut Callas dead backstage. Enraged, she took public revenge at her next performance of Il Pirata. Instead of pointing offstage to her lover mounting the gallows, Callas leveled a finger at Ghiringhelli's box as she declaimed the lines: "There you see . . . distressing torture."

But even before Callas quit, Tebaldi made a surprising maneuver: she announced that she would not sing at La Scala without Callas. "I sing only for artistic reasons; it is not my custom to sing against anybody," she said. Groaned Manager Ghiringhelli: "This is a stab in the back." To some critics and subscribers, a Scala with no top diva seemed a disaster. Others considered the price well worth the exit of Callas. "She corrupts public taste," cried the Giorno critic. "She lowers the noble assembly of the theater to the level of an arena."

Unwelcome in both Rome and Milan, too high-priced for other Italian cities, Callas faced a lucrative, popular future abroad--and the prospect of a new battleground. Next winter she will sing at Manhattan's Met, and so will Soprano Tebaldi.

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