Joseph Calleja was easy to teach but is “not easy in life”, according to his late teacher Paul Asciak – whose last recorded comments on the Maltese tenor were featured in a documentary aired on Sky TV last week.
Asked by Melvyn Bragg – the legendary presenter of Britain’s best known arts programme, The South Bank Show – if he had made up his mind from the start that he would teach Mr Calleja to become a great tenor, Mr Asciak says:
“It would be a little presumptuous of me to say that really – you keep these things to yourself – but, yes, I knew he was going to get there. I had never heard anything like him…
Joseph Calleja watching the recording.“(His voice) went in the direction I expected. He wanted to go further really, but there’s still a lot of time for him to sing Waterloo,” Mr Asciak – who was known for his insistence with the tenor to develop slowly – says with a knowing smile.
During the interview, the late teacher’s gaze is diverted on more than one occasion by another presence in the room – Mr Calleja’s – who, rather unusually, was watching the session being filmed. It was an opportunity too good to pass up for Mr Bragg.
“You’re looking at him all the time, as if you’re still teaching him really. You’re keeping an eye out…”
With the Maltese tenor now visible in the shot, Mr Asciak says: “I’m trying to notice his reactions.” It’s a light-hearted moment that seems to bring the interview, and the teacher-student relationship, full circle.
Filming for the programme was carried out at Mr Calleja’s Mellieħa home just a few months before his 92-year-old teacher passed away last April. Himself a tenor of note in the 1950s, Mr Asciak discovered Malta’s prized operatic asset two decades ago. “To an extent, he was almost obsessive about me. Not about me, but about my voice,” Mr Calleja tells the show’s presenter in a mirror interview.
‘You have no idea what gift you have in your throat – you just can’t go and squander it like that!
“I said, Paul, listen: I’m 16 years old. I want to chase girls and I want to go out… he literally started shouting at me. He said, ‘You have no idea what gift you have in your throat – you just can’t go and squander it like that!’”
Mr Bragg remarks that Mr Calleja must be one of the very few “great tenors” who has not gone through a long course of musical preparation. “What benefits did that give you, just the two of you?”
“They were huge. For starters, I avoided a lot of the pitfalls that other singers fall into because of bad advice.
“And what my teacher did was that, instead of trying to mould me in the style of what people expected at the time in opera, he let my voice go where it wanted to go,” Mr Calleja says.
The South Bank Show has been at the forefront of arts and culture broadcasting for as long as the 37-year-old Maltese tenor has been alive.
In that time it has profiled the world’s most renowned performers, actors, writers and musicians – from pop to classical, contemporary theatre to opera. Luciano Pavarotti has been among Mr Bragg’s illustrious guests.
Mr Calleja recently completed a highly successful run in La Bohème at the Royal Opera House in London to rave reviews.