Albert Sonntag’s Legal Blog

What listening to Maria Callas taught me about the practice of the Law.

Maria Callas was not the greatest singer in recorded musical performance, nor did she possess the most beautiful voice.  But she was the most dramatic singer, the best actress singer, in all of the recorded history of musical performance, and because of that she was the best Opera singer.  Opera demands acting, performance, and not just singing.  Maria Callas understood very well that she needed to be an actress in order to be a great operatic singer, and she accordingly used her dramatic personality to its utmost in re-creating all the great heroines of Opera.  She was the perfect Norma, whose aria “Casta Diva,” she made famous as the chaste priestess of Diana.  Her Carmen was demonic, and she was an impassioned Leonora in the recordings and performances of ‘Il Trovatore.’  She was also a flirtatious Musetta in ‘La Boheme,’ and a teasing Rosina in “The Barber of Seville.”  Her Aida is intensely dramatic, particularly evident in the brief but desperate exchanges with her father, Amonastro.  For she was as great in the ordinary narrative and recitative parts of the opera as she was in the great arias, precisely because she was such a wonderful dramatic actress.  Her voice, which ranged from the most strident soprano, to the bel canto, to very low contralto, was most dramatic as it raced from one extreme to the other over vast arpeggios.  She spoke of singing Medea at the ancient Greek theater in Epidauros, and feeling the drama of ancient Greek tragedy coming up to her from the flagstones under her feet.

What’s all this have to do with the practice of the law?  It does in that the practice of the law requires drama.  Lawyers are primarily actors, and only secondarily lawyers.  The law is more the manner in which the lawyer argues it than it is the cold logic of the text.  In the Common Law, the law was not even written down for most of its early history.  The lawyers in this tradition were not meant to simply parrot the law, but to argue it as advocates for either plaintiff or defendant, a petitioner or her respondent, a prosecutor for the People or counsel for the accused.  The lawyer becomes his client in argument, leaving it for the judge to decide.  Thus the lawyer is always acting, pretending to think like his client, having adopted the client’s argument as his own.  We are not judges in court, but advocates for or against a cause, and we must act accordingly.

Before a jury, the lawyer becomes almost exclusively a performer.  All of the tricks of the actor are put to use, and there is even an appropriate intonation that is adopted, which makes the lawyer almost perform as an opera singer.  This is well known.  But the probate attorney is also an actor, at his desk, when he interviews a client, the corporate lawyer in the boardroom, the criminal defense attorney in his client’s cell, they are all performers.  The lawyer must know how to conciliate, how to encourage, how to decide for a client when the client requires it.  It is a constant dance on the stage, a skillful performance which lawyers, since time immemorial, since the days of the Sophists, have played for the benefit of those who put trust in them for the conduct and resolution of business in a society.

Maria Callas, the Greek opera singer, always conscious of her ancestral tradition of democracy, of acting on a public stage in the conduct of public business, she knew this and she brought it to the great tragic art that is the Opera.  Her ashes, scattered on the Aegean Sea.  That was her last performance.