She is among the greatest opera singers of all time and her extraordinary voice continues to enchant audiences today, 50 years since her final public concert.
Maria Callas was one of the first truly global singing superstars, who rubbed shoulders with the likes of Marilyn Monroe and performed at the Queen’s coronation in 1953.
She was also known as the world’s greatest diva, just as famous for her tempestuous outbursts, mid-opera walkouts, public scandals and turbulent love affairs, including one with shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, who jilted her for Jackie Kennedy.
But despite the dazzling whirlwind that characterised her life and career, it is her tragic death, aged 53, as told in the forthcoming Netflix biopic, Maria, starring Angelina Jolie, which provokes the most fascination.
The movie, to be streamed next month, reimagines the Greek-American soprano’s final days living as a recluse in Paris, before dying of a heart attack on September 16, 1977.
Angelina, 49, believes there is much in Maria’s life she identifies with. She said: “I’m sure there’s a lot that will be read into it of our overlaps as women. But the one that’s maybe not the most obvious is I’m not sure how comfortable we both are with being public. People were quite aggressive when Maria wasn’t able to be what they wanted her to be. They were very unkind, and she carried a lot of trauma and she worked very, very hard. I just began to really care about her.”
Despite being adored by millions, Maria never knew real, lasting love off-stage, not even from her own family and certainly not from men. Plagued by heartbreak and personal torment, she died depressed and unfulfilled after the one thing that had never let her down, her voice, began to fail.
Born in New York to impoverished Greek immigrants in 1923, Maria was a replacement child, supposed to alleviate her mother Litsa’s grief after the death of her two-year-old son, Vasily. Litsa had consulted a device similar to a ouija board, and believed the unborn child would be Vasily reincarnated. When the baby was born a girl, Litsa turned her head to a window and refused to look at her for four days.
Maria later recounted a loveless and harrowing childhood in which her conniving mother treated her and her older sister, Jackie, with cruelty, using both to make money. When she realised Maria had a beautiful voice, she was desperate to turn her into a child star and pressured her to perform. “I was made to sing when I was only five and I hated it,” she later remembered.
The anguish continued after Litsa separated from husband George and returned to Greece with her daughters in 1937, when Maria was 13. Lyndsy Spence, the bestselling author of Cast a Diva: The Hidden Life of Maria Callas, says the sisters suffered “every abuse imaginable”.
She adds: “When Litsa discovered Maria could sing, she tried to make her a child star. She pimped Maria’s older sister out to a rich man, which paid for their rent and bought Maria a piano. Her mother was always trying to make money off her daughters. When the Second World War came, Litsa prostituted herself to Nazi officers and tried to make Maria do the same.”
“Only Maria’s voice saved her and she sang with the Greek National Opera during the Nazi Occupation. When a teacher at the Athens Conservatory attempted to rape Maria, her mother told her, ‘A pity he didn’t manage it because we would have made him marry you and that would have been that.’ Maria never felt protected or loved by her mother.”
The singer later recalled: “I’ll never forgive her for taking my childhood away. Everything I did for them was mostly good and everything they did to me was mostly bad.”
Soon, Maria’s stunning voice was getting her known. Her first teacher at the Greek National Conservatoire, Maria Trivella, waived all tuition fees after hearing her audition, saying her vocals “swirled and flared like a flame and filled the air with melodious reverberations like a carillon”. Trivella later remembered Maria as a “model student, fanatical and uncompromising”, studying five or six hours daily.
Maria’s professional debut came in February 1941, as Beatriz in Suppe’s Boccaccio at the Greek National Opera, before returning to New York after the war, hoping to reconnect with her beloved father, only to discover he wanted her to become his maid.
Dismayed at his rejection, Maria travelled to Verona in Italy, establishing herself as the pre-eminent opera singer of her day, and as an international celebrity known as “La Divina”.
There she met Giovanni Battista Meneghini, who became her agent and then her husband, only for her to realise he was using her to make money, secretly embezzling her fortune by putting everything in his name.
“He viewed her not as his wife but a valuable product and was prepared to sell her to the highest bidder,” says Lyndsy. “It was Meneghini’s greed which explained his decision to not want a family. He feared Maria would retire to raise children instead of being a top earner.”
Meanwhile, Maria was taking the world by storm and made triumphant appearances at the top opera houses. Critics gushed over her bel canto technique, wide-ranging voice and dramatic interpretations. Audiences would become hysterical and fans would mob her in the street.
Her performances of Tosca at Covent Garden, London, have been described as among the greatest operatic displays of all time. Lyndsy says: “She really was the most famous woman in the world. She had the X factor and it fuelled her celebrity, even more so than her talent. She was beautiful, she reinvented herself, she was outspoken and exciting, and when you see old photos or footage of her, she’s magnetic. You can’t take your eyes off her, and when you listen to her you can’t concentrate on anything but her voice.”
Maria’s exacting high standards meant she was prone to storming off stage mid-performance if she wasn’t happy. She would rather cancel a show minutes before the curtain went up than sing below par and disappoint her public, cementing her diva reputation. Maria said: “I am only as difficult as I need to be to achieve perfection.”
On one occasion, in January 1958, Maria walked out halfway through a performance in Rome where Italian President Giovanni Gronchi was in the audience, saying she felt unwell. The “insult” prompted riots in Italy, while the Italian government tried to ban her from singing at state-owned theatres. And in 1958, she demanded a huge fee to perform at The Met in New York, saying: “I am not really interested in money but it must be more than anyone else gets.”
Newspapers reported her temperamental behaviour, diva demands and bitter rivalry with another soprano, Renata Tebaldi. But her love affair with Onassis received the most publicity. It led to her divorcing Meneghini. But when, in 1963, after they had been lovers for four years, John F Kennedy was assassinated and Onassis was free to pursue Jackie, Maria was left lonely and distraught.
Worse still, her voice began to fail. And, after her final recital in Sapporo, Japan, on November 11, 1974, she withdrew from public life.
Lyndsy says: “She was depressed and fed up with everything, including the people who only ever wanted to be around Callas, the star, and not Maria, the ordinary woman who wanted to be understood. In the end, I think she just gave up. A lot of people have a phobia about the tragic elements of her life and I think it’s a disservice to her story, because when she was alive she longed to be understood. She gave so much to others and she died alone.”
Even after her death, Maria’s ashes were stolen. They were recovered and scattered in the Aegean Sea, as she had wished, two years later. Her life became a tragic operatic masterpiece in its own right, one which unfurled its final curtain far too soon.
- Cast a Diva: The Hidden Life of Maria Callas by Lyndsy Spence, published by The History Press.
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