Notes on Maria Callas
TL-DR/Disclaimer 1: I saw Pablo Larraín’s movie (the text has some spoilers), and I think you should, too. The critics are divided, but I liked it enough to write a piece about operatic dramas and divas in a moment when the state of the world invites to anything but.
TL-DR 2: Maria Callas did not swallow a tapeworm to lose weight. You’re welcome!
In a Nutshell
Maria Callas, the legendary opera soprano, was probably the most famed singer of the 20th century. Dubbed La Divina, La Callas, La Prima Donna Assoluta, and Queen of La Scala, Callas left an indelible mark in (music) history, combining a unique voice with a notable acting talent. Franco Zeffirelli once said that ‘The world of opera was changed… there was BC and AC, before and after Callas.’ And I believe that sentence is enough to describe the magnitude of her career and work.
Because fame never comes without gossip, Callas is also famous for her dietary choices, her looks and for being part of one of the most famous love triangles of the 20th century — with the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
The Operatic Drama(s)
On Sunday, the 9th of February, I watched Maria, starring Angelina Jolie, in my very favourite screening room (which is this one). The film is the last part of a trilogy by Pablo Larraín, after Jackie (2016) about Callas’ nemesis, Jackie Kennedy, and Spencer (2021) about Princess Diana.
The film was written by Steven Knight and looks into the last days of the legendary operatic singer. I found it — if not factually accurate — of an elegant dramatism (I wept half of it). The drama comes mainly from Jolie’s powerful role. The black-and-white flashback scenes centre on what turned Maria into La Callas. The present-day scenes show the diva, whose de facto career ended in 1965, struggling to recover her lost voice through heart-wreaking daily visits to a devoted accompanist, who tells her that her performance is too much Maria and too little La Callas and encourages her to scream so loud that both her dead lover, Aristotle Onassis and the equally dead composer Giacomo Puccini can hear her (approximately quoted). When she was not rehearsing her improbable comeback, Larraín’s Callas was walking the streets of Paris in a drug-induced (Mandrax) oneiric haze.
Exiting the theatre room, I heard: ‘I thought she was Spanish or something’, ‘I love that stained-glass kitchen’ (I concur), and, from my movie companion: ‘It was interesting. I did not know anything about her. Except that she was… well, Maria Callas’. I gathered mentally all I knew about Callas. I knew that she was actually Greek-an information received in (for some reason) hushed tone from my maternal grandparents, that she lost a considerable amount of weight in the early stages of her career, that the weight loss was attributed to swallowing a tapeworm and that she had a love affair with Aristotle Onassis (whom, as a child, I was confusing with Anthony Quinn, who played him in 1978, The Greek Tycoon). Later, I had a brief and not extraordinary yielding opera phase (from around 2018 to 2020) when I bought The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera by Rupert Christiansen and read more about the soprano. Learning how widespread the misconception of her Italian roots was, I understood why knowing she was Greek was almost a mark of high culture.
The Life: The Biography to Read and The Biography to Avoid
Maria Anna Sofia Cecilia Kalogeropoulos was born on the 2nd of December 1923 in New York to a family of Greek immigrants. The second daughter of Elmina Evangelia “Litsa” and George Kalogeropoulos, Maria was expected (by her mother mostly) to be a male, the God-given substitute for a dead son. The Kalogeropoulos immigrated to the United States in 1923, when Litsa was pregnant with Maria, and they immediately changed their name first to Kalos, then to the more American-sounding Callas. When the expected heir turned out to be a girl, Litsa refused to look at her for four days. Maria spent her first 14 years in New York. Eventually, her mother, who was single-mindedly obsessed with turning her daughters into child-stars, acknowledged the talent of her youngest, pushing her to sing and feeding her sweets and candies (to feed the voice), while subsequently calling her fat. In 1928, her father opened, with borrowed capital, a pharmacy in Manhattan. Shortly after, in 1929, the American economy crashed, and George was forced to close it down. The marriage of her parents, as well as the family finances, continued to deteriorate, and in 1937, Litsa decided to move back to Athens with her daughters. What followed was Maria’s traumatic teenage years in Nazi-occupied Greece. Lying about her age, Callas (turned Kalogeropoulos once again) was admitted to the Greek National Conservatoire and was soon taken under the protection and mentorship of Elvira de Hidalgo, a Spanish soprano caught by the war in Greece. During these years, she often sang operas she was too young or untrained for, which is considered to be one of the culprits of her eventual voice loss. To survive the hardships of the war, Litsa forced her daughters to sing (and not only, as suggested by Larraín’s film and various biographers) for Nazi officers. Fighting with all forces to avoid the title of ‘Mother of the Year’, after her daughter became famous, Litsa blackmailed her and sold stories to the press. For the sake of a very unholy symmetry, her father, George, wrote her letters in which he was pretending he was dying (he was not), asking for money.
Those Athens years and her troubled relationship with both her parents (but especially her mother) haunted Callas until the end of her life. In 2021, a new biography by Lyndsy Spence, titled Cast a Diva, was published (the biography to be read). One of Maria Callas’ most iconic roles was Norma by Vincenzo Bellini, with the famous aria Casta Diva. The book delves into those unhealed wounds. In writing the biography, Lyndsy Spence was given access to Callas’ previously unpublished correspondence and diaries. The result is a thoroughly documented, not judgmental book that sheds a compassionate light on the soprano’s childhood, career, life and death, including her marriage and her abusive relationship with Onassis. The only reservation I have about the book is how it presents the alleged relationship between Jackie Kennedy and her brother-in-law, Bobby (Robert F. Kennedy, the father of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services — speaking of ingesting worms) as an indisputable fact.
