The suffering of a prima donna who lost her voice

On December 4, 1923, Maria Anna Sophia Cecilia Kalogeropoulos, the unwanted daughter of Greek immigrants, was born at the Fifth Avenue Hospital in New York. That "ugly duckling" will become the opera diva Maria Callas, the greatest opera icon of the 20th century after Caruso and Chaliapin. Her father Yorgos/George, a Greek by birth, decided to move to the New World just months after his son Basil died of typhus. Her mother Evangelija - who was pregnant and mourning her lost son before leaving for the New World - desperately wanted to give birth to a boy. However, when they arrived in New York and she gave birth, seeing that she had a daughter, she fell into postpartum depression. For four days she refused to hold her newborn. The parents paid all their attention to their older daughter, the beautiful Jacinta called Jacky, while Maria, who was six years younger, was neglected. That didn't change even when Maria was hit by a car in 1928, and she lay in a coma for three weeks.

But the plump, bespectacled girl had such a voice that people on the upper West Side stopped in the street to hear her singing from the windows.

Evangelija - whom Maria described as cold and calculating - decided to make a star out of her younger daughter and paid for Maria's solfeggio lessons with almost the last of her money. She took her to various radio competitions and she won first prize at the age of 11, and already at the age of twelve she sang an aria from an opera by Giacomo Puccini. Madame Butterfly.

TALENT RECOGNITION: Circumstances did not go in her favor. Her father, who Americanized the surname Kalogeropoulos to Callas, opened a pharmacy in Manhattan in 1929, but during the Great Depression business did not flourish and he went bankrupt in 1937. Evangelia left her husband. Maria fled to her father, but he had already remarried, and her stepmother refused to accept her.

When Evangelija returned to Greece with both her daughters in 1937, pulling out all her former connections, she arranged an audition for Maria with Maria Trivela, a singing teacher at the Athens National Conservatory. Trivela immediately recognized her talent, opened the door to the conservatory and offered her a scholarship after her mother allegedly falsified her daughter's baptismal certificate to prove she was 17, not the 13 she really was.

After that, in 1939, she went to another conservatory, Odeon Ation, in the class of the Spanish singer Elvira de Hidalgo, who once sang a duet with Enrico Caruzo. On her recommendation, Kostis Bastias, the founder and director of the Greek National Opera during the regime of General Ionis Metaxas (1936–1941), trusted Maria at a new audition. By the way, Metaxas was remembered for the famous "Oxi" (no) to the ultimatum of Mussolini's ambassador on October 28, 1940.

SINGING BEFORE THE OCCUPIERS: The war has begun.

Kostis Bastias was arrested for his pro-British stance. Maria, whose last name was again Kalogeropoulos at that time, was left without professional and pedagogical support, in occupied Athens she learned the art of survival in life and on stage, singing until 1945 in front of the occupiers. She sang at the opera and in night bars in Omonia, the historic heart of Athens, at that time the haunt of soldiers, war merchants, thieves and prostitutes.

When on August 27, 1942, he attended the premiere of Puccini's opera Toska performed in the main role of Floria at the Athens Opera, all the seats in the first row were occupied by German and Italian officers in uniform.

In October 1942, at the Palas cinema in Thessaloniki, she took part in a recital on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Gioacchino Rossini (1792–1868), organized by the Italian occupation authorities. When she sang Beethoven's Leonore aria in the Herodes Attic Theater in Athens in August and September 1944, most of the people who applauded her were Nazi officers and soldiers.

During the war period, Maria developed a friendship with the Italian Major Di Stasia, an opera lover and a frequent pre-war visitor to Milan's La Scala, who encouraged her desire for an operatic career, helped her in various ways, and was involved in the organization of her concert performances in front of the Italian occupying forces .

Did this strong, middle-aged man whom Maria found fascinating become her lover, asks biographer John Louis di Gaetani in the book The Definitive Diva: The Life and Career of Maria Callas.

She received fees for singing in front of the occupying soldiers, and sometimes pasta, salami and chocolates. The little money Maria earned helped her mother and sister survive the occupation of Athens. About 60.000 of their fellow Athenians did not survive, writes American author of Greek origin Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington in her biography Maria Callas – the woman behind the legend (1989).

