The daughter of Greek immigrants to the United States, Maria Callas became an iconic embodiment of a very European art form: opera. Along with singers like Beverly Sills, Cecilia Bartolli, and Montserrat Caballé, she helped spearhead a revival of the bel canto style of opera that had flourished on the Continent during the 18th and 19th centuries, and became one of the most renowned sopranos of the 20th century.
Torn throughout her life between America, Italy, and Greece, Callas eventually renounced her American citizenship in 1966, taking on Greek citizenship so as to end her marriage with the Italian industrialist Giovanni Menghini. For better or worse, her love life, in particular her affair with the Greek business tycoon Aristotle Onassis, is often remembered as the stuff of legend. Perhaps because of her success, Callas had a complicated, even adversarial relationship with the press, which gossiped endlessly about her professional and personal life. For those who were opera-lovers, Callas was “la Divina Assoluta”; for the broader public, she was a temperamental diva. After her career came to an end in 1965, she gradually ceased to be either: with her voice in a notable state of decline, Callas spent the remaining 12 years of her life as a recluse in her Paris apartment. “Since I lost my voice I want to die,” she is reported to have said. “Without my voice, what am I? Nothing.”
And yet Callas’s voice has never been forgotten. A perfectionist by nature, Callas was also immeasurably, almost incomprehensibly talented. “Maria, you’re a monster,” the composer Victor de Sabata, a long-time admirer of Callas, once said to her. “You are not an artist nor a woman nor a human being, but a monster.” Others were even more direct: the famous soprano Elizabeth Schwarzkopf once proclaimed Callas a “miracle”, while the composer Leonard Bernstein named her the “Bible of opera”. In death, Callas has become a yardstick for others, her life the subject of plays and films. Her performances in Puccini’s Tosca, Bellini’s Norma, and Bizet’s Carmen are often considered definitive, and she remains one of classical music’s best-selling voices.
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