‘It’s a good brassy broad of a part’: Maria Callas’s Juilliard masterclasses get an Irish staging

In 1971, at the end of a feted and storied career, Maria Callas gave a series of public masterclasses to students at the Juilliard School in New York. The format was a familiar one for music enthusiasts at the time: twice a week over two six-week sessions, the opera star’s classes for aspiring singers were opened to a general audience. The classes were recorded and eventually released for sale.

They are fascinating to listen to, with Callas mixing her technical advice and passion for music with autobiographical details about some of the roles she played over the course of her professional life: Bellini’s Norma, Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Callas comes across as deeply attuned to the demands of each musical score, honouring the idea of voice as just one more instrument in the orchestra. She also reveals herself as smart, sharp and quick-witted, an enigmatic and complex character.

It’s a very witty play, with these terrific one-liners from Callas that are caustic and clever and funny. There are moments where she is like a stand-up comic

It was this aspect of self-revelation that inspired the American dramatist Terrence McNally to write his Tony-winning 1995 play Master Class, which receives its Irish premiere this week at Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin, 100 years after Callas was born.

Conor Hanratty, the production’s director, has been dreaming about staging McNally’s play for many years. He read it as a teen, and was immediately drawn to its diva protagonist and musically infused storytelling. McNally was a huge opera buff, and Master Class was the third in a trilogy of work with operatic themes, including the The Lisbon Traviata, in which a group of gay men dying of Aids in New York become obsessed with a recording of Callas singing in Verdi’s opera. “I didn’t know that much about Callas, or opera, at the time,” says Hanratty of his first encounter with McNally’s work, “but [Master Class] really stuck in my mind as a very entertaining and accessible introduction to that world.”

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First, “it’s a very witty play, with these terrific one-liners from Callas that are caustic and clever and funny. There are moments where she is like a stand-up comic, so on the base level of the attraction there was the character that McNally has created: it is a good brassy broad of a part.” Second, the masterclass structure that McNally honours in the play makes it a natural tool for gentle pedagogy.

“The masterclasses are basically private voice lessons turned into performance events,” says Hanratty. “They are supposed to be done in front of an audience, so in the theatre, watching McNally’s play, the audience are not voyeurs. We are not pretending we are not there: the play begins with Callas walking on stage and laying out the rules.” For the rest of the performance, Callas steps in and out of story, making direct address, “so you have this balance of the confessional she is making to us, the real audience, with the lesson she chooses to teach while confronted with three students”. This particular dramaturgy allows McNally to weave in excerpts from the scores of three operas, too, which three real young opera singers bring to life under Callas’s watchful eye, with accompaniment from a pianist.

Hanratty knew the production would rely on two particularly challenging elements: someone to play the icon, of course, and “a director who knew a good bit about opera, which at the time I did not”. Acquiring that musical knowledge became a key part of Hanratty’s early professional life, as he sought opportunities to hone his understanding of the form. He spent two summers in the United States as director of the young-artists programme at the Glimmerglass Festival, in New York state, which showcases opera and musical theatre, and on his return to Ireland was inspired to start his own company, Ulysses Opera Theatre, which has produced several new Irish operas.

A lot of work has gone into making audiences feel more comfortable in the opera

—  Conor Hanratty

In recent years Hanratty has continued to balance directing plays with operas. He directed a film for Irish National Opera in 2020 and, with the composer Alberto Caruso, adapted Colm Tóibín’s The Master for Wexford Festival Opera last year. As shown by the number of opera nominations in the Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards, the collaboration between the theatre and opera communities has been growing stronger year by year. “A lot of work has gone into making audiences feel more comfortable in the opera, and part of that is the increase [in cross-disciplinary] work,” says Hanratty. “I will happily be an ambassador waving the flag for both worlds.”

As far as finding a performer to fulfil the demands of the title role goes, McNally makes one concession, according to Hanratty, in that “what he has written can actually be performed by a capable actress rather than a professional singer”. Even so, Caitríona Ní Mhurchú, who stars in this production, took voice lessons to prepare for the role. McNally’s Callas doesn’t serenade us with solo arias – at this stage in her career, when she was in her late 40s, Callas’s own voice was showing its decline – but Ní Mhurchú was interested in exploring how the soprano’s voice would influence her character, the way she held herself, the way she spoke, “in terms of being able to breathe and access material as an opera singer would”.

“But, really, moving, breathing as a singer would is only one of many skills” the role demands, says Hanratty. “Sometimes she’s a stand-up comedian. Sometimes the timing of music is so intense and precise and she has to balance that with heavy monologues. She has to know when to hijack the moment, when to pause and breathe.” Ní Mhurchú also has to direct three opera singers and the pianist in her role as teacher.

This is a task Hanratty must balance as director, too, and he is relishing the discrete demands: “To be sitting in the middle of that Venn diagram is a dream.”

Master Class: An Audience with Maria Callas opens at Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, on Sunday, May 14th, with previews from Thursday, May 11th. It runs until Saturday, May 27th