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Maria Callas as Rosina in Rossini’s film Il Barbieri di SevillaAt the La Scala Theater in Milan in 1956.

Erio Picagliani / Teatro alla Scala

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Erio Picagliani / Teatro alla Scala

Maria Callas as Rosina in Rossini’s film Il Barbieri di SevillaAt the La Scala Theater in Milan in 1956.

Erio Picagliani / Teatro alla Scala

Legendary – and controversial – soprano Maria Callas, who would have turned 100 on December 2, continues to command attention. Opera fans remain fascinated, of course, but Callas appeals to many from the world of arts and entertainment. For example, Angelina Jolie.

“I take responsibility for Mariah’s life and legacy very seriously,” the actress recently said in a statement. Mariaa Upcoming CV Starring Jolie in the lead role. “I will do everything I can to meet the challenge.” One of the biggest challenges in telling stories about Callas is confronting her many contradictions, both in her life and in the legacy of divided opinions about her voice.

This film, now in production, is just one of the countless ways Callas still looms large 47 years after her death. Her albums are routinely reissued, and this fall No Divina131 deluxe discs box set, issued. She has been the subject of recent biographies, coffee table books, He plays, the opera, documentariesAnd previous hologram and CV tours. Artificial intelligence is also coming in Duet from La traviata Featuring Callas, recorded in 1953, and current tenor Lawrence Brownlee.

Why does Callas endure? Is it her melodramatic rags-to-riches story? Her doomed love life? Her sudden and premature death? The best place to start looking for an answer is with sound, a sound that some love and others hate.

“It’s a question of liking my vocal type or not,” Callas said in an interview that aired on WQXR in the 1970s. “Some people say I have a beautiful voice, others say I don’t. It’s a matter of opinion.” Few opera fans, even today, have no convictions when it comes to Callas’s voice and what she did to it.

“She was and remains, in my opinion, the queen of opera,” declared soprano Angel Blue, who currently sings many of Callas’s most famous roles. “I would describe Maria Callas’s voice as all the emotions at once. I listen to her and feel joy and pain at the same time.”

Even Callas’s most ardent fans admit that her voice wasn’t perfect, or perhaps not always beautiful in the conventional way. Lindsay Spence, author of the biography Cast Diva: The Hidden Life of Maria CallasHe says that at first there was a new shock when Callas’s career rose from the ashes of World War II. “She can sing like a tsunami,” Spence notes. “She could give you beauty, she could give you darkness, the richness of her voice. And she was eccentric, more or less, when she was doing that.”

Callas is in a class of her own, according to composer and Metropolitan Opera producer William Berger. “For me, it was about the way she inhabited the characters with her voice. And by characters, I don’t just mean characters in the abstract. I mean archetypes.” Berger says that she not only found intellectual and vocal weight in the roles she sang, but that she engraved her images in stone, defining the essence of the character that only others could reach.

He adds that this strictness can be annoying: “It’s very scary, in a way, when we hear her sing Lucia or Tosca“Because she finds aspects of the role not only beautiful.” In her famous 1953 recording of Puccini’s aria ToscaWhen her character resorts to stabbing her assailant, encouraging him to die, she repeats the word “morrie” in breathless outbursts, like verbal knife wounds. Berger believes this is part of the Callas phenomenon – creating performances of a mythical, almost ritual-like quality.

“When I listen to Maria Callas, I can hear her life story,” Blue explains. “Listen to her singing”Visi darti“The way she sings, it’s so sincere.” Blue thinks Callas is a great actress, willing to bend lines in an unconventional way to make the drama real. Sometimes that meant making unattractive tunes, which Blue says she could do. She also says: “I’m not trying to make everything beautiful, because life is not always beautiful. Singing is not always beautiful.”

Born to Greek immigrant parents who had quarreled and separated, Callas moved to Athens from New York in 1937 with her domineering mother and sister, with whom she quarreled bitterly. She threw herself into opera, singing her first major role at the age of fifteen. In 1947, in Italy, her international career took off and took off First recordings It came two years later.

Even with all the success, Callas was conflicted. She would give up everything just to find true love, settle down and raise a family. Instead, she became closer to the character of Greek tragedy—an artist who rose from poverty, sacrificed everything for her art, and died, brokenhearted, at the age of 53.

Spence says Callas channeled all her pain and suffering, and sometimes her joy, into her music. “I’m thinking about her [1964] registration Carmen. She was almost going through a renaissance in her relationship with [Aristotle] Onassis, she was happy and in love. You can really hear it in registration“.

But Berger warns against falling into a kind of schadenfreude trap. “I’m uncomfortable with people almost enjoying the tragedy and not taking the courageous next step to move past what she was putting out there. The idea of ​​labeling this great artist as a victim takes away from the artist who showed you how to do something better with him.”

Throughout her life, Callas, the fierce artist, was in constant conflict with Maria, the weak woman. This was a contradiction that Spence couldn’t resist exploring. “Her story, in my opinion, has been hijacked by people who don’t know much about Maria the woman,” Spence says. “And I really wanted to know the truth about who Maria was.”

The Maria that Spence found was a person who, far from the tabloid stories and high fashion lifestyle, was not all that different from the rest of us. She loved watching westerns on television, playing with her dog, and collecting recipes. “I felt like, in the end, this was just an ordinary woman with an extraordinary talent. She was the greatest for a reason, and she did her best. It wasn’t just luck. It wasn’t just luck,” Spence says. Propaganda machine. She deserves all the accolades we give her, even today.

Besides her status as an opera star, Maria Callas (pictured here in 1958 in London) also became a fashion icon.

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Besides her status as an opera star, Maria Callas (pictured here in 1958 in London) also became a fashion icon.

Weston/Getty Images

Despite the accolades, suffering was a real part of Callas’ story. She faced a disastrous love life with an older gold-digging husband, then an abusive lover in Onassis, opportunistic undertakers, some sleeping pill overdoses, and a voice that began to show signs of wear uncommonly early. The last of these was irresistible fodder for Callas’ critics, who speculated that her new, slim figure in the early 1950s led to vocal problems. However, some of her most vivid recordings were made in 1964, near the end of her career, including an entire song. Carmen Showing an intelligent style and a burning personality, Verdi’s album is where she is at He slanders Cadenza in the song from I vespri sicily Which spans approximately three octaves.

From starving during the war years in Greece to being harassed by the men in her life, Callas continued to be who she was the A game-changing opera singer and at the same time a cultural icon, despite or perhaps because of the difficulties she faces. “Maybe Maria Callas was that woman who really lived for her art and really lived for love,” says Angel Blue.

In the end, true love may have eluded Callas. But her art, William Berger says, will last forever. “I don’t see how Maria Callas can ever be forgotten. The name has become part of the collective unconscious.”