Nevermind whos placing bets with a misogynist bookie in Ba

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Maria Callas
1923-1977, United States

Greek-American soprano. Her mother hated having a daughter and was always pushing her on to the stage to make money. Her father, a New York pharmacist, broke up with his wife, who returned to Athens. Maria was ungainly and short-sighted and her mother stuffed her with sweets in the belief that being fat would make her voice fuller. At fourteen the docile Maria entered the Academy, studying singing and piano before performing at the Athens Opera. In 1945, she played La Gioconda at the arena in Verona, kickstarting her career as a young diva. Endowed with an extraordinary range, Callas's voice went from scorching, almost raucous lows to stratospheric top notes. "I am a dramatic coloratura," she said. Her voice was perhaps not as perfect as that of her greatest rival, Renata Tebaldi, but its harmonics were interesting and teemed with inexpressible emotions. A true virtuoso, the[sic] "La Divina" moved seamlessly from light lyric roles to the most dramatic, from the teasing gypsy of Carmen to Norma, the murderous mother. [Not to mention Rosina, in love with the Count whom she eventually weds with the help of the tricky antics of Figaro, in spite of Don Bartolo's cretinous machinations!]

Scarcely off the playbill, in five years Callas played eighteen different characters on 160 occasions. She even stood in for Tebaldi in Verdi's Aida at La Scala in Milan, an unforgiving venue [now reduced to a tourist trap to siphon German money from the pockets of folks desiring a place to be seen in their expensive clothes] where cognoscenti went wild with excitement at her performance. With a sublime Traviata (Verdi) and an impressive Norma (Bellini) at the Metropolitan Opera, in New York, in 1956, and an overwhelming Tosca at Covent Garden in 1964, she attained the zenith of her glory. But she was not only a singer: she was a wonderful tragic actress. "This is the beauty of bel canto: it allows the public to read your thoughts before they hear the tune." Completely transformed physically, having lost forty kilos at the end of a Draconian diet (which also damaged her voice), she remained carried away by the music, overcome by the meaning of every phrase. Vissi d'amore, vissi d'arte.

But a passionate affair with Aristotle Onassis, a Greek shipping magnate, scuppered her career. To be at his side, she gave up singing and threw herself into high society. In 1965 at the Paris Opera, at the beginning of the second act of Norma, she could go on no more. Then the diva, who would have so loved to have been a mother, gave birth to a son who died at birth. Broken, in pain, she learnt that Onassis was to leave her to marry Jackie Kennedy. It was a double blow she never got over. Hiding away, alone, in an apartment in Paris, she died of pulmonary embolism. Or was it suicide through her overuse of medicines?

Her ashes were scattered over the Aegean Sea, but the memory of this tragic actress, consumed by passion for her art and an unhappy love story, still burns bright.

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