A Fascinating Rivalry: Exploring the Untold Story of Carlotta Berlumi and Maria Callas

2023-10-18 02:17:05

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The Rival. Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt. Albin Michel. 146 pages. €16.90. October 2023

Did you think Callas’ rival was Tebaldi? Mistake, it was Carlotta Berlumi!

Are you more Maria Callas or Carlotta Berlumi? We will bet without too much risk on the response of today’s music lover, which we guess is identical in every way to that of yesterday’s music lover. Today as yesterday, Callas fascinates beyond all the imagination that she will have generated: the plump transformed into a top model, the popular icon of the tabloid press, the revolutionary diva, the passionaria of high-end friendships. range (Visconti, Pasolini…), the victim of legendary loves, premature solitary death, repeated on stage for decades… A social veneer which has never obscured the essential: a Art lives, a life through Art and for Art, made of extreme demands and discipline, of burning stage investment. A planet on fire all by itself in a world of opera that was gathering dust between purr and caricature… The 1950s marked the beginnings of a double revolution (the New Callas from 1953, the New Bayreuth of 1951), victorious in 1976 (the Ring de Chéreau), which, a year before the death of Maria Kalogeropoulos, would transform, with no possible turning back, the singer into an actor.

It is all this that makes Carlotta Berlumi mad with rage, a caricatured summary of all the clichés of the old-fashioned shady diva, who sees the rise of the ” fat Greek… myopic, frumpy, buttoned-up, pudgy, flanked by a senile husband » like the sky loaded with threats of his own career. For the formidable Carlotta, Callas is at most a “ illusionist “, never “ the greatest singer of the 20th century “. When Enzo, a young man introduced to the lyrical art by his grandfather, meets Berlumi during a guided visit to La Scala, the latter never lets him go, inexhaustible about the decades of rivalries which will have seen his prophecy (” The Callas? You will see: soon no one will remember her anymore… “) cruelly invalidated.

Playwright, writer, director, but above all a generally celebrated story-maker, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt resurrects a bygone era. The Rival is an express report on this time when Callas also invited herself to the table of the proletariat. Extremely brief, modest, even volatile, the work, lit by bladders and lanterns, covers a handful of related subjects: the ravages of Time, the close links between opera and homosexuality (we are far from the analysis of the subject by Opéra International in the 80s, and even more of the recent Anatomy of the lyrical madwoman by Wayne Koestenbaum) but above all what is perhaps his real subject, made accessible via the convenient alibi Berlumi: the thorny subject of the Callas style, whose ” three different voices » would have the effect of a UFO in today’s era of widespread beautiful singing.

In 2023, Maria Callas would be 100 years old: a posthumous birthday that is celebrated, in addition to yet another complete discography, the little gift of this Rival which could have taken the title of a more in-depth novel by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: The Part of the Other.

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