call on resources within herself that will enable her to fully inhabit whatever role she is playing. Since the essence of opera is raw emotion, she must be able to fully experience all the emotions felt by the character—joy, sadness, love, hate, jealousy, rage. It is not enough merely to sing the words and get the notes right. ‘‘It’s not a note we’re after here,’’ says Maria to her student Sophie, ‘‘It’s a stab of pain.’’

Since Maria emphasizes again and again that her art consists not only of vocal technique but of ‘‘Feeling, feeling, feeling,’’ the question arises of how an artist can capture the feeling, say, of a character like Amina in La Sonnambula, who has lost the man she loves. Maria makes clear that the singer must have some life experience behind her before she can successfully create the role. She must have experienced the same emotions herself, in her own circumstances. Maria constantly nags the students about whether they really know what they are singing about, and she is not inquiring merely about their knowledge of Italian. She asks Sophie whether she has ever had her heart broken, as Amina has, because no one to whom this experience is foreign could express the passion required in the role.

It is the same when Maria coaches Sharon. Is there anything, Maria quizzes her, she would kill for—a man, perhaps, or a career? She asks because that is exactly what Lady Macbeth is contemplating in the aria that Sharon is about to sing. If Sharon has not felt such desire herself, how can she sing about it? When Sharon replies that she has never really thought about such matters, Maria says that is because she is young. Life will eventually teach her, although in Maria’s view, art is even harder to master than life. The point Maria wishes to make is that the singer must reach down into the depths of her psyche to access those times in her life when she felt similar emotions. ‘‘You have to listen to something in yourself to sing this difficult music,’’ she tells Sharon. What she is alluding to, whether consciously or not, is a concept developed by acting teacher Lee Strasberg, known as ‘‘emotional memory,’’ based on the work of Konstantin Stanislavski (1863–1938) and his ‘‘method’’ system of acting. The technique of emotional memory focuses on recalling the sensory atmosphere of a past activity in order to recapture the emotion associated with it. That recovered emotion can then be used by the actor as the equivalent of the emotion being experienced by the character in the play. This is one reason why, for example, Maria sets the scene of the tenor’s aria in praise of Tosca, telling him that it is ten o’clock on a beautiful spring morning and that he made love all night to Tosca, the most beautiful woman in Rome. When the tenor points out that the score says nothing about such things, Maria replies, ‘‘It should say it in your imagination. Otherwise you have notes, nothing but notes.’’

At the heart of this is a paradox. By digging deeper into herself, the singer can in fact transcend herself. The artistic imagination transforms the singer into a kind of spiritual medium who can identify absolutely with the fictional character she is portraying. ‘‘When I sang Medea I could feel the stones of Epidaurus beneath the wooden floorboards at La Scala,’’ says Maria. She found for herself a ‘‘direct line’’ to the character, as if the woman she was portraying were a real person. It is not a matter of acting, a word that Maria dislikes, but of being. (Medea is an opera by Italian composer Luigi Cherubini based on a play by the Greek dramatist Euripides. Callas was famous for her performances as Medea.)