They also received money from Milton Embiricos, who was Maria's sister Jackie's fiance. After the war he did not marry her; he wanted a chaste virgin, not an ex-mistress.

REPERTOIRE CHANGE: At the beginning of March 1945, Maria sang the main female role, the role of Marta, in the opera Tifland Eugen D'Albert for the German soldiers, with the Athens Opera in the city theater of Olympia, and already on March 20, 1945, she sang a concert of English songs for the British troops, writes her biographer John Louis di Gaetani.

British and American allied forces, as well as Greek partisans, expelled the Germans and Italians. Maria received threatening phone messages about how she was known to have sung for Italians and Germans. Other singers accused her of being more than willing to sing German and Italian operas in Athens. She defended herself that she is a young singer trying to develop an operatic career in an occupied country. Some Greeks understood this and others did not. Many did not forgive her, writes Di Gaetani, who believes that they should have because her mother and sister also survived.

Anyway, after the occupation, Maria was suspended from the national opera for three months and sang in bars again.

A 1998 BBC documentary claims that in 1945, Maria Callas quickly set her sights on British officers instead of Italian officers. Ray Morgan, with whom she danced in the "Argentina" bar, told the BBC camera how he once leaned over to whisper something to Maria and was surprised when he was blinded by the spotlight directed at her because the moment had come for her number; when she sang, he was convinced that she was singing to him.

At that time, chants of "KKE, KKE!" could be heard on the streets of Athens. Ray asked what that meant. They told him that it was against the Communist Party of Greece. "It was terrible," says the former British soldier.

It was a little scarier than that Cold War description. In an event that Greeks remember as Decamvriana, during the crackdown on demonstrations in December 1944, the British fired into the crowd and killed around 200 people. In the struggles between leftists and monarchists, in Athens in 1944/45. around 2000 members of the leftist movement died
ELAS, about 1800 soldiers of the monarchist Greek government and about 200 British. About 1946 people died in the Greek civil war from 1949 to 150.000.

Composer Mikis Theodorakis, captain of ELAS, was arrested in February 1945. He was tortured in prison, and thanks to his father's political connections and intervention, he received a reduced sentence. The following year, in 1946, during a demonstration he was beaten so badly that he suffered a fractured skull and an eye injury and was taken to the morgue alive; in 1947 he was exiled to the island of Ikaria, and in 1948 to the island of Makronisos, the Greek island of Goli otok where left-wing political prisoners were interned.

The post-war revenge on the "occupation singer" cannot be compared to the torture of the leftist Mikis Theodorakis, but the disturbing situation left a bitter taste and Maria Kalogeropoulos decided to leave Greece - where she made many enemies - and never return.

RELATIONSHIP WITH MOTHER: She broke off relations with her mother, whom she accused of being a prostitute during the war and of turning her and Jackie into prostitutes so that the family could survive. Maria's mother Evangelia, who was not averse to fostering an affair between a middle-aged Italian major and her young daughter, is in her book My daughter Maria Callas (1960) insisted that the family would starve without the money and food provided by Maria's singing (and other activities), but ordered her to keep her mouth shut.

Later, when Maria became famous, her mother Evangelija wrote to her: "Do you know what film artists of humble origin do as soon as they get rich? In the first month, they spend their first money to build a home for their parents and spoil them with luxury... What do you have to say, Maria?"

In a letter from 1951, she asked Maria for $100 "for daily bread". Maria answered: "Don't come to us with your troubles. I had to work for my money, and you are young enough to work. If you can't earn enough money to live, you can jump out of a window or drown."

The magazine "Time" is in its main text, October 1956, under the subtitle Terrible anger quoted the words of Maria Callas: "During all the years when I should have played and grown up, I sang or earned money. Everything I did for them (mother and sister) was mostly good, and everything they did to me was mostly bad".

Having severed ties - with Greece, with her mother, and with the surname Kalogeropoulos - in 1945, Maria was faced with the choice of where to go. Italy, recommended by her teacher Hidalgo, was heavily bombed, and opera was not at the top of the list of priorities in post-war reconstruction. Thus, in 1945, New York and her father, whom she had not seen for almost ten years, seemed a logical choice and a safe refuge. She convinced her godfather to send her money for a boat ticket to New York, where she returned as American citizen Maria Callas.

