JULY 24, 1921 – MARCH 3, 2008
Maria Callas had rarely been hotter – physically, emotionally, figuratively. The Milanese summer of 1953 was a roaster of record-breaking proportions. Problem enough for those out in the open, but sheer hell for Madame Callas and anyone else obliged to spend 10 days inside La Scala recording Puccini’s Tosca.
“La Divina” was appearing at the request of EMI, the label having devoted itself to recording as much and as often as it could with the soprano while her voice was at its strongest. Those sweltering summers were the only break in her touring schedule, and thus she recorded three operas for the company during the baking weeks of 1953. Another seven were taped between 1954 and 1957.
The soprano suffered in the heat, as did her genius conductor Victor de Sabata – known for his love of formal dress, but here forced into a short-sleeved shirt. As the mercury rose, de Sabata’s insistence on take after take increased temperatures still further, with Callas threatening to go on strike.
One man, though, helped to prevent a combustible situation from becoming an inferno by keeping his cool. According to EMI’s Peter Andry, Giuseppe Di Stefano, who played Cavaradossi to Callas’s Tosca, was “a tremendously good-looking man… he was very funny; he didn’t take the whole thing too seriously. Maria Callas so enjoyed working with him. Giuseppe gave her a great degree of confidence.”
Di Stefano understood that this was the work of his lifetime. “It was my destiny to sing so many times with Maria Callas,” he would say later. “We feel the same way about the words, about the drama.”
More than 70 years on, that 1953 recording of Tosca remains a landmark work – it is regarded as one of the greatest, if not the greatest opera recording ever made. Because while the contributions of Callas, de Sabata and Tito Gobbi were brilliant enough, there was more to Di Stefano than good looks and good humour. As Andry said: “I don’t suppose there’s ever been a voice quite like his.”
Fittingly for an opera star, drama accompanied Giuseppe Di Stefano throughout his life. Born in Sicily but raised in Milan, he might have become a priest but for an afternoon when a beautiful young woman turned up at the family home to collect some fabric that had been left behind by his seamstress mother. “I happened to be home from the seminary and… end of story,” he said.
Then, after a friend heard him singing and convinced him to try the opera, “my mother almost threw me out of the house! ‘A tenor?! What is that?!’ Even when I sang in church, it never aroused their enthusiasm. They never came to watch me, they never cared about it.”
Fortunately his early teachers, the tenor Mariano Stabile and baritone Luigi Montesanto, were quick to acknowledge the promise of Giuseppe’s warm rich tones. When war intervened, an army superior did likewise and “Pippo” – a diminutive of “Giuseppe” – escaped service on the eastern front by telling the medical officer he feared what the cold might do to his voice. He later went on sick leave and sang at Milan restaurants, but when it became evident that Mussolini was done for and all military personnel were told to return to barracks, Di Stefano couldn’t flee to Switzerland swiftly enough.
It was while interned there that Giuseppe made his first recordings, singing Sicilian folk songs for Radio Lausanne. Word of Di Stefano’s impressive diction and phrasing reached Milan in next to no time. And once he was there in person, his career as a lyric tenor went into overdrive.
Indeed, within 18 months of VE Day, “Pippo” was playing Alfredo in Verdi’s La Traviata at La Scala. Ten months after that, he debuted at the Met in New York. Di Stefano was now a star, though his personal motto – “Don’t give me advice; I can make my own mistakes” – ensured that his gift of a voice would ultimately be squandered. “I smoked a lot. And it’s true I used to gamble, and I would stay up late and sometimes drive around all night,” he later admitted.
In the years that Di Stefano’s throat could still pour out liquid velvet on demand, his professional partnership with Callas prospered. “I first realised his great value in [Bellini’s] I Puritani in Mexico City in 1952,” she once said. “That’s a devilish opera to sing… Giuseppe started singing the worst, the most difficult part for any tenor, and I just said, ‘my, that’s some tenor!’” The two would frequently share stages, and recording dates, until 1957.
But standing next to the flame of Callas proved too hot for Di Stefano. Attempting to match her own theatricality and power drained his voice; taking on parts that were too heavy for it just so he could play opposite her damaged it still further. By the end of the 1950s, he was notably in decline – although rather than high living and attempting to keep up with the greatest voice of his generation, Di Stefano somewhat risibly blamed an allergy to nylon carpets.
The pair remained friends – Peter Andry fondly remembers meeting with the two in Paris in the early 70s, finding them “sat up in bed, laying side-by-side, fully dressed, chatting about some opera or another”. When they united for a last great adventure, a 1973-74 world tour, they had become more than friends, and the result was disaster.
Neither of them were the singers they’d once been and relations between the lovers had been strained by Di Stefano’s belief that provoking Callas into backstage rage would make her perform better. Critical reaction was unkind to the point of cruelty. The broadcaster and opera enthusiast Sir John Tusa later wrote: “Certainly the concerts were a sell-out… the crowds cheered… the atmosphere was electric. But to most charitable ears, the actual sound was a mere disappointment at best, at worst a travesty of former greatness and a deep personal tragedy.”
Di Stefano had a hard time coming to terms with Callas’s untimely death in September 1977. Divorced a year earlier, the singer threw himself into his work and a new relationship with German soprano Monika Curth, whom he went on to marry in 1993.
And while he might have been a diminished talent, in the years until his 1992 retirement Di Stefano’s reputation grew as he was praised by successors like José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti, the latter speaking about “Pippo” with a reverence he otherwise reserved for Princess Diana.
Were only the end of his real life as joyous as the acclaim-drenched conclusion of Di Stefano’s career. Four years of compromised health following an assault while holidaying in Kenya was a cruel end. Better to remember the astonishing music he made in a hot opera house with a great diva in that sultry summer of 1953.
