A Land Without Opera

Maria Callas, la Divina of bel canto, appeared at Covent Garden only three times. At her 1952 debut in Norma, The Times praised her ‘tragic grandeur of a Medea’, while cautioning that her vocalism ‘pushes beyond the bounds of taste familiar to us here’. When she returned in 1958 for Tosca, the Observer noted her ‘burning passion’ and the ‘almost shocking exposure of feeling’, remarking that ‘such naked emotion is rare on our stage’. The mixture of British admiration and disquiet was revealing.