So she goes to her father in America, tries to get an engagement for two years without much success, and her father doesn't have much money to support her either.

Two years later, she disembarked from the ship in Naples with one cardboard suitcase and a make-up kit. In front of 17.000 people in the Arena di Verona on August 2, 1947, she sang in an opera La Gioconda. There she was under the patronage of Tullio Serafino, who recommended her to Teatro La Fenice in Venice, where a replacement for a sick singer was urgently needed. He's going to an audition. The conductor tells her: "Sing!" She sings. The director says: "You have a play in five days!" She replied: "I can't prepare in five days..." "You can."

At the La Fenice Theater, whose reputation among wealthy audiences dates back to 1792, she shone in operas Turandot Giacomo Puccini and Tristan and Isolde Richard Wagner.

In the 1951/52 season. the mother house of Maria Callas becomes Milan's La Scala; in the following seven seasons, she was surrounded by famous colleagues, conductors, directors, scenographers and designers. At La Scala, her directors were the legendary Herbert von Karajan, Franco Zeffirelli and Luchino Visconti, who even stated that he started directing opera only because of Maria Callas.

She felt what the composer wanted to express and gave life to each note, as she said herself, listening with her soul and not with her ears and was attached to the heroines she identified with as women who suffer in order to love.

Her soprano, as musicologists say, was not perfect - in the middle tones it had a special "wrong timbre", which made her voice unrepeatable and authentic, which brought drama back to Italian bel canto. Opera singer Mario Del Monaco said that Maria Callas managed to turn her flaw into an advantage over the years: "She managed to establish her own style."

There was Aida, Violetta, Tosca, Medea, Desdemona, Ćo-Ćo-San, Carmen, Lucia, Ashton, Norma, whose aria "Casta diva" she performed a total of 89 times, as a kind of prayer in the moonlight:

Pure Goddess,
which you silver
these sacred ancient plants,
turn your beautiful face to us
without clouds and veils…
(in free translation)

IT'S ALL AUDREY HEPBURN'S FAULT: Visconti taught Maria to be more natural on stage – with more vocal expressiveness, with minimal movement – ​​and told her to lose weight. And that was a distant goal. Her mother Evangelia, adhering to the stereotype that a good singer must be overweight, did not interfere when she quenched her stress with delicious Greek dishes. At that moment Maria, who has a lot of weight, thick arms and legs but also a strong will, promised Visconti: "I will be like Audrey Hepburn".

Like skinny Audrey Hepburn, who is in the movie Holiday in Rome (1953) drove a Vespa through the streets of Rome!

Maria, who was 171 cm tall, noted that from December 1952 to April 1954, the weight of her heroines "melted" during her ordeal: "Mona Lisa 92 kg; Aida 87 kg; Norm 80 kg; Medea 78 kg; Lucia 75 kg; Alceste 65 kg; Elizabeth 64 kg…”

The "New York Times" later wrote that those who believed that a prima donna must be corpulent to be "operatic", after the sensational weight loss of Maria Callas, shook their heads and predicted her "vocal death", but that "the newly glamorous Maria, thin, relaxed it hasn't lost a decibel of power, not a note of range, not a hint of sweetness..."

With a new image, in the mid-fifties, after La Scala, she filled halls on all continents, in London's Covent Garden in 1952, in Chicago, the Metropolitan Opera in New York...

RETURN TO ATHENS: Following an invitation from the government of Constantine Karamanlis to appear at the Athens Festival with two recitals in the ancient open-air theater Odeum Herodes Atticus, Maria Callas arrived at Athens International Airport on July 29, 1957.

The one who left in 1945 as an unknown and suspect soprano, after an eleven-year absence returned as a diva and felt fabulous. However, the daily newspaper "Ta Nea" and "To Vema" they attacked the government for giving her $9000 for two recitals, spreading vulgar gossip about Maria Callas' relationship with her mother and claiming that Maria Callas is unworthy of her people and her family, and that she has only one path left, the one that leads to the airport.

