Hans Keller was of the opinion that few teachers in general and few teachers of musical masterclasses in particular could survive without being their own admiring audience, their own real addressees. It is a theory which is confirmed by the classes Maria Callas gave at New York's Juilliard School in 1971 and 1972. Heard at this distance of time, they sound like her own funeral oration masquerading as a musical seminar.
Juxtaposing the teaching, about two hours 40 minutes of it, with Callas's own recordings of some of the pieces she teaches was a nice idea, but it stresses still more the valedictory nature of the whole thing. I don't know what else she taught in these sessions, but the items we have here register as thinly veiled autobiography. Leonore, she sweepingly tells her pupil, Pamela Herbert, is ''a woman who has suffered enormously''; the girl who is about to attempt Charlotte's Letter scene from Massenet's Werther is told to mingle presentiments of disaster with the colours of nostalgic memory in order to convey a suffering at once terrifying and intimate. ''It must be suffering'', she demands, ''you've got to give me suffering''. But the pupil can't. Only Callas can in the 1963 recording which follows the often pointless attempts to make the poor student enact these minacious orders.
Rigoletto, she tells Kil Kim, faces a bunch of courtiers who are vile and damnable. Why, she asks, must he beg for what is his by justice? Callas calls him a trapped animal and adds: ''This would be my version.'' At which the audience gives a loud, knowing guffaw. The fact that Callas sings bits of ''Cortigiani'' with thrilling insight suggests that she had a longing to appropriate the role for her own mental succour and catharsis; Callas as Rigoletto would have been an even greater sensation than Sarah Bernhardt playing Hamlet. Listening to Callas's experienced coaching of Syble Young in Rosina's aria from Il barbiere (the class prefaced by the girl getting a ticking off for wearing a dress short enough to embarrass the New Yorkers in the front row) one realizes why the comedy struck home so forcibly when Callas sang the role on stage and on record: the malice is actual, not feigned.
Sometimes Callas teaches specific points well, so that singers and singing teachers combing the records or tapes for tips will get a few ideas. There is a nice generalization at one point about the difference of the relations between word-pointing and phrasing in the Italian and French styles. Equally, good small points crop up in the midst of much that is slack and humdrum. The session on Mozart's ''Non mi dir'' seems endless and should have been pared down further or omitted along with other passages, which could have helped reduce the set to two, rather than three, discs or tapes.
The teaching is at its specific best in the Rossini whether it is Callas explaining the difference between the single and the double 'r' sound, or stressing the importance of the ''placed'' chest note, or giving general instructions to ''vibrate the sound'', ''warm it'', or ''round it out''. There is nothing pert or glib about Rossini's music if it is well sung, she seems to imply. Twice the student does unbelievable things. In the upward portamento from ''guidar'' to that famous, spiteful ''ma'', she rolls the final 'r' in a way that makes Callas very angry. (Not least, perhaps, because the student had obviously taken not the slightest notice of Callas's published recordings of the piece.) Callas herself fails to place the ''ma'' and her disingenuous explanation further adds to the stormy mood. But it's the student's sudden eruption into vocal fireworks that arouses Callas's real wrath ''Now what's all that about?'' she demands imperiously before telling the famous story of Rossini's sarcastic put-down of Adelina Patti's over-decorated account of the piece. She doesn't tell the story very well and the critic she addresses in the audience upstages her with a joke. In the end, the cadenza—''the hubbub''—is radically simplified, with Callas asking, finally, ''Are you after expression or are you after fireworks?'', the latter a clear term of abuse in her critical lexicon.
In the sessions on Puccini's ''Si, mi chiamano Mimi'' Callas gives some fascinating insights into her insistence on intensifying verbal nuances within the framework of the conductor's possible range of rubato, and she suggests how to turn a breath into an expressive accent, but she can't teach the singer, one of Juilliard's many Orientals, how to sing good Italian or articulate the words in a memorable way. In this respect the masterclasses were a waste of time. A voice is a voice. You can't teach anyone how to become a Dietrich or a Churchill. And so far as I know the late Rene Cutforth never gave masterclasses on how to transform a slogan into an experience. The gulf between Callas and the unformed personalities she is addressing is too wide to be bridged.
The editing is reasonably unobtrusive; though, as I say, there should have been more of it on the principle of giving the punters the plums and leaving them thinking there were more. It is good though, to have Callas's ''Farewell to the Students'': a couple of minutes about the difficulty of a singer's career and about the next generation taking up the torch. She is equivocal about whether she will sing or even teach again. All she advocates is the ''proper way'': that is, no fireworks, no easy applause, just expression and good diction and ''your real feeling, whatever it is''.
At the very end there is a mumbled apology for her lack of eloquence, a final laconic ''So that's that'', thunderous applause, and then a fade into silence. It seems to suggest that by this stage Callas had truly come to see her great career as a thing of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It wasn't; but by 1972 it must have got to feel that way.'