Sensation at La Scala

Oldtimers at La Scala pronounced her singing sensational. All Milan has been talking this winter about Maria Meneghini Callas. This powerful new dramatic soprano is an American-born singer who has never sung a note in the land of her birth. Her parents, who came from Greece, took her on a lengthy visit to the old country when she was 13, and she has been in the U.S. only once since then.

On her first opening night at La Scala, last December, 30-year-old Soprano Callas made a smashing hit in Verdi's Sicilian Vespers. Milan critics kissed their fingertips in ecstasy over her sureness, her "miraculous throat" and the "phosphorescent beauty" of her middle range. Her performances of Norma (eight of them) were enthusiastic sellouts. Last week she was collecting more bravos in a difficult role in which even her most ardent admirers had feared for her: the vocally acrobatic part of Constanze in Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio.

Two years ago it was a different story. La Scala heard her then and yawned. Maria Callas thinks she knows why: "I have a funny kind of voice, and often people don't like it the first time they hear it. One has to hear me more and more." After singing in the Italian operatic "sticks"--Parma, Florence, Rome--she finally got a chance at La Scala when leading Soprano Renata Tebaldi fell sick.

Maria Callas is married to an Italian industrialist and considers Italy her home. She would like to come to the Met, which has made her offers, but only for the right money and the right operas--her La Scala hit, I Puritani, for instance. Says she: "I don't gamble in my singing. If an opera is good for me, I know it."

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