Maria Callas - Main Operatic Career

Main Operatic Career

After returning to the United States and reuniting with her father in September 1945, Callas made the round of auditions. In December of that year, she auditioned for Edward Johnson, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, and was favourably received: "Exceptional voice—ought to be heard very soon on stage". Callas maintained that the Met offered her Madama Butterfly and Fidelio, to be performed in Philadelphia and sung in English, both of which she declined, feeling she was too fat for Butterfly and did not like the idea of opera in English. Although no written evidence of this offer exists in the Met's records, in a 1958 interview with The New York Post, Johnson corroborated Callas's story: "We offered her a contract, but she didn't like it—because of the contract, not because of the roles. She was right in turning it down—it was frankly a beginner's contract."

Read more about this topic:  Maria Callas

Famous quotes containing the words operatic career, main, operatic and/or career:

    You have promise, Mlle. Dubois, but you must choose between an operatic career and what is usually called “a normal life.” Though why it is so called is beyond me.
    Eric Taylor, Leroux, and Arthur Lubin. M. Villeneuve (Frank Puglia)

    Whether or not his newspaper and a set of senses reduced to five are the main sources of the so-called “real life” of the so- called average man, one thing is fortunately certain: namely, that the average man himself is but a piece of fiction, a tissue of statistics.
    Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)

    You have promise, Mlle. Dubois, but you must choose between an operatic career and what is usually called “a normal life.” Though why it is so called is beyond me.
    Eric Taylor, Leroux, and Arthur Lubin. M. Villeneuve (Frank Puglia)

    The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.
    Jessie Bernard (20th century)