Opera buffa
Sir: Martin Davidson, producer of the BBC documentary Maria Callas: A Big Destiny, claims (Letters, 15 August) that my con- tention that it was full of inaccuracies 'sim- ply doesn't stand up' and then promptly goes on to make some more. He claims that her 1964 Tosca is 'the only surviving [video] of her in full costume', but the same act from her 1958 Tosca is also available on video. He seems not to have seen his own documentary, for it claims — not Callas that `Meneghini was reduced to the role of a comic cuckold'. It also claims Callas was already fat when she came to Italy in 1947, but only by showing a photograph of her not taken until 1952.
The Greeks interviewed had, I repeat, `nothing original' to offer; yet Callas's sister was not invited, although Davidson claims `she was contacted'. Why then wasn't she asked if Nina Foresti, who sings lin bel di' on that 1935 broadcast, was really Callas? In those days the sisters were living togeth- er in New York and she might have told them it was not her, as she did the Maria Callas International Club, at a meeting on 8 October 1991 (a video exists). Foresti's singing voice even Ardoin, Mr Davidson's `acknowledged expert', has to admit is `weak and quite unlike anything known to be Callas['s]'. A voice is as unique as finger- prints; it may develop but doesn't change its character any more than a leopard changes its spots. The documentary repeats the fiction Callas herself told Ardoin in 1968: that Onassis ruined her career. But he didn't. In the summer of 1959, at the time they began their affair, her voice was pretty well gone and her career virtually over; recordings and the sharp decline in the number of per- formances she gave confirm this. A Big Des- tiny proves, I am afraid, what I wrote in the first sentence of my review: 'As Callas's leg- end grows, so the more inaccurate and trite does the story of her life become.'
Michael Scott
Impasse des Bengalis, Morcellement Swan, Pereybere, Mauritius
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