The Grand Bretagne Hotel in Athens on Syntagma Square, where Maria Callas stayed, was guarded with a heavy police presence due to bomb threats, it was besieged by Greek and foreign journalists, opera singers, musicians, fans... When the Minister of Culture Tsatsos was informed that Maria Callas refused to appear in such a hostile environment claiming that she was ill, he came to the hotel shortly before the opening of the festival to convince her to change her mind: "Do you know that the government in danger of falling if you don't sing?” he said. "Do you know that Callas is in danger of falling if I sing tonight?"

Her recital on 1 August 1957 was postponed at the last minute, but she still sang on the evening of 5 August 1957 in the ancient Odeum of Herodes Atticus at the foot of the Acropolis. The press described it as a triumph, but she, however, once again bitterly because of the political storm in which she found herself, decided that she would never appear on stage in Greece again.

Nevertheless, three years later, on August 9, 1960, at the then Hellinikon airport in Athens, Maria Callas was welcomed by Kostis Bastias, to whom she thanked him for auditioning her when she was still a child of fourteen or fifteen. expressed confidence: "He had a brain, ears, and, as they say in Italian - nazo, nose, in other words, he knows how to smell something valuable..."

Asteris Kolutas writes in the newspaper "Neos Kosmos" that between 1960 and 1967, during a short democratic respite of seven to eight years, a cultural movement developed, evolved and flourished in Greece, which gained great response from all social classes and international appeal. Maria Callas was part of that "new golden age" of Greek culture.

Besides her, Mikis Theodorakis, Melina Mercouri, Irena Pappas, Nana Mouskouri, as well as the actor John Cassavetes and the director Elia Kazan (both with Greek roots), Konstantin Kosta Gavras, Michalis Kakoiannis... The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to a Greek to Yorgos Seferis in 1963, and to Odysseus Eliti in 1979.

FATAL CRUISE: The world of elite culture, especially the expensive one, was during that period in an embrace with the world of business, spectacle and politics. One side of that coin was seen in the summer of 1959 on Aristotle Onassis's yacht "Christina", which looked more like a floating museum the size of a football field than a vessel, on which began one of the most media-exploited sagas about the life of the jet set at the time, in which mixed soap opera, melodrama, opera, business, politics and tragedy.

In addition to Maria Callas and her husband, Onassis and his wife, the brave boil from the film, boarded the yacht Exactly at noon Gary Cooper, Winston Churchill with his wife Clementine, daughter Sarah who was suffering from a divorce, sixteen-year-old granddaughter who later shared vivid memories of that cruise, personal physician Lord Moran and beloved canary Toby... They set sail for a three-week cruise from the pier in Monte Carlo, in who is Onassis by arranging the fabulous wedding of Prince Rainier and the American actress Grace Kelly in 1956 demonstrated how high culture and media spectacles, the jet set and business can be connected.

During that cruise, Aristotle Onassis and Maria Callas began to show each other unequivocal signs of attention, allegedly without hesitation in front of distinguished guests, as well as in front of Aristotle's wife Tina and Giovanni Battista Meneghini, an industrialist from Verona 28 years older than Maria, who from In 1947, he was her manager, producer, lover, and eventually her husband.

Unaccustomed to hiding her thoughts and feelings, she informed her husband: "Everything is over between us. I'm crazy about Aria".

Meneghini behaved like a true Italian: he cried, threatened to kill himself, used his connections in the Catholic Church to prevent a divorce and tried to take all her money.

Maria Callas lamented: "My husband is still bothering me after he stole more than half of my money by putting everything in his name since we got married... I was a fool to trust him." That's what Linda Spence writes in her book about the hidden life of Maria Callas Cast a Diva: The Hidden Life of Maria Callas, whose title is based on a pun in the title Cast a diva – to play a diva, instead Chaste diva pure goddess.

THE FALL OF THE EMPIRE: Maria Callas saw the love of her life in the 17-year-old Onassis, as ugly as three keys to a dungeon, and he probably saw her as warm prey, like when hunters catch a stag. It was more complicated though.

Aristotle Onassis divorced his wife Tina, which could not have been easy because she took Onassis' children to live with her father, a Greek shipping merchant old-money magnate Stavros Livanos, whom he despised new rich Onassis.

