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Introduction
Maria Anna Sophie Cecilia Kalogeropoulos, known to the world as Maria Callas, was born in New York in 1923 and made her opera debut in Greece in 1941.
Her breakthrough came in 1949 when she replaced another singer as Elvira in I Puritani in Venice. She married Giovanni Battista Meneghini, a wealthy Italian industrialist and opera lover, who became her manager and promoted her as the new star in the Italian bel canto repertoire.
Callas was large and overweight – the ideal image of an opera singer at that time. In 1954, she suddenly lost 30 kilos and the promising singer became a glamorous, news-worthy temperamental opera star. The media made less of her successful debuts in New York, London and Paris than her walk-outs from productions, quarrels with managements, firing from the Metropolitan Opera in New York and affair with the Greek shipping magnate, Aristotle Onassis.
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In 1964, Callas starred in Tosca at Covent Garden. The performances are remembered as among the greatest opera experiences of all time. Purists carped that the voice was not always perfect, but it was faultless in communicating raw emotion, passion and heart-stopping suspense. Truth, not sterile perfection, was her aim.
A year later she was ill, but insisted on singing Tosca at a Royal gala in London. It was her last opera appearance. Then in 1968 Onassis married Jacqueline Kennedy, widow of assassinated US president J F Kennedy.
A devastated Callas withdrew from public life. Apart from a few master classes and a concert tour, she lived as a recluse in Paris. She died in 1977.
