The betrayal of Maria Callas was the equal of any operatic tragedy

When I first heard Maria Callas sing, I used to be solely eight years previous. My mom had purchased an album of the soprano’s most well-known arias within the Oxfam store and he or she put it on the file participant, excited by her discover.

The first observe was Casta Diva, from Norma, which I now know is a few priestess singing to the goddess of the moon, however again then I simply knew it was a magical piece of music that made everybody within the room — my stressed mom, my ferocious stepfather, my annoying little brother — go quiet, as all of us fell below Callas’s spell.

Her voice is one I’d recognise wherever; it has an urgency that defies you to not pay attention. There are opera singers with extra lovely voices, however Callas makes you imagine within the music.

The face on the album cowl was as filled with drama because the music. Large, darkish eyes, a powerful nostril and a large, beneficiant mouth. It was not a fairly face, however in it you may see each sorrow and majesty. It was the face of a queen.

Maria Callas stayed with me by way of my stormy adolescence. Her voice may all the time stir me from my juvenile self-pity. There was one thing in the best way she sang that was fearless.

Other women discovered solace in Gloria Gaynor, nevertheless it was Maria Callas who made me really feel I’d survive my dumpy teenage years, the taunts of the ladies at college who knew my mom had left us to run off along with her lover, and the stepmother who slapped me for insolence.

With Divinites du Styx (one in all Maria’s punchiest arias from the French opera Alceste) as my theme track, I knew I may very well be the heroine of my very own story.

As I grew up, I learnt about Maria’s extraordinary life. It was as dramatic as any of the roles she performed on stage.

I’m fascinated by how sturdy girls take care of their future — I’ve spent the previous few years bringing the lifetime of Queen Victoria to the display screen within the ITV collection Victoria — and I’m not alone in being intrigued by Callas.

Angelina Jolie is to play her in a brand new film, Maria, presently taking pictures in Athens and Paris. Jolie has mentioned, ‘I’ll give all I can to fulfill the problem’ of documenting Callas’s closing days in Paris within the Nineteen Seventies, earlier than her demise of a coronary heart assault on the age of 53, and already pictures of her trying totally fabulous — in a few of Maria’s personal garments — have made it probably the most anticipated movies of 2024.

Meanwhile, marking the centenary of the Greek soprano’s beginning, the artist Marina Abramovic is presently on a world tour along with her operatic tribute, The Seven Deaths Of Maria Callas, which is a sell-out wherever it performs.

As for me, I may by no means fairly reconcile the voice I knew with Callas’s story, so I made a decision to write down a novel, Diva, concerning the lady behind the legend, which can be printed in Britain subsequent 12 months.

No one below the age of 60 has heard Callas sing dwell, but she stays Warner Classics’ best-selling artist: I used to be clearly not the one one who caught the Callas bug when younger.

Even individuals who know nothing about opera will know one thing of her story.

She was born Maria Cecilia Sophia Anna Kalogeropoulos in New York, the youngest youngster of Greek immigrants. Her mom, Litsa, all the time most well-liked her elder daughter — the blonde, petite Jackie — to the ungainly, shortsighted, brunette Maria. But when she realised Maria had the potential for greatness, she turned the final word stage mom.

In 1937, she took her daughter, then 14, again to Athens to check music, leaving her husband in New York.

It was a wierd choice, given New York was not precisely a musical desert, however Litsa hadn’t learnt to talk English and he or she knew that if Maria studied within the U.S. she’d lose management of her profession.It was unlucky timing. During World War II, Greece was invaded first by the Italians, then the Germans. Maria would recount how the household hid a British airman throughout the occupation. A neighbour betrayed them, and a troop of Italian troopers got here to look their flat. Maria sat on the piano and began to sing Vissi D’arte from Tosca, and the opera-loving Italians have been entranced. The airman escaped, so the story goes.

Like most of the tales informed by and about Maria, one has to do not forget that neither she, nor her associates, ever let details stand in the best way of a great yarn.

