Maria Callas, the charismatic soprano who changed the history of opera by exposing her personal life and bringing her own feelings to the stage, would have turned one hundred years old today. She died early, at 53, in her Paris apartment, due to heart failure resulting from drug use. Her golden decade of the 50s, when she became a legend, making the public fall in love with her artistic level and her unprecedented way of combining singing and theater, was behind her. Already without a voice, longing for the stage and the family she never had, Callas lived her last years like the heroine of an operatic tragedy: alone, lost, abandoned, as Manon Lescaut sings.
“She wanted to bring the drama of life to the opera and that drama ended up eating her, she became an operatic character herself,” notes the opera critic of this newspaper, Jordi Maddaleno. Callas went beyond singing an aria very well: she not only got involved but she felt it. Her performance transcends the beauty of the voice, she reminded the world that opera is theater and singing. When you listen to it, there is a truth there, and it is a truth that is valid in 2023.”
Born on this day in New York, she moved with her mother and sister to Greece in 1937, where she had the good fortune to meet the Spanish soprano Elvira de Hidalgo, her teacher. Her life was tragic and beautiful like an opera, intertwined with Hollywood glamor – she rubbed shoulders with Grace Kelly, Yves Saint Laurent, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe... Pasolini or Visconti – but subjected to the psychological abuse of her ambitious mother, who He wanted to exploit herself as a singer but also prostitute her to soldiers in the Second World War. “I hope you have throat cancer,” the peculiar lady would wish her. Marrying the industrialist Battista Meneghini, 27 years older than her, seemed like her best escape, until she felt “feminine” next to Aristoteles Onassis.
“It is surprising how strong her character was and how emotionally fragile she was, because Onassis destroyed her. “He marked the beginning of the end for Callas: he mistreated her, psychologically abused her and she became nothing,” adds Maddaleno. According to the theses that the biographies consider to be true about her, the shipping magnate would have raped her, sedating her to subject her to unwanted sexual practices. And he forced her to abort her when she became pregnant in 1966. Two years later Onassis announced her wedding to Jackie Kennedy. The soprano found out from the press; she, who had renounced her American nationality so as not to record her as married... Onassis would end up leaving J. F. Kennedy's widow and would whistle serenades to her under her balcony until he softened her again...
“Opera singers have always been great stars, but at no other time did they coincide with actresses in the same wake. Callas broke that by putting opera at the Hollywood level and bringing the drama and personal life of the singers to the same parameters as that of film artists," says the singers' agent Aleix Palau, founder of the Josep Palet singing competition (who , by the way, he even sang with Elvira de Hidalgo).
“Callas fueled scandals about her personal life or her bad relationship with the superintendent of the Met in New York, a theater that she spent years without setting foot on. She gave exclusives, she had the press waiting at the airports, she dropped iconic phrases in each interview... he was a whirlwind of a woman, tall thin, a different paradigm from opera singers. And she exploited his image: you just have to see the photos in Venice, when he sang at the Fenice, those costumes, Channel, elegance at the level of Hollywood artists. Pairing herself with one of the great tycoons in history is something that she suffered but at the same time benefited from.”
“Yes, because he incorporated it into the interpretation – Maddaleno argues –: you heard Norma's lament and you knew that it was also her lament, abandoned by Onassis. The tycoon's betrayal took her to the stage, how will I be able to sing with more truth if not! In any case, did that drama disguise her vocal difficulties at a given moment? “Let's say that he decorated it with a credible tragedy that transported you,” says Palau.
But what happened on January 2, 1958 at the Rome Opera, with the President of the Republic inaugurating the season at a high-level gala of honor? Callas's sit-in was heard. He sang the first act of Norma and left. Did he really have bronchitis? The press crucified her while she defended herself: “The first act was sung out of respect for Bellini,” said the great recoverer of the bel canto repertoire, “the other acts were not vilified. The next day I realized that my lynching had begun.” Callas fell, like Violetta in La traviata, with “zero” hope of regenerating.
Callas's career had started from a super instrument. The diva had a multiple register: lyrical-light, dramatic and coloratura, everything. According to De Hidalgo, she was a “formidable and very musical student, who arrived first and left last, listening to all the students, whether they were tenors or doing coloratura... Thus she got an idea of how to reach all of them. grades and do everything he set out to do,” said his teacher.
It is said that in the same week she sang Bellini's I puritani and Wagner's Brunhilde: “There couldn't be two more different roles, and she did it. Her voice lasted so well, of course,” laments Maddaleno, not without admiration. Callas could do it all, from the treble to the bass, “although he also had three different qualities depending on whether he was in the bass, the center or the treble; Not everything was homogeneous,” warns Palau. "They came from that heritage of performers who sang everything, he was not segmented like today."
Her most honest record would be, the critic assures, La Gioconda, a spinto-dramatic role in which she had a great impact. "In the aria 'Suicide!' Callas looks like a soprano, a mezzo and a contralto...", points out Maddaleno.
And its most deplorable version? His tour with the tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano, in 1973-74, both of them being very fair in voice. Callas had not acted since 1965 and had decided to return. Good or bad, she always had his magnetism, the one that Pier Paolo Pasolini had used when he proposed to film the myth of Medea (1969). “She continued to attract the public and, although vocally she couldn't handle her soul, in that video from Tokyo in 1974, she is spectacular in her red dress, you can't stop looking at her,” concludes Palau. Luckily, in those years of golden Hollywood the recording technique had also improved. And there she was, rescuing a forgotten repertoire: Donizetti's queens, Medea, La Vestale... that is what also marked a clear difference compared to previous generations of singers. Callas went down in history duly immortalized on records.