A second biography I revisited for this piece was a book from my childhood home: a paperback book in a deep red colour titled, in Romanian, O Viaţă (a life). The book was — according to its preface, written by the author, Pierre-Jean Rémy — created in a haze in the months that followed the soprano’s death. Pierre-Jean Rémy was a French diplomat, novelist, essayist and a staunch admirer of Callas. This, as you probably figured by now, is the biography to be avoided. To be entirely fair with the book and the author, what makes it avoidable is the disconcertedly poor translation into Romanian. Translated in 1988 (when communism in my homeland was at peak brutality and repression), the book is so poorly written that reading it leaves one confused and exhausted. Translation aside, it is a well-structured chronological account of Callas’ life. However, it was written in the 70s, and it is a creation of her time: her mother was not abusive but ambitious, and on a random page in the chapters about Callas’s younger years, the word ‘fat’ appears five times. ‘We got it; she was plump,’ I said, rolling my eyes and turning the page. Just to read how much she weighted when she was at her heaviest on the next one…
Callas’ weight was a constant preoccupation of her contemporaries.
La Callas
In 1945, against the advice of her mentor, Elvira de Hildago, who had urged her to go to Italy if she wanted to build a career, Maria Callas returned to New York, armed with big dreams, among which, conquering the Metropolitan Opera. Finding out the hard way that dreams don’t always come true, in 1947, she’s leaving, not on a midnight train to Georgia, but to Italy, where she will make her professional debut on the 6th of August 1947, at the Verona Opera Festival, with the role of La Gioconda, by Amilcare Ponchielli. Cruel irony: the play is about a woman in love with a sailor who, well… loves another one. As our friend Pierre-Jean Rémy reminds us, at that time, Maria was still on the heavier side. However, as the same author observes, a star was born that night.
Two years later, Callas married Giovanni Battista ‘Titta’ Meneghini, an Italian entrepreneur who would take over her career as her manager (stealing from her, as Spence correctly and bluntly puts it in Cast a Diva). In 1951, she debuted at La Scala in Milan, and in 1955, she lost a considerable amount of weight, turning into the diva we all recognise. Spence notes that she might have, indeed, had a parasite — a result of eating raw meat while dieting. However, the root of the rumour that she owed her figure to a tapeworm was an interview in which her husband, Meneghini, claimed she swallowed the tapeworm pill down with a glass of champagne without giving it a second thought. Maria remained obsessed with her own and other people’s weight throughout her entire life.
In 1957, Callas met the Greek magnate Aristotle Onassis, and they soon started their legendary long-term extra-marital affair. It is believed that he was the one who introduced her to Mandrax. The media, at the time, called the relationship passionate. In reality, it was volatile and co-dependent, and he was, by all accounts, manipulative and verbally and physically abusive, forbidding her to sing and pushing her toward cinematography. The (less sad) result was the 1969 Medea, written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. It has been long speculated and theorised why she accepted all kinds of unacceptable behaviour and loved Onassis until the very end: fear of abandonment, lack of paternal love and him making her ‘feel like a woman’ (her own explanation). By all accounts, Onassis, too, confided in her and showed vulnerability (or as close to that as he could get), an aspect that did not make the relationship equal and even. Callas, unlike Onassis, was not a born predator and never used his susceptibilities against him. Maria tried multiple times to divorce her husband and filed for legal separation in 1959, as divorce was illegal in Italy. In 1960, Onassis divorced his wife, Athina. Although everyone (Maria included) was expecting the two to get married, the relationship continued on unchanged terms until 1968, when Callas learnt from the newspapers that he married Jackie, the widow of John F. Kennedy. In Maria, Jolie’s character explains why Onassis did not marry her: ‘He could not control me.’ The real reason is captured by an earlier moment in the movie: throwing a party for Callas, Onassis tells her that he has been instructed to do so as it was a great advantage to be associated with La Prima Donna Assoluta. In 1969, he understood that it was even better to be associated with America’s Sweetheart (as a small reparation, it was not).
The End
Maria Callas moved to Paris in 1969. She lived in an apartment on Avenue Georges Mandel. After the initial shock of her marriage, she was persuaded to resume her relationship with Onassis. She called it a ‘passionate friendship’, but insisted it was platonic. Onassis died in 1975. She died shortly after, on the 16th of September 1977, of a heart attack in her Paris apartment, generating the enduring romantic hypothesis that she died of a broken heart following her lover’s death. She was 53. Her mother, Litsa, outlived her but did not attend the funeral on account of being too frail to travel to Paris. Callas was found by her loyal butler, Ferruccio Mezzadri. He and her maid, Bruna Lupoli, were her only company in her last years.
To Read:
This article in which The New Yorker’s Richard Brody argues that ‘the operatic drama misses its cue’
A more forgiving review of Maria
This article by The Guardian dismantling Franco Zeffirelli’s 2002 Callas
Forever
‘How Maria Callas Lost Her Voice’, a 1995 article by Will Crutchfield (an American conductor)
To Watch:
Franco Zeffirelli Callas Forever (2002), the movie dismantled by the aforementioned article. Up to you if you want to read the article before or after watching the movie.
Maria by Callas, a 2017 documentary using archival footage, interviews, personal letters, and audio recordings, as well as rare and previously unseen footage of the singer
To Listen:
You know what to do, but here is a very personal favourite.
