Maria Callas: Diaries of a Friendship. By Robert Sutherland. Constable. 292pp. £18.99 in UK
Maria Callas: the Tigress and the Lamb. By David Bret Robson Books, 389 pp. £9.99 in UK (paperback original)
`Boring old farts, promiscuous homosexuals and dykes with one foot in the grave. You name it, and it came running after me. I wonder if Audrey Hepburn attracted all the dregs of society, the way I did?" When Maria Callas totted up the sum of her unwanted admirers in 1976 she omitted - or, more likely, was as yet unaware of - a fourth category: wannabe biographers. This year alone, three books on the subject of La Divina have landed on my desk: and it isn't even (so far as I'm aware) an anniversary. Previous years offer dim memories of several more, including a dismal piece of "faction" in which the diva spent most of her time weeping and slamming doors. The effect is akin to being handed an enormous box of Belgian chocolates and being invited, as you brush the crumbs of a five-course meal from your groaning waistband, to tuck in.
It's one of the more tiresome truisms of the publishing trade that biographies of a select band of celebrities - Hitler, Leonard Bernstein and Marilyn Monroe spring to mind - always sell. It looks as if we're doomed to get more and more massive tomes devoted to these individuals, and that fewer and fewer readers will get to read quirky, well-written studies of lesser-known mortals - Manuela Hoelterhoff's recent hilarious, informative deconstruction of the contemporary opera scene, Cinderella and Company, based around a period in the life of the young mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli, springs to mind - unless they happen to be paperback reviewers, trainspotters, or bookoholics.
In Callas's case, I'm sorry, but we know it all already. Fat Greek girl grows up to become the most gorgeous and successful singer of the century; fat Greek girl's lover jilts her in favour of the gorgeous widow of the American president, who can't sing a note; fat Greek girl goes into musical and psychological decline, and dies.
In many ways Maria Callas's life wasn't particularly eventful or - celebrated backstage tantrums apart - dramatic. A biographer worth his or her salt would need to take an uncommonly intelligent view of the thing, approach it all from some as-yet-untried angle, and be a way-above-average writer into the bargain. The present two books fail miserably on all counts. Robert Sutherland, a highly acclaimed pianist and, no doubt, a highly affable individual, offers a "diary" of his experiences, personal and musical, of the early 1970s comeback tour in which Callas - most would say, unwisely - gave a series of recitals with the tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano.
It begins promisingly enough, at least on a musical level, with much discussion of repertoire, rehearsals and so on, but degenerates fairly rapidly into a vapid reconstruction of Callas's on-off affair with the ageing Di Stefano, a wearisome business of hints, omissions, flirtations, coy references to black eyes and a bizarre menage a trois arrangement with the tenor's wife.
To say this was a love-hate relationship would be like saying La Boheme is not a comic opera: and while Sutherland's accounts of some of the acerbic exchanges between the two are certainly eye-opening, they are hardly edifying. Do we really need to know about the time Di Stefano, who had taken time out of the tour to make a recording with Montserrat Caballe, tells Sutherland in some detail "how wonderful it was to work with a real professional again, of the long phrases she could sing without taking a breath and how nice to be near a soprano with big tits"? This in a taxi on the way to a rehearsal: "Maria stretched her left hand across to her right shoulder and looked out of the window," writes Sutherland, temporarily abandoning biography for the world of the cheaply-shot soap opera.
WHERE Sutherland is ponderous and, occasionally, clumsy, David Bret's The Tigress and the Lamb aims for a sort of informed raciness, and rattles along at the same cracking pace as his recent biographies of Tallulah Bankhead and George Formby. He zooms through the Di Stefano tour in a couple of pages, translating Sutherland's cautious prose as he goes, as in "visitors and reporters would often be ushered in [to the artists' hotel] to find four television sets blaring at the same time, full-blast, and with Maria and Di Stefano screaming at each other over the din. Her nerves were so frayed by this time that she was swallowing as many as 50 pills in any one day . . . "
It's all eminently readable, mildly entertaining and utterly pointless. Maria Callas was something special, to her fans and to music history; a biography worthy of the Callas name should be something special too. This kind of half-baked voyeurism doesn't even come close.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times staff journalist