But it’s fairly true Maria by no means forgave her mom for her domineering methods, later saying that having lived by way of the German occupation, she thought her mom was ‘worse than the Nazis’.

There is not any scarcity of first-hand accounts of Maria’s life: her mom, sister, ex-husband and pianist all wrote books about her. One of the explanations I made a decision to write down a novel relatively than a biography was that I needed to attempt to see the world by way of Maria’s eyes.

In the course of my analysis, I went to the locations that resonated in her story — together with Maxim’s, the restaurant in Paris the place she and the love of her life, Greek delivery magnate Aristotle Onassis, dined; and La Scala in Milan, the place she had her operatic triumphs. (I used to be fortunate sufficient to see the fabulous headdress she wore in Turandot.)

I went to the traditional Greek amphitheatre at Epidaurus the place she gave a seminal efficiency of Norma. I found she and Marilyn Monroe have been on the identical invoice on the notorious live performance for President J.F. Kennedy’s forty fifth birthday, and I imagined what their assembly might need been like.

In the early years of her profession, Callas was well-known for her extraordinary voice however, chubby and badly dressed, she was not but an icon. It was solely after she was forged as Violetta, the consumptive heroine of La Traviata, that she determined to alter the best way she appeared.

After seeing Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, she’d discovered her position mannequin… and misplaced 60lb on a eating regimen of steak tartare and salad.

All sorts of rumours have circulated about her dramatic weight reduction, together with cosmetic surgery and iodine injections, the wildest being that she had swallowed a tapeworm, however I prefer to suppose Maria was merely a girl with iron self-discipline who was ready to starve herself to look the half.

Callas was media-savvy sufficient to grasp she needed to look the half off-stage, too, and he or she put herself within the palms of Italian designer Madame Biki, who created the Callas ‘look’: the hair in a good chignon, the hard-won waist displayed in elegant, fitted fits and frocks. Even off-duty, Maria took each side of her efficiency critically.

By the late Nineteen Fifties, Callas was not simply essentially the most well-known opera singer on this planet, she was additionally probably the most well-known girls. She was on the duvet of Time journal and her each look created the sort of frenzy reserved today for the likes of Taylor Swift.

One of the explanations I like her a lot is that she was by no means cowed by the lads who ran the opera world. She knew her price, and demanded and acquired enormous charges, stunning the classical world by asking to be paid the identical as world-famous conductor Herbert von Karajan.

But her confidence in her skills didn’t endear her to her contemporaries, who started to leak tales that she was troublesome and capricious. I feel she was merely a perfectionist, a top quality that will be admired in a person. When Callas pulled out midway by way of a efficiency of Norma in Rome as a result of there was an issue along with her voice, a mob gathered exterior the opera home, calling her a witch.

It was at this level, when she was each essentially the most beloved and essentially the most hated singer on this planet, that she met the person newspapers known as the Golden Greek, the multi-millionaire Onassis.

He invited Maria and her a lot older husband and supervisor, Giovanni Battista Meneghini (a person who wore a hairnet in mattress), to spend three weeks cruising the Mediterranean on his yacht. Other passengers included Onassis’s spouse, Tina, and Winston and Clementine Churchill. By the tip of the cruise Onassis, 53, and Maria, 35, have been lovers.

In my novel, it is clear that Maria falls for Ari as a result of he’s the primary man she believes is occupied with Maria the girl, not Callas the nice singer.

In truth, Onassis did not like opera a lot, however he appreciated Maria’s superstar, and so they had a lot in widespread: they have been each Greek and each self-made. They understood one another in a world the place everybody round them had been born privileged and rich.

And they actually had a bodily connection. Although Maria had spent her life singing about ardour, I do not suppose she skilled it till she met Onassis. She did not love Ari for his cash; she was scrupulous about paying her method, even shopping for her personal tickets on Olympic Airways which Onassis owned.

There is a few proof she had a toddler by Onassis early of their relationship that was still-born.

I do not suppose Maria had been occupied with having kids earlier than, as her profession was all essential, however to have a toddler with him would have sure them collectively for ever.

