Perfecting Your Craft à la Maria Callas🔧

This week I've been pondering over the importance of having some sort of a craft or a skill in life that we enjoy developing. We may have many sorts of different roles to fill in life, but besides the feeling of purpose they bring us, most of us want to also develop at least one main skill that we're passionate about either for a hobby or for work. The reason for this is that seeing ourselves make progress on a particular skill is just profoundly satisfying and often a means to make others happy in some way as well.

For Maria Callas that craft was, obviously, operatic singing. And boy did she get to the top of her game during her career!💎 I'm not sure she wanted to be specifically the best in her field, but she was definitely very devoted to her art, and the quality of her work made her the superstar she was. Of course there are other factors that made her a star, but I'd argue that she did her best to make sure that her singing would stay at the core of her notoriety. For example, it did help that she was so beautiful and she did make sure she looked stylish as a public figure, but she was known first and foremost for her brilliance as a singer and as an actress.

Callas didn't contend with just performing nicely enough evening after evening and "sit on her glory" as she liked to say. Instead, she sought excellence in her craft, and recognized the need to stay humble enough in order to evolve, despite the accolades she was given all the time.

My only problem in this regard is that Callas' rhetorics around this topic can sound quite harsh sometimes in her interviews, letters and memoirs. Notably, discipline and willpower are the recurring words in her discourse when she was asked about her approach to her work. She often put the emphasis on how hard her job is, even though in reality her talent made many of the aspects of her work much easier for her than for many of her colleagues. I'd say that she was a very fast learner, but she was just very hard on herself.🪞

It's evident that she needed a lot of self-control to be able to operate at such a high level, but we must not overlook the fact that she also mentions many times the amount of love she had for her craft. This is of paramount importance. In addition to being disciplined, her love, devotion and a spirit of play and service were all important counterparts in her successful way of working.

In short, if she hadn't been passionate about her work; if she didn't enjoy her work most of the time, she wouldn't have had the internal drive to continue to practice singing until the end of her life. That's not to say that Callas enjoyed every performance she ever did, because when you mix your passion with work, it is bound to take at least some of the joy out of it some of the time. This is why we have to think carefully if we want to earn our primary source of revenue from practicing our passion.

Still, in some cases, to reach a level of excellence in a craft requires the pressure of a professional context. For example, Callas wouldn't probably have been the calibre of a singer if singing would've been a hobby for her. I guess some heights can be reached only under the right amount of pressure. So, it's a delicate balance with regards to choosing how far to take which craft we're passionate about.🚀

Nevertheless, Callas kept her fire for opera alive until her death, and we're ever so grateful for the sources of inspiration she left behind. Like the sincerity and authenticity in her (that I discussed in last week's issue), I find her love for her craft quite disarming, and of course – elegant.😉

Have an elegant week perfecting your craft!

Bisous,

Elle

❣️Recent delights

• If you want to hear what Callas' singing sounded like just around a year before her death, listen to this! It's an excerpt with a bad audio quality that Callas' maid Bruna Lupoli recorded in a private rehearsal in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées here in Paris in 1976. Her voice is in surprisingly good condition! Well, she was only 52 years old at that point though😂, but it proves that she had been able to revive her voice to a relatively good condition after the strain of her career in the 50's and her farewell tour in the early 70's.
• Here are three great tracks that present the vocal feats Callas was able to reach in live performances:
  • An 11-second crescendo note in the third act of Verdi's La Traviata.
  • An unbelievable coloratura aria D'amore al dolce impero from Rossini's opera Armida.
  • Ombra leggera, one of my favorite coloratura arias, from Meyerbeer's opera Il perdono di Ploërmel aka Dinorah (1859).

🔎New content

• I posted a new singing video this week where I'm vibing with a cute song sung by the one and only Julie Andrews.🤓