Elvira — I puritani

The Callas legend has a birth certificate: Venice, January 1949. She was at La Fenice singing Brünnhilde in Wagner's Die Walküre when the soprano engaged for Bellini's I puritani fell ill. Tullio Serafin asked the unthinkable: that Callas learn Elvira — a high, ornate bel canto role at the opposite pole of the vocal universe — in a matter of days, while continuing to sing Wagner.

She did it. Within the same week, Venice heard her as Wagner's warrior goddess and as Bellini's fragile, mad Puritan bride. The feat stunned the operatic world: no voice was supposed to be able to do both. It announced the return of a vanished species — the soprano drammatico d'agilità, the dramatic voice with coloratura wings — and everything that followed, the Normas, the Lucias, the Annas, flowed from that revelation.

Elvira's mad scene, "Qui la voce sua soave", remained one of the touchstones of her art: sorrow spun into endless, weightless line.

In the Foundation's collection

Documents and photographs of Callas's early Italian years, when the legend was forged, are preserved in the Foundation's collection. Explore the collection · Licensing

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