There is something oxymoronic and striking about the case—or, rather, the phenomenon, or even better the myth—of Maria Callas, who is perhaps the only Greek artist to whom the word can be applied without a hint of hyperbole or cliché. Callas’ fame, stature, career and life, her internal contradictions and the men she loved, not only continue to fascinate, intrigue and move the public 101 years after her birth and 47 since her death, they also feed into contemporary creativity and pop culture.
Callas enjoys the privilege, even after her death, of attracting a mass—and therefore inherently heterogeneous—audience; of existing among us and, ultimately, of speaking to people who may never have heard an aria in their lives. What’s my point? Well, the Greek soprano may have marked a real watershed in opera, redefining the way we approach and present great works with her interpretations, but her impact—or, rather, her ‘impactfulness’, to use a concept unknown during the five and a half decades of her life—extended far beyond the bounds of her art.
Around this time last year, the celebrations to mark the centenary of the birth of Maria Callas culminated in the inauguration of a museum in downtown Athens dedicated to the ultimate opera diva. But, as we already noted, the Greek goddess doesn’t only show up in the news when something special happens or another anniversary comes round. No, she is ever-present. There could be no more vivid proof of this than Maria, the new film by Chilean director Pablo Larraín, which everyone was talking about before shooting even began. One of the most anticipated films of 2024, which had its world première at the 81st Venice Film Festival and was snapped up on the spot by Netflix, it grapples with Callas’ life by honing in on the blurred line between myth and reality.
And, as if that wasn’t enough, the film has some extra layers of fascination for Greek audiences, due both to Callas’s origins and the 48-year-old director’s decision to shoot in Greece, in Ilia in the Peloponnese. In fact, some scenes were even filmed aboard the legendary “Christina O”, the yacht that once famously belonged to Aristotle Onassis—which is to say to the man who left as profound an imprint on Callas’ life as anyone. What sent public interest into overdrive around the world, however, was the—for many, controversial—choice of Angelina Jolie to play La Divina.
“I take my responsibility to Callas, her life and legacy, very seriously. I’ll do my best to rise to the challenge. Pablo is a director I’ve admired for years. That I’m being given the opportunity to speak about Maria’s life through him and Steven Knight (the screenwriter of Peaky Blinders and a good deal else) is a dream come true”, the 49-year-old American actress said in autumn 2022, a few weeks after it was announced that she would be taking on the challenge of playing a true cultural giant.
As it turned out, Jolie found herself to have a lot more in common with the Greek diva than she might have expected. As she said a few days before the film’s première, the fact that her own personal life has also been subjected to tabloid scrutiny over and over again helped her understand Callas, but also to share her pain. And there’s more. Callas’ almost cinematic end, aged 53 in her Paris apartment with only her trusted housekeeper Bruna Lupoli and her butler for company, reminded the American star of some bad places she knows very well: specifically, the fragile balance she struggles to maintain between loneliness and solitude.
The diva’s last days in her apartment at 36, Avenue Georges Mendel in the French capital also inspired Marina Abramović, the ‘grandmother’ of performance art, to attempt to interpret, or rather decipher, a woman whose thoughts and emotional world remain an enigma to this day. For the Serbian artist, the famous operatic project The 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, which received its world première at the Munich Opera House in September 2020, marks a milestone in her own fascinating life and multifaceted career.
The Greek National Opera’s international co-production (which received its Greek première in autumn 2021) with the Bavarian State Opera (Munich), Deutsche Oper Berlin, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Paris National Opera re-enacts—through Abramović—the deaths of seven heroines whom Callas made her own with her performances (Violetta, Tosca, Desdemona, Cho-Cho-San, Carmen, Lucia and Norma). But there is an eighth death. That of Callas herself, who, as Abramović notes, also fell victim to love. “For over 25 years, I wanted to create a work dedicated to the life and art of Maria Callas. I have always been fascinated by her personality, her life, and even her death. Like many of the opera heroines she embodies on stage, she died for love. She died of a broken heart.”
Undoubtedly, Callas’ experiences, losses and disappointments influenced her performances and brought them into focus, setting the bar at a height her artistic followers are unlikely to ever surpass. It was through one such recording that the man who may well have more right than anyone else to call himself an expert on the iconic soprano’s life and times came first to know and ultimately adore Callas as a true devotee. The French director and writer Tom Wolf was introduced to Callas’ captivating world when he attended an opera performance at the Metropolitan Opera in New York nearly a decade ago.
Enthused, exploring recordings on his return home that night, his search inevitably led him straight to Callas. Since then, he has never looked back, devoting all his energy to exploring both the artist and the woman: to what some call the ‘Callas-effect’ and others ‘Callas-mania’. His systematic research has already resulted in the impressive photographic album Maria by Callas (ed. Assouline) and, of course, the book Maria Callas: Letters and Memories (Michel albin SA). “For three years, I traveled the world, following in the footsteps of Maria Callas. I considered it my mission, my duty. I truly wanted to allow others to experience what I felt when I discovered Callas”, he has said.
Wolf did something very important: he brought together unpublished letters from almost every period in Callas’ life, along with the fragments Callas put to paper when she began work on two unfinished autobiographies in 1957 and then again in 1977. These letters and fragments were transformed into a performance, a theatrical monologue so fascinating, enticing and revelatory that, in 2019, Monica Bellucci accepted the offer to perform on stage for the first time in her career. Later, they would also become the raw material for the documentary of the same name which Wolf directed in collaboration with the filmmaker Yannis Demolitsas. The French excavator of Callas’s history has also made a second equally personal documentary dedicated to the Greek diva entitled Maria by Callas.
But there was more to Callas than her superlative performances, her larger-than-life career, marriage to Giovanni Meneghini, and stormy affair with Aristotle Onassis. Another documentary which premiered on 2 December 2023, the centenary of Callas’ birth, is even more personal and hence revealing about the Greek “goddess” of opera. Vasilis Louras and Michalis Asthenidis managed to fit the least known and dimly-lit period in the soprano’s life into 103 minutes. In their documentary Mary, Marianna, Maria: The unsung Greek years of Callas, they focus on the years that made her who she was: her time in Greece during World War II, which Callas herself also considered to have been of crucial importance for her subsequent career.
Olga Malea decided to return to the soprano’s early years, too, for her Greek mini-series Maria who became Callas. Over ten episodes that will begin airing this Friday (13/12) on ERTFLIX, the director sets out to recreate for the small screen the beginnings of the woman who would go on to create a mythology beyond her wildest imaginings. Especially as she was naturally reserved, shy and—however unlikely it may seem— timid, as she explained in her last interview a few weeks before her death in September 1977: “My shyness and insecurity make me come across as arrogant. It’s just a way timid people have of protecting themselves. I’m just like everyone else: I want to be praised and encouraged all the time, because I’m rather pessimistic by nature. And don’t forget that only the happy bird sings; the unhappy one buries itself in its nest and dies.” Perhaps, in the end, Callas was everything that no one has ever glimpsed (yet).
