Fame, fortune and success: Everyone thinks that those three things go hand-in-hand. But as legendary opera singer Maria Callas discovered, great fame and great talent do not always equal great happiness.
In the new Angelina Jolie-starring film “Maria,” which drops on Netflix Dec. 11, we’re transported back to the dramatic final days of one of the original divas of modern opera — and learn what it was like to be a true Greatest of All Time.
“Callas has always been a fascinating character,” Marc A. Sorca, CEO and president of advocacy group Opera America, tells TODAY. “You could write an opera about her — about someone who made an indelible impression in her 20s and 30s, and by the time she was 40 was finished as a singer. It’s a truly operatic story.”
Who was Maria Callas? Her significance is lasting
Maria Callas was so famous in her day — and now, nearly 50 years after her death — that even if you’re an opera novice, you’ve probably heard of her. Born in 1923 in New York City shortly after her Greek family emigrated, Maria Anna Cecilia Sofa Kalogeropoulos received training in singing in Greece while a teen, then became famous for her “bel canto” style of singing (think of a broad, flexible voice and drama in how she interpreted the music) while in Italy.
“The palette of vocal colors she could bring to her singing, the nuance of her interpretation, and her emphasis on language in her performances was extraordinarily subtle and powerful,” Sorca says. “In her prime, she gave 120 percent of what she had to give vocally.”
But Callas had a troubled early life, particularly with her mother, Evangelia Callas, who wrote a book “My Daughter Maria Callas” in 1960 that focused on their challenges.
In a Time magazine article from 1957, Callas said of her mother, “I’ll never forgive her for taking my childhood away. During all the years I should have been playing and growing up, I was singing or making money. Everything I did for them was mostly good and everything they did to me was mostly bad.”
Callas debuted in Greece in 1941 and by the following year was taking on lead roles. She went from strength to strength from there on, performing at the Metropolitan Opera, then on to Italy for major roles. She broke through big in 1949 when she took over a lead role from a performer who had fallen ill in “Die Walküre” and triumphed.
Callas’ voice was often described, but hard to capture in mere words. As The New Yorker wrote in 1995, “The agility, volume, and expressiveness of her singing caused excitement everywhere, while the actual sound of her voice —which was unusual and in some ways unbeautiful — occasioned differences of opinion.”
Nevertheless, the label “diva” seemed tailor-fit for her: Though she was always professional, she was known for being a prima donna who wanted as many curtain calls and spotlights as she could get. Time, in 1956, characterized her manner as follows: “Onstage, Callas’ thirst for personal acclaim is insatiable.”
Meanwhile, she struggled with her weight throughout the 1950s, and lost a significant amount that may have contributed to the weakening of her singing voice. Her Time profile said she went from 202 pounds to 135 pounds in three years.
“Singers learn to sing with their body,” Sorca says. “Changing your body means you have to learn to sing all over again — the instrument is the body.”
Callas continued performing across Europe for over a decade and eventually had a brief semi-retirement when she fell for Aristotle Onassis in 1959. She eventually performed again during from 1964 to 1965, and said farewell to the stage after what the New Yorker said was a “disastrous concert tour” in 1973 and 1974.
“She no longer had control over her instrument,” Sorca says. “It was a sad shadow of what had been great.”
Her romantic life also made headlines
In 1949 she married an older, wealthy man, industrialist Giovanni Battista Meneghini. He became not just her husband, but her manager and agent.
“I don’t know if it was ever a love marriage,” Sorca says. “Meneghini gained a celebrity wife, and she gained an industrialist husband and it worked for both of them for a while.”
Ten years later, she moved on to a different wealthy man — the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis — leaving singing for a time to be part of his life. At the time of this partial retirement, the New Yorker wrote, she’d been “averaging 50 appearances a year,” but between her 36th and 40th birthdays only sang another 28 times.
MARIA. (L to R) Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas and Haluk Bilginer as Aristotle Onassis in Maria. Getty Images, Netflix
The pair met while cruising on his yacht in the summer of 1959 — a cruise that also included Winston Churchill. By the end of the summer, Callas and Meneghini were separating, and she was part of the headlines for her new romance. They were partners until 1968.
Still, neither relationship was very happy: Callas’ private letters excerpted in Lyndsy Spence’s 2021 biography said, via The Guardian, that her first husband “robbed me of more than half my money” and that Onassis drugged her for sexual reasons.
Onassis ultimately married former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, widowed after President Kennedy’s assassination, in 1968.
Director Pablo Larraín, who directed “Maria,” also made a movie about Jacqueline Kennedy called “Jackie.”
What happened to Maria Callas?
Callas died at age 53 in 1977 of a heart attack, having remained off the stage for the last four years of her life. She was alone in a Paris apartment. Soca says what led to her death at a young age is an “open question.”
Spence’s biography suggests new reasons behind her health challenges — including a drug dependency, and her weakening voice.
“I tracked down the neurologist who treated her before her death,” she wrote, via The Guardian. “Callas suffered from a neuromuscular disorder whose symptoms began in the 1950s, but she was dismissed by doctors as ‘crazy’. It also explains the loss of her singing voice, which cut her career short. … Her life was full of tragedy, but I wanted to give her her voice.”