Lucia di Lammermoor

Before Callas, Lucia's mad scene had become a canary's showpiece — dazzling, weightless, empty. She gave it back its horror. In her voice, Donizetti's bride, driven to murder on her wedding night, was not an excuse for vocal fireworks but a mind coming apart in music, every ornament a symptom.

She first sang the role in Mexico City in 1952, and made it one of the pillars of her repertoire at La Scala under Herbert von Karajan, who then took the production to Berlin in 1955 — two performances that survive in a live recording widely considered among the greatest documents in the history of opera on record. She sang Lucia across Europe and America throughout the 1950s.

With Lucia, as with Norma and Anna Bolena, Callas demonstrated her central thesis: that the bel canto repertoire is not decorative but dramatic — and that its heroines deserve tragediennes.

In the Foundation's collection

Photographs, programmes and recorded material documenting Callas's Lucias are preserved in the Foundation's collection. Explore the collection · Licensing

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