Why Maria Callas is still the greatest diva ever

A century ago, on December 2, 1923, a daughter was born to the Kalogeropoulou family, Greek immigrants who had settled in Manhattan. The baby girl was named Maria Anna Cecilia Sofia.

As Maria Callas, she would launch a stage career just 17 years later and become arguably the greatest opera diva of all time within the next decade.

Today, in the centenary year of her birth, Maria Callas is more present than ever.

International Callas celebrations

To mark the event, the world is celebrating Callas. Large and small opera houses are hosting gala evenings devoted to her, publishers are presenting dozens of new publications and record labels are digging out their archival treasures.

Performance artist Marina Abramovic pays tribute to the diva in her latest work, "7 Deaths of Maria Callas," which explores the skillful way Callas performed her stage heroines' deaths.

In his upcoming biopic, "Maria," Chilean director Pablo Larrain reconstructs the real last days of the lonely star's life, shortly before her death in Paris in 1977 at the age of just 53. Larrain has cast Hollywood star Angelina Jolie to play the title role.

The film isn't set for release until 2024.

But just in time for her centenary, a Callas Museum will be opening in Athens, whose conservatory accepted the musical prodigy as a student when she was just 14.

UNESCO included the centenary of Maria Callas' birth in its list of anniversaries, as her audio legacy is undoubtedly part of intangible World Heritage.

And finally, in the summer of 2023, a €2 coin featuring an iconic Callas portrait came into circulation.

A vocal magician born for the stage

"Why is Maria Callas the only singer of a past era who is still present, not only in music, but in theater, film, fine arts and even gossip columns?" That's the question posed by Eva Gesine Baur, author of a carefully researched biography of the diva published in German earlier this year. "What allowed her to become unique?"

Bauer isn't the first to ask those questions. Many have attempted to explain the Callas phenomenon over the years.

In 1958, Italian music critic and journalist Teodoro Celli got to the heart of at least one aspect when he wrote that in Callas' singing, "instinct and temperament merge in an unparalleled art of performance."

As early as 1953, director Franco Zeffirelli, who experienced Callas as Medea at La Scala, described her impact as "opera B.C. and opera A.C. — before Callas and after Callas."

In her fewer than 30 years on stage, the indefatigable soprano performed 47 roles, revolutionizing the art of opera in the process.

Three of them are particularly well known: Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor," Puccini's "Tosca" and of course, "Norma" — which Callas believed Bellini had written for her, despite the fact that she was not even born until almost a century after his death.

Callas saw herself primarily as a singing actress. Callas biographer Eva Gesine Bauer says that approach allowed her to "save opera from a gradual demise into indifference." Callas herself was never indifferent to any aspect of her performance, "not a note, not a breath, not a gesture, not a character trait of the women she portrayed," Bauer adds.

But that explains only part of the diva's enduring appeal. Curiosity about Maria Callas, the woman, is at least as great as the interest in her as an artist.

The life and loves of Maria C.

It would be easy to tell the story of Maria Callas' life through infamous anecdotes and scandals, especially since they have all been well-documented in the gossip pages of the world press: stormy disagreements with artistic directors, bickering with fellow singers, in particular with her main rival, Renata Tebaldi (Callas found comparisons between her and Tebaldi as apt as comparing champagne to Coca-Cola — where she, of course, represented the high-end sparkling wine).

Her chronic struggles with her domineering mother were as fascinating to the press as her marriage to wealthy industrialist Giovanni Battista Meneghini, who was twice her age. Gossip pages reported on her jet-set lifestyle, cancelled performances, angry outbursts and poor eyesight.

Callas was very nearsighted, but was too vain to wear her thick glasses on stage. So directors had to find other solutions to help their star soloist find her way around the stage. Luchino Visconti, who directed her in "La traviata" in Milan, had perfumed handkerchiefs placed on the stage so the singer could use the scent to hit her marks.

Then there was a long and, by today's standards, toxic relationship with shipping magnate Aristotle "Ari" Onassis — whose marriage to presidential widow Jacqueline Kennedy Callas is said to have read about in the press while she was still his partner.

There was also the mid-career weight loss, from more than 90 kilograms to around 60 kilograms within just a few months, which some observers have blamed for Callas' vocal decline. According to legend, that weight loss was achieved by consuming tapeworm eggs for breakfast, washed down with a glass of champagne. In reality, she underwent weight-reducing hormone therapy, the most modern method she could find — highly efficient but at least as bad for her health as the tapeworm would have been.

Maria Callas died alone in her Paris apartment, leaving behind an estate containing some 40 mink coats, 250 cashmere sweaters, countless handbags and several drawers of full-length velvet gloves, many never worn.

'The most modern of all women'

But does collecting all these anecdotes bring one any closer to understanding why Maria Callas remains such a phenomenon? "Of course not," says biographer Eva Gesine Bauer, who adds that all the rumors and legends tend to present Callas as a victim of her overbearing mother, of sensationalistic reporters, of a faithless lover. But Bauer says that gives a skewed picture of this remarkable woman, who was never a victim, neither on stage or off.

She exercised self-determination in her life just as she did in her singing — decisive and assured down to the most subtle vocal nuance.

"In a way, she is the most modern of all women," wrote Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini about Callas. "But inside her lives a woman of antiquity, strange, mysterious and magical, which triggers terrible conflicts within her."

The wild, the imperfect and the broken are what takes Maria Callas from the minutiae of her private life and the times in which she lived and makes her what she was and still is — one of the greatest artists of all time.

This article was originally published in German.