"It is very difficult to speak of the voice of Callas. Her voice was a very special instrument. Something happens sometimes with string instruments - violin, viola, cello - where the first moment you listen to the sound of this instrument, the first feeling is a bit strange sometimes. But after just a few minutes, when you get used to it,
when you become friends with this kind of sound, then the sound becomes a magical quality. This was Callas."
Had she lived, today would have been the 85th birthday of the diva Maria Callas.
Although born in the USA, her singing career began in her native Greece - to where her mother had moved the family - even during the German occupation of WW2. After the war, she briefly moved back to America, but it was in Italy that the music establishment began to really sit up and take notice of the budding opera star.
In post-war Venice she was a massive success. Callas demonstrated to the world the sheer versatility of her voice and talent by taking on not one but two demanding (and stylistically different) roles - Wagner's Brünnhilde and Bellini's Elvira - in the same season! She went on to triumph at La Scala in Milan throughout the 1950s, which mounted many new productions specially for her by directors such as Herbert Von Karajan, Margherita Wallmann, Luchino Visconti and Franco Zeffirelli, and the international legend "La Divina" (the divine one) was born. She dazzled audiences in Chicago, New York and London - and with her striking looks and stylish attire she soon became a media darling, even if she was rumoured to be temperamental and difficult to deal with.
But it was during the twilight of her full-time operatic career in the late 50s that she really drew the attention of the media, when she embarked on a scandalous (for the time) affair with billionaire shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. The two later married, but more scandal ensued when Onassis left her in 1968 for the President's widow Jackie Kennedy. Always battling with ill-health (she was rumoured to be anorexic and was almost blind), Maria Callas died alone in Paris in 1977, and was hysterically mourned across the world.
We still have the music by which to remember one of the world's most magnificent operatic divas...
Maria Callas website
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