Her voice was starting to fail and he or she hoped that her relationship with him would maintain her in a life with out applause.

But to Maria’s dismay, Onassis by no means proposed. She knew he had been untrue to her with Lee Radziwill, the socialite sister of former First Lady Jackie Kennedy, and when she came upon concerning the affair, Maria took an overdose. (I believe that it was extra of a cry for assist than a severe try to finish her life.) What she did not know was that after JFK’s assassination in 1963, Onassis started his pursuit of the final word prize: Jackie herself.

Maria found Jackie and Onassis have been to marry solely three weeks earlier than the ceremony was resulting from happen on the Greek tycoon’s non-public island of Skorpios in October 1968. It was a betrayal to equal something in an opera.

On the night time of the marriage, as an alternative of taking drugs or retreating to her mattress, Maria gave the efficiency of her life.

She went to the theatre in Paris with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton after which to Maxim’s, and had a really public dinner on the desk the place she often sat with Ari, smiling gaily all through.

The pictures of a radiant Maria ran alongside the image of Jackie marrying Onassis on entrance pages around the globe.

Maria wouldn’t give the Press and the general public the satisfaction of understanding that Onassis had damaged her coronary heart. But he quickly realised that marrying Jackie had been a horrible mistake.

She had married him for his cash and the safety he may supply her and her kids. He had thought marrying essentially the most well-known lady on this planet would give him an unbeatable benefit on this planet of enterprise.

But each of them have been depressing, and inside weeks Onassis was attempting to see Maria once more.

And although she nonetheless beloved him, she couldn’t forgive him for having humiliated her a lot.

One of the various myths surrounding Callas is that her demise in 1977 on the age of 53 — 4 years after Onassis died — was from a damaged coronary heart. But I feel the actual tragedy of Maria’s life wasn’t her sad love affair with Onassis, however the untimely decline of her voice.

Like ballerinas and footballers, opera singers know they’ve solely a finite variety of performances in them. Today, younger singers are cautious to tempo themselves in order that they’ll go on singing till they’re into their 50s.

But Callas was so proficient that she may sing the whole lot, and conductors and administrators by no means stopped to suppose what the impact of these fixed performances would have on her voice and the longevity of her profession.

There was one season in Venice, when Callas sang Bellini and Wagner in the identical week, which in athletic phrases can be like competing in a marathon and a 100-yard dash on successive days. The outcome was that her voice started to falter in her mid-30s, proper on the peak of her profession.

For a perfectionist similar to Callas, this was a catastrophe. She wasn’t comfortable until each be aware she sang was flawless.

Her voice was her superpower, and when it was gone, I feel she struggled to search out which means.

The irony was that it wasn’t simply the voice that made Callas the best opera singer of her time, maybe forever, however the high quality of her performing.

Unlike the statuesque divas of the previous who would merely ‘park and bark’, Maria gave an awesome dramatic in addition to musical efficiency. Even when she wasn’t singing, it was inconceivable to take your eyes off her. Her immersion within the position was whole.

I do not know the way Angelina Jolie will play her — and already there’s criticism that the movie’s creators have given Callas’s family and friends the chilly shoulder. But after three years immersed in her extraordinary life, I feel Callas must be remembered not as a tragic heroine, however as a musical genius whose nice reward meant that she needed to dwell her life below essentially the most intense public scrutiny.

The concept that somebody of her indomitable spirit would fade away as a result of she had been betrayed by a person works because the plot of an opera, nevertheless it doesn’t do justice to the actual Maria Callas — the musical genius who has left a legacy that also speaks to audiences everywhere in the world, 100 years after her beginning.

Powerful and susceptible, perfectionist and passionate, Maria Callas, for all of the tragedy in her life, knew her price. Perhaps that’s the reason girls, together with me, are nonetheless entranced by her.

Diva by Daisy Goodwin can be printed by Head of Zeus on March 14, 2024. You can pre-order a duplicate.