MARIA CALLAS
A MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY
By Robert Levine
224 pp + 2 CD’s
Amadeus Press 2010-07-03

www.amadeuspress.com

At merely 25 USD I guess this new Callas book (with two cd’s) may be a good bargain for a Callas novice yet for the seasoned Callas devotee the book sadly enough doesn’t bring anything new either in facts or insight. In fact I was surprised and disappointed with his opus. In the first chapter Robert Levine summarizes her life story yet while he intentionally avoids the gossipy side of it he nevertheless retells the abortion hoax. In the second part I had hoped to read what the book title promised to me an in-depth analysis of Mme Callas’s art (solo recordings, roles and complete recordings) but that honour still goes to John Ardoin. Levine only offers a discussion of some solo aria recordings all included on the CD’s. Some analyses go deeper than others but none is put into a greater perspective. Nowhere do we read about other singers’ recorded versions of the arias and how they compare. And while the book does look attractive the person acknowledged for her red pen should have used the colour a lot more as several disturbing typos occur in the book and Levine himself should have corrected some odd photo captions. The legendary French conductor René Leibowitz becomes twice René Liebowitz on page 109, sentence distortions occur on page 78 and on page 54 Callas’s mother sked for money to cite a few. On the photo caption on page 15 a friend of the family becomes the mother though she obviously looks less than half Evangelina’s age and a friend becomes the father, Levine also dated the photo back to 1937 while it was taken in 1939,  in the photo caption on page 29 the cast of the Athens Fidelio becomes the chorus another two striking examples of bad editing and proof reading. Nope I’m afraid for Callas we still have to go for the triumvirate of Scott, Ardoin and Petsalis-Diomidis to tell the story.
RvdB