The Maria Callas Museum recently opened in late 2023, featuring costumes, garments, musical sheets, photos, videos and audio material, from the legacy of Maria Callas (La Divina). Located in Athens, Greece, where Callas first began her formal training as an operative virtuoso, the museum offers visitors to see and hear Callas command the stage with her sonorous vocals and unmistakable presence. The culmination of more than a decade of acquisitions and planning, the museum takes the visitor on a resplendent journey into a voice which enraptures and still haunts today.
The museum is the first of its kind to preserve and grow the legacy of Callas; the space features a splendid view of the Acropolis from its location in Syntagma Square. The collection includes 1200 items with 40 new donations made during the first year of operations. New items acquired include correspondence, autographs, LP records, and rare recordings. Further, La Scala in Milan has donated costumes the singer wore during the performances: Norma, Iphigenia in Taurus, and Lady Macbeth.
Conceived a quarter century ago in 2000, the city of Athens made its first acquisitions through participation in an international auction in Paris. Over time, the collection has grown to include paintings, letters to the singer, her personal photo album from 1947-1959, personal wardrobe items, telegrams, original programs from performances, as well as magazines and paintings.
Maria Callas, La Divina
Fathoming the unmistakable sound and majesty of the opera singer Maria Callas perplexes even the most keen sensibility. La Divina may have revealed the secret to her divinity when she said:
“An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I’ve left the opera house.”
Her career, which burned brightly and ended tragically, was marked by a number of performances in London, Lisbon, Milan, Paris, and New York. Her wondrous work, captured in a new feature film, starring Oscar-winner Angelina Jolie as Maria, places her as one of the most intriguing female icons of the 20th century. Callas’ enchanting contemporaries include Princess Diana, Queen Elizabeth II, Marilyn Monroe, and Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis.
The Early Years in Athens
At the height of her success, her soprano proved divisive with some considering her unique voice revelatory while others thought it barbaric. A teacher of hers stated she possessed “a great ugly voice, in a way.” Born in 1923 in New York City to Greek immigrants, Callas was driven to perform by her mother, who identified her talent early on. This became both a blessing and curse for La Divina for the rest of her life.
Early on, a contentious relationship with her mother ensued. Callas expressed resentment for supplanting a normal childhood for fame and fortune:
“I’ll never forgive her for taking my childhood away. During all the years I should have been playing and growing up, I was singing or making money.”
Nevertheless, her mother’s foresight proved fruitful, as she returned to Athens from New York where Callas, at age 13, began to study with Maria Trivella. So taken by her first audition and talent, Trivella insisted on waiving all affiliated tuition and fees. Trivella said the young pupil’s voice “swirled and flared like a flame and filled the air with melodious reverberations like a carillon.” Trivella characterized Callas as a “model student, fanatical… uncompromising,”, under whom Callas trained five to six hours daily.
In 1939, the singer began to cultivate the Italian Bel canto style of singing under the tutelage of Elvira de Hidalgo at the Athens Conservatory. Over the next decade, she would emerge as La Divina. Callas performed in all of the opera houses in Italy, including La Scala in Milan in 1951. Up until her performance, La Scala was considered elusive, thereafter, it became her home theater for the next decade.
Visconti and La Scala in Milan
Her tenure at La Scala pivoted on a seminal collaboration with the esteemed stage and film director Luchino Visconti. Visconti remarked that an hour before he breathed for the first time, a performance of La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi commenced. Unsurprisingly, his passion for Verdi manifested with a production of the opera at La Scala. In 1955, Callas starred as the lead role, “Violetta,” a decadent courtesan who dies tragically of consumption.
In preparation for the role, Callas followed a strict diet, whereby she lost 66 pounds. She immersed herself in an extraordinary number of rehearsals and rigorous individual sessions with Visconti and the conductor Maestro Giulini. Her dedication was noted by critic Tedeschi, who claimed the performance was:
“the first turning point in the history of staging and set design, showing how opera could be cleansed of conventions and become a modern, live, believable form of performing art.”
Maria Callas’ Tragic End
From Milan, her fame only grew with performances at the Metropolitan in New York and the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London throughout the 1950s into the 1960s. Yet, from the 1950s, La Divina began to experience complications with her voice. Overwork, weight-loss, menopause, loss of confidence have been cited as reasons for the gradual erosion.
Shortly before her passing in 1977, Callas assessed the decline as: “I never lost my voice, but I lost strength in my diaphragm. Because of those organic complaints, I lost my courage and boldness[…]The result was that I overstrained my voice, and that caused it to wobble.”
Callas moved to Paris following the dissolution of her marriage to the Italian industrialist, Giovanni Meneghini. After a stint teaching master classes at Juilliard and a brief world tour, she succumbed to a heart attack. Her ashes were initially preserved at the columbarium at Père Lachaise Cemetery. There, they were stolen and eventually recovered, then scattered into the Aegean Sea in Greece per her wish.
Other Opera Ventures
Adjoined with the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Museo Teatrale alla Scala holds both a theatrical museum as well as a library. Exhibits at the institution include paintings, sculptures, autographed scores, musical instruments, set designs, and pieces. Besides the history of the opera, learn about Italian theatrical history via refined ceramic figures depicting characters from the commedia dell’arte.
While in Paris, visit Bibliothèque-musée de l’Opérao (BnF), located within the Palais Garnier. Part of the National Library of France, this institution showcases a collection of objets d’art chronicling the history of the house for over 300 years. Since the early 1990s, BnF has curated 25 exhibitions with partnerships, including Musée d’Orsay. Likewise, the artistic tradition of the French Capital finds its way in the adjacent main performance hall with the luminous ceiling painted by Marc Chagall.
[Written November 2024]
Cover photo: Maria Callas takes a curtain call in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, at La Scala in Milan, Italy, in 1958. Willy Rizzo/Paris Match/Hachette Filipacchi Associés.
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