Maria Callas - Biography
Maria Callas perhaps the most celebrated of opera singers was born on December 23rd 1923 in New York and died in Paris on September 16th 1977. Callas was born Maria Anna Sophia Kalogeropoulos to recent Greek émigrés George and Evangelia. Her father a pharmacist was a gentle easygoing man her mother aggressive and ambitious. Maria learned to sing at an early age. The relationship between the father and mother deteriorated enough to have the mother take Maria 13 and her older sister back to Greece. Callas in Greece studied voice in Athens with a well known Spanish soprano Elvira di Hidalgo. Callas made her debut at 16 in a Suppe operetta and made her debut in a major role Puccini’s Tosca when she was 18 Greece was occupied during the Second World War by both Germany and Italy, life was difficult for Callas who faced real poverty. She related to people later on that she fraternized with German soldiers in order to get meals and food rations. She sang a number of roles in Greece during the war including heavy German repotoire.In like Fidelio and Oberon. At war’s end she went back to New York to spend time with her father and while there auditioned for the Met who’s General Manager at the time Edward Johnson was impressed enough to offer her a beginners contract, she felt this was the wrong path and left for Italy.
Callas made her formal Italian debut in Ponchielli’s La Gioconda on August 3rd 1947 in Verona, while she was in Verona she met and eventually married a wealthy industrialist Giovanni Meneghini who was 23 years older than her; he was to become Callas’s business manager and spent a considerable sum in promoting her career. Callas was unique among sopranos in modern times by the fact she had the ability to sing stratospheric high soprano roles with the strength of dramatic soprano. This made her uniquely able to sing the Bel Canto roles that Bellini, Rossini and Donizetti had written for the great sopranos of the early nineteenth century like Pasta and Malibran. She soon became a sensation in Italy. She was tutored by the wise and great opera conductor Tulio Serafin whose experience went back to the turn of the century. She eventually made her La Scala Milan debut in Verdi’s I Vespri Siciliani in the fiercely difficult role of Elena.
Callas made her initial commercial recordings for the Italian company Cetra but she was soon to start a collaboration with EMI producer and English impresario Walter Legge, their recordings were to become legendary. The first was Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and Bellini’s I Puritani conducted by Serafin with the tenor and frequent partner Giuseppe di Stefano; this was followed up with perhaps her most famous recording, Puccini’s Tosca with Di Stefano, baritone Tito Gobbi and firebrand Italian conductor Victor De Sabata. Callas decided her weight of more than 200 pounds made her acting which she took very seriously less then credible and in late 1953 she lost ninety pounds and transformed her into women of great glamour.
1954 was to be the year of her American debut in Madama Butterfly at the Chicago Lyric opera. She was also to make recordings of Pagliacci,La Forza Del Destino and her most famous role Norma all produced by Legge. In 1955 she was to collaborate with the great conductor Herbert von Karajan in a legendary performance of Lucia di Lammermoor in Berlin. Callas was becoming an international superstar known well beyond the confines of world of opera. Part of what was fueling this notoriety was Callas formidable temperament. She feuded with colleagues, employers and her mother. Time magazine on the eve her Met debut in 1956 did a devastating profile of her. When told that her admittedly awful mother had told the press that she was living in poverty and her daughter won’t help her, she was quoted as saying ”she is young enough to find work and if she can’t she can jump out a window”. Her Met debut in Norma was a great success. While in New York she became friends with the elderly and obnoxious arbiter of New York Society who resembled Tugboat Annie Elsa Maxwell who at a party introduced her to the fabulously wealthy Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis; that meeting would have a fateful and ultimately tragic effect on her life. Callas was to have a feud with the famously dictatorial manager of the Met Rudolf Bing over cancelled performances, which would to him firing her publically. She then moved on to a new opera company in Dallas run by a Chicago friend Lawrence Kelly. She would debut there with a signature role Cherubini’s Medea. Callas was to begin an affair with Onassis that made worldwide headlines. Callas who lived a sedate personal life with Meneghini was now thrown into a social whirlwind where she would socialize with Onassis’s friends like Winston Churchill, Prince Rainer and his wife Grace Kelly. Callas continued to make recordings now in stereo of her core repertoire that were arresting but not as good as far as her contribution than the earlier recordings. A tendency that was always there for her high notes to be out of control and crack were more and more prevalent. Many feel that the vocal decline that should not have happened to a singer in her mid thirties was caused by her weight loss others thought her life as a jet setter had caused the decline. Meneghini of course was humiliated by Callas’s affair with Onassis and was not quiet about it. The already inflamed Italian public was further outraged when an indisposed Callas walked out on the 1958 Rome Opera opening performance of Norma in front of the Italian Premier.
Callas made a return in the mid 1960’s to Covent Garden and the Met to perform Tosca; even though she was in vocal decline she was evidently dramatically mesmerizing. She made during this time a famous recording of Bizet’s Carmen with conductor George Pretre that was partly successful because it was a mezzo role and her lower voice was not in severe decline. Callas was a key player in what was viewed as a great scandal, Onassis’s marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy in 1969. Callas was infuriated and humiliated by the event and whatever was left her career was gone when she went into seclusion. She had occasional small triumphs as when she unexpectedly 1971 accepted an offer to tech a master class at Juilliard. Luckily a lot of her instruction was recorded and made commercially available after her death by EMI. She also appeared in a film of Medea based on the Euripides play directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini which was not a success, though she was fine in it. She went on an ill advised tour with her close friend Di Stefano in 1973, recorded evidence prove that they were both beyond their prime. Her final years were as a recluse in Paris. Onassis had recently died and even though he humiliated her in a very public way she still loved him and continued to see him. She died of an apparent heart attack on September 17h 1977. There were questions regarding her sudden death perhaps she was over medicated by prescription medications (ironically this was a month after the death of a different kind of idol Elvis). She had a funeral of great pomp and splendor in Paris and her cremated ashes were spread in the Aegean Sea off the Grecian Coast.
Maria Callas was probably the best known Classical performer of her time and for all the wrong reasons. When all the tabloid drama of her life is discounted what is left is the greatest singing actress of the past century. We gratefully have a treasure trove of virtually every piece of music she sung on record. Though except for a short clip of the 1964 London Covent Garden Tosca we don’t have a visual record of a staged performance by her there is visual documentation of her in concert. There are also a number of fine documentaries of her life. An especially moving performance is her performance of Verdi’s La Traviata in Lisbon from 1957.
