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This shot attempts to re-create Maria Callas on Thursday, Nov. 6, 1958.
That’s the day that the soprano was opening the Dallas Civic Opera Company’s second season.
Earlier that day, Callas received a telegram from the New York Metropolitan Opera’s general director Rudolf Bing saying that Callas’ contract with the NY Met had just been cancelled (costing the diva $18K).
In the late-’50s, Dallas opera was big business.
Big D’s cultural scene was hoping to gain some prominence. And with Callas — aka “The Diva” — in town, Dallas was earning some major cred.
In fact, Dallas was her only American performances of Cherubini’s “Medea” — the witch-princess who beheads her brother, stabs her children and sends her lovers wife up in in flames. In short, the role Callas was born to portray.
With some of the biggest opera critics — Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune — in the audience, Callas is said to have given a “near-perfect” performance.
Not (as some would have expected) because she exploded in rage, but because she exuded a dramatic graciousness.
This all went down at the State Fair Auditorium (now the Fair Park Music Hall), built in 1925, designed by Lang & Witchell and able to seat 5,200.
After it opened, local groups were reminded that it could be made available. One group that stepped forward was a negro choir, which the Ku Klux Klan protested...
Ever since 1925, the Music Hall’s acoustics have been a notoriously cruddy place for sound waves.
What’s so magnificent about The Fierce Diva’s “Madea” performance is that as an opera singer, her voice wasn’t amplified.
Without a microphone, Callas had to sing over the orchestra and perform a resonation miracle.
No tiny feat inside the cavernous barn known as Music Hall.
Charles Yusko styled the shoot.
nd Bryan Amann photographed “Callas in Dallas.”
