As part of the research for a longer piece on Maria Callas, I wanted a reliable reference guide for her recordings. I approached this book gingerly. It’s an established part of the body of work devoted to Callas by the vocal and 'gramophone' critic (they are mostly all male, mostly all of a certain age, or writing as if they are, and always have been).

The criticism they produce bridges two linked categories: writing about the vocal aspects of Callas' performances and then about the history of the recordings themselves. It's remarkable to me that a lot of this work hasn't been called out for its assumption of an apparent authority, which is in fact not earned. At its most basic, the approach is to take some incontestable musical fact - e.g. that an aria ends on a certain note or a tempo marking in the score and then add some ridiculously subjective comment about Callas' voice and/or performance, and whether the listener should think of that as ‘good’ or bad’. If such comments can also be then pinned to the timeline of her life, so it coincides with weight loss in the 1950s or her relationship with Aristotle Onassis, all the better!

Unfortunately in a lot of the writing there is also the unignorable and unpleasant background music of male critics attempting to write about a female artist in a certain way, often seeing her as their own personal goddess. Take a very mild example of some of this in the Foreword to Ardoin's book by Terrence McNally:

'The year was 1953, the recording was Lucia di Lammermoor...I was ...a dreamer, and I thought she was singing just for me. I still do.'

An essay I need hardly add that raises Callas' 'physical beauty' on the very next page.

It's an inauspicious start. To be fair it’s Ardoin’s book and he mostly avoids this sort of thing, devoting himself instead to just basic bad writing and questionable opinions, very much in line with the school of criticism I have just mentioned.

The writing I think comes from a desire for his readers to see him as Solomonistic. Wrong-headed, clichéd pronouncements adorn every single page. Opening the book (genuinely) at random we see his comments on the 1953 Tosca (which has the credible claim of being one of the greatest opera recordings ever made):

'All the dramatic ingredients...are balanced and covered with a plenitude of expression...Her voice is dark but not unduly covered, full but not thick; through it, words glow and live'

and at the end of the review a helpful (not) summing up

'But opera being an arena that makes its own rules, the winner is none of the three [i.e. Callas, Gobbi, de Sabata - di Stefano doesn't come into to it and is only mentioned for his 'charm'] but a fourth - Puccini.'

There is so much one can say here (and would rather not). A quick enumeration: the miserably four-square writing, the well-trodden and profoundly meaningless comments on the voice (how is it that such ludicrously inexpressive and virtually meaningless terms like ‘thick’, ‘covered’ etc have somehow become commonly accepted adjectives when writing about Callas and vocal performances more generally?), the entitled way in which judgment is passed and the pathetic view of opera as a boxing match in which the 'contestants' slug it out.

My second random page opening is Ardoin on the 1952 live recording of 'Macbeth'. This fourth edition of the book dates from 2004, so long before the most recent remasterings, but I don't think the sonic quality of whichever pressing he was using has anything to do with his apparent inability to parse what he is listening to. I will just take two examples.

First, he criticises Callas' spoken narration at the start of Act 1, Scene 2 as being 'leaden' and later in the book compares it unfavourably with the same scene in Callas' later recording as part of an album of Verdi arias in 1958. He basically misundertands what Callas was attempting to do here in the theatre, which is to manage in a psychologically coherent way, the jump from speech to recitative to aria. If the spoken narration here starts in a low key almost disinterested manner, that makes profound dramatic sense and to anyone with ears to hear, works brilliantly. The studio recording is of course different - would you want a solo spoken voice to sound the same in 'production terms' in the studio as in the theatre? Of course not. Give Callas credit for realising what works in each context and for trying in the studio something she could not in the opera house.

Second, Ardoin criticises Victor de Sabata, the conductor for a 'dramatically divisive' tempo in the Act 3 sleepwalking scene, as if de Sabata's primary concern was posterity rather than creating thrilling dramatic tension on a particular night in the theatre. For me, this not only works but is entirely congruent with the rest of his approach and Callas responds magnificently (she and de Sabata would of course have discussed and rehearsed this extensively). Again the comparison with the same aria in that 1958 recording is simply invalid.

Let's look at the writing here. How does the following score on your cliché meter?

'Her voice creates scenery for...the mind's theater'

and for pomposity it's hard to beat this (a summing up of the perceived defects of the sleepwalking scene ):

'... a totality has not been achieved'

A totality has certainly not been achieved in this book for me.

In his Preface Ardoin says:

'Some might wish to attach the tag "discography" to this book; I hope not'

It is a real irony that the only conceivable use of this book is to use it as a 'discography' and ignore most of the words. ( )