Doomed to an Eternal Present?: Callas’s Studio Recordings

Much has been written on recordings as trace, index, and representation; their role in creating new forms of reception; and their inability to capture the manifold facets of a live performance. The release of Warner’s Maria Callas: The Complete Studio Recordings, 1949-1969 (2015) provides a unique opportunity to revisit another important question that impinges on the role of recordings in musical culture, namely the oft-cited claim that live performances have at times become indistinguishable from their recorded counterparts. At stake in this process of convergence is not just the status of liveness in contemporary culture but also the very nature of performance as an event. For the studio recording of an opera is not simply an ideal performance from which the visual and scenic components have been subtracted. Comparisons with live recordings indicate that even when onstage, Callas sought to achieve a level of proficiency such that the performance was no longer the virtuosic realisation of a work but the striving toward an ideal associated with the practice of studio recording. This is indicated not only by the enormous breadth of her repertory but also the broadly admired projection of textual and dramatic values. Hence the significance of Callas’s idiosyncratic tone color or breathing, and even her mistakes—inevitable when pursuing a theoretical ideal dictated by the aesthetics of recording. It is by listening to her vocalizations in the recordings of her Juilliard School master classes that one fully regains a sense of Callas’s performances as situated events. They are the counterpart, in classical music terms, of the celebrated recording sessions of the Beatles in the Abbey Road studios.

CREDITS

Giorgio Biancorosso (The University of Hong Kong) - Speaker

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