Oil magnate Onassis got rich after he fled Smyrna when it was burned by the Turks in 1922, then went to Argentina, made money from tobacco and before the Second World War went into the tanker business.

However, although he divorced, Onassis did not propose marriage to Maria. As is known, he married Jacqueline Kennedy.

Onassis hosted Jacqueline and her sister on the yacht even while President John Kennedy was alive, probably trying to bribe and soften up the Americans who greatly hindered his oil business with Saudi Arabia. When, in 1968, Onassis married the widow Jacqueline Kennedy, with whom he concluded a marriage contract that resembled a commercial deal, the front pages of the newspaper screamed "JFK died a second time!". However, his turbulent relationship with Maria Callas did not end even after he entered into that marriage.

Aristotle Onassis died on March 15, 1975 at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris from grief for the heir to the empire, his son Alexander, who died on January 21, 1973 when his private plane crashed. According to the diagnosis, Aristotle Onassis died of respiratory failure as a result of the neomuscular disease myasthenia gravis, which affects the muscles of the eyes, face and muscles that enable swallowing, speech and walking.

GOOD DAY, SAD: Maria Callas' romance with Onassis was instant fodder for gossip; her life became a circle of parties, cruises and miserable ups and downs with her charismatic lover; her stage career almost ended, wrote the "New Yorker" 1995 in a text entitled "The story of one voice".

Russian prima donna Elena Obraztsova, who sat with her in the same box during a performance of the Moscow Bolshoi Theater at the Paris Grand Opera, remembers their conversation. At one point, Maria Callas whispered that a woman should be stronger than a man. "Who will protect us if not ourselves!". Elena Obraztsova recalled: "Almost on a whim, I asked: 'Do you love him?'". "I love him, I love him!" quickly answered Maria, intensely looking at the scene. "And I suffer a lot!"

"For a very long time, there was everything in her life - fame, wealth... Everything but love," the Russian daily "Izvestia" wrote about her..

She herself repeated that they loved her only when she sang, and that no one needed her anymore.

Ariana Stassinopoulos, in her biography of Maria Callas as a victim of manipulative men, claims that the first major crisis of her voice began in 1960 as a "result of her emotional state".

VOICE STORY: Writer John Ardoin, music critic for the Dallas Morning News, says that "from 1960 to 1965, the year she began an eight-year hiatus in her career, there was a gradual disintegration of her extraordinary artistic machinery."

Maria Callas, who was a perfectionist and knew how to sing better than the critics, was confused after the performance in May 1965: "It seemed to me that another woman sang in my place..." In Covent Garden in 1965, Maria Callas sang three acts opera Toska and she did not appear in the fourth.

In September 1973, she returned to the stage with concerts in Europe and America. The audience still applauded the diva wildly, but critics wrote that people respect the legend of Maria Callas, not her weakened voice.

She continued to practice and hope, but the tapes circulating in pirated form depressingly proved that a return would not be possible. The idea that Maria Callas lost her temper and not her voice does her art a profound disservice — it reduces it to the art of mere theatrics. Her tragedy is as simple as it seems, and as simple as fans and psychobiographers don't want it to be: she lost her voice, the most wonderful musical voice we've ever heard, American conductor Will Crutchwild wrote in the "New Yorker" in 1995 in the aforementioned text "The Story of a voice".

Citing Italian voice researchers Franco Fucci and Nico Piccoli, "La stampa" suggests that Maria Callas suffered from dermatomyositis, a disease that causes muscle and tissue failure, including the larynx, and a noticeable decline in vocal cords began to affect Maria Callas in the 1960s. them. Treatment of dermatomyositis includes corticosteroids and immunosuppressive agents, which can cause heart failure in the long term.

Maria Callas died on September 16, 1977, alone in her apartment in Paris. It was announced that the cause of death was a heart attack. The body was cremated in unusual haste.

Her ashes were scattered in the Aegean Sea, if they were her ashes at all. Namely, her urn was stolen and found on the edge of the Perlachaise cemetery in Paris. And all her things, even the most intimate ones, were sold at auction. ¶