In 1971 and 1972, Maria Callas conducted twenty-three master classes at Juilliard. They were recorded by the school, resulting in 46 hours of audio tape with inconsistent engineering but invaluable content. Subsequently, EMI issued selections from a few classes on three LP's - reissued on CD. John Ardoin, Callas' friend and later her biographer, attended some sessions and from the Juilliard tapes and his own experience wrote Callas at Juilliard: the Master Classes - first published by Knopf, now in a paperback edition from Amadeus Press. A few classes, recorded from the audience in poor sound, have found their way into private distibution, but the bulk of the material has been stored on analogue tape, decaying with time. They are now available on a single disc from the distributor, http://www.operamogul.com/ and from some dealers.
A mutual friend 'introduced' me to John (at this writing, we still have not met in person) and I sent him some of my early CD-ROMs. On 5 July 1998, John asked in an e-mail whether it might be possible to embody the classes in a CD-ROM. As you can imagine, my response was an enthusiastic 'yes'. We discussed some technical aspects and arrangements were made to send me his copy of the tapes. That copy had been made by Juilliard with Callas' approval and given to him to use as he wished; one use was, of course, to prepare his book. It was clear from the beginning that one major task would be the collation of information from various sources on precisely what was performed by whom. Fortunately, I had worked previously with Frank Hamilton, whose extraordinary effort on the Callas annals and discography (at http://www.frankhamilton.com/) was already known to John. Frank joined the team both to prepare the indices and to provide a critical review. We all shared a commitment to release of the material, but had somewhat different perceptions of the needs for the different users.
Our devotion to the project was clear immediately when we agreed without discussion that none of us would be compensated in any way for our efforts. Pricing was determined to be twice the cost of the discs themselves plus postage. When half the discs have been sold to cover the costs of pressing and mailing, the remainder were given away to libraries, schools and similar institutions. Of course, neither 500 discs sold nor 1,000 total satisfied the demand, so that we determined to allow reissue of the student edition by Opera Classics.
The tapes arrived on 18 August and initiated a very intense process. After determining the format, I set up a recording station and digitized each tape. Fortunately, while various problems were evident, they were all correctable even with my limited skills. I compressed a set and sent alpha copies to John for review and to Frank to provide input for his indexing. While they were in transit and being reviewed, I split each class into its separate sessions, edited out some extraneous material (e.g., "Where is the music stand?"), rearranged a few segments which related to prior sessions, and processed each selection for audibility.
That processing required a balancing act. All was fine when Callas was at her seat and the student was singing. But when Callas went to the student for discussion and for examples, the sound level dropped well into the background noise. Some of the school's engineers had tried to compensate - but that only made matters worse with sudden blasts of music, sweeping volume increases, thundering footsteps and other adjustments. In order to make the playback as useful as possible to the student, I wanted to raise sound levels and to reduce noise, but that would compromise authenticity and leave the scholar with further 'correction' of the source. Similarly, the scholar would want every second of the material, but then the student would have to listen through minutes of noise or irrelevant discussion. The decision was, then, to issue the disc as a pair: one completely unedited, the other made as listenable as possible. The student version has some light denoising applied to portions which have been amplified for audibility; the scholar edition is untouched. Since the consensus of all who reviewed the discs is that the scholar edition is not of general interest, it has not been reissued.
Another benefit is that Frank had prepared an elegant and altogether fitting layout for the indices which you can see on the scholar's disc. However, we felt that the student would want easy access to the most familiar form of the title - that used in John's book. So I stripped the elegance from Frank's work, producing on the student edition a simpler format suited to even a modest computer. The beta of the disc was prepared. While it was in transit and being reviewed, I obtained and prepared a consistent set of the texts, starting from the Internet and my own library. John amplified and edited the texts to agree with the material covered in the actual session. I also went back to the raw digitized form and prepared the scholar's edition of the audio. With approval of the graphics (from John's book), I was ready to send the discs off on 18 September to be pressed.
Mike Richter:
Mail me at operas@mrichter.com