With nothing strictly new in it, is Warner's new "Maria Callas - Live Re-Mastered" box-set necessary, let alone important? It will be a meaningless question for Callas devotees, for whom redundancy has been the name of the game over the 40 years since the soprano died. We've bridled every time someone has whined about the singer's sound; yet as the recordings, studio and live, have morphed from master to re-master, platform to platform, we've found that Callas' famously "unreliable instrument" has remained truer than any engineering.
True Believers likely already have most of these 20-plus performances. Still, the revelations of this latest re-mastering are many, and phenomenal. It would be a reader disservice to say much more than "Get shopping, girls," but I will anyway. Callas was an artist who changed things. This new set changes - not fundamentally, but frequently astonishingly - how we hear Callas. She steps from behind yet another acoustical curtain.
Start, as the set does, with the 1949 Naples "Nabucco." The sheer size and command of the voice has seldom seemed a more settled matter. She knew enough to put down the role of Abigaille soon afterwards, but Callas rips through it with technical flourishes meant to bring you to your knees (or your feet) and a sound so huge and blazing you momentarily draw back.
What's telling is that, as you work through the set, up to the several versions of the 1964 "Tosca," you never lose that sense of the amplitude and generosity of the voice, even if the artistry becomes ever more subtle, whittled down to essences.
The videos - the filmed concerts often out of circulation, now restored on Blu-ray - are offered as bonuses, but their value has never seemed greater. Seeing the singer's fabled concentration, coupled with the additional economy of movement required by concert settings, re-boots the mental image of her no matter how many times you've seen it.
But in this new context, they offer illuminating comparisons. Spellbinding as the final scene from "Il Pirata" in the 1958 Hamburg recital remains, the same scene in a wonderfully cleaned-up recording of the same scene in Carnegie Hall concert the following year is yet more mesmeric, because Callas has gotten to the final scene by way of the whole opera.
She earned her reputedly enormous fee for the 1964 "Tosca" Act II performance at Covent Garden merely by allowing it to be the sole representation of her live in a staged opera. Still, as has often been remarked, it's irrefutable proof that, despite how operatic acting conventions have changed, Callas was no scenery-shredding lioness but a Tosca whose short-fused fury was also laser-focused.
On the one hand, this set will not significantly alter the received opinion that the 1960s were the great decade (of a career that ran only 15-plus years). But it will decisively dislodge the idea that Callas only got better until the voice started getting away from her. That will be replaced by the realization that every performance was different, none a throwaway - the reason we go to the theater in the first place.
Spontini's "La Vestale" and Giordano's "Andrea Chenier" have not become better operas by dint of these performances, though they're the only place I can bear them. And the historically informed-performance police have long since pulled the two Gluck ventures - the 1954 "Alceste" and the 1957 "Ifigenia in Tauride" - over and booked them for inauthenticity. Though they turn out to be no more right for her than the Kundry in the 1950 "Parsifal" (in Italian), the only one she phones in is the Ifigenia, while singing decently.
Previously - not long ago - I had concluded that I finally "got" Callas' Norma because I loved them in reverse chronological order, vocally come what may. I almost dreaded hearing again the 1950 Covent Garden performance (with Joan Sutherland still with her baby teeth as a cowering Clotilde), but it held me start to finish. It's already Callas'.
Elsewhere come the great collaborations. With Bernstein in "La Sonnambula" and "Medea," the two urging each other into the ring of live fire. The "Berlin Lucia" (1955) with Karajan gets less of a sound upgrade while remaining her all-time best Lucia.
I somehow lost interest when Terrence McNally co-opted the "Lisbon Traviata" (1958) for his parasitic play, but hearing it again got me to stop thinking I knew which was the best performance of the role she may have been born to sing.
If you're "above" Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, the other sets are available individually, but you'd be missing the good stuff. Rossini's "Armida" (1952) is knock-your-socks-off singing. And then there's the La Scala "Anna Bolena" (1957). Scholarship has cleaned up "Anna" considerably since then, but Callas' wrenching heroine wrings the last ounce of emotion out of you with the finest filaments of sound.