Maria Callas would have been 100 today. It is impossible to say anything new about a singer so celebrated she was nicknamed La Divina. Her unique voice –an originally imperfect instrument transformed by her technique, her vocal extension and the emotions she infused in it – was described and studied in detail in endless ways. But we can reflect on her legacy and the impact she still has on the passionate, touchy, volatile community of opera lovers.
The day is marked by plenty of public debates centered on movies, photos and books exploring Callas’ story. She was born an American in New York from Greek parents, Maria Anna Cecilia Sofia Kalos, a contraction of the original Kalogheropoulou (recorded on December 2, 1923, although both she and her mother were sometimes uncertain whether it had been December 3, or 4). She studied in Greece after her parents separated and she went back to the country with her mother. She was already on the stage at 15, became Italian by working in the country of Romantic opera. She sang with all the great conductors, had a wide repertoire reflecting the richness of her voice.
She was pitted in an (alleged) rivalry with the soprano Renata Tebaldi whose pure, silvery timbre was preferred by a part of the music lovers. She was – it’s a given for a tragic figure – unhappy: lost over 30 kilos between 1953 and early 1954 (there are very few visual images of her when corpulent). Some, like Joan Sutherland, said her radical weight loss led to the loss of part of her voice, but made her extremely chic. Directors from Luchino Visconti to her friend Pier Paolo Pasolini, who wanted her as an actress for his movie Medea, loved her.
She left her Italian first husband, the industrial Giovanni Meneghini, after ten years for Aristotle Onassis, only to be abandoned in 1968 when the Greek shipping magnate met Jackie Kennedy, widow of the assassinated US President.
Finally, she died too young, at just 53, in Paris in 1977 of a heart attack. Her last performance had been in 1974 in Japan.
Callas was a musician, not ‘just’ an interpreter. Her career was short, and in the last years her voice (still breathtaking even after her drastic diet, although one can wonder what it would have been to hear her in a theatre at the height of her power) had lost its sheen. Her greatest gift was her expressive intensity, unmatched by any other modern singer, paired to the perfect control of her instrument.
We are grateful that we have many of her performances recorded and video recorded. It does not make much sense comparing Callas to singers in the modern context, shaped by major recording companies and a star-system often elevating artists too soon or pressing them into roles for which they are not ready. The generation of people who actually heard her live is also waning, so we have to rely on technology.
Opera lovers are always hungry for new talents and new stars and bickering about their personal preferences. But they all tend to stop and listen with a nostalgic glint in their eyes when presented with a Callas recording, although they’ve heard them all many times before, her voice and her sheer presence onstage never fail to amaze.
