About
Maria Callas was born to Greek parents in New York City on 2 December 1923, and over the course of a 33-year career gained the affectionate nickname ‘La Divina’, and the love and respect of much of the world’s population. Callas spoke often about her unhappy childhood, and difficult relationships with both her parents. Her mother, Litsa, discovered Callas’ vocal talent early on, and pressured her to perform.
Maria Callas’ first teacher, Maria Trivella, waived all tuition fees for the then-13 year old after hearing her audition, remarking that her untrained voice “swirled and flared like a flame and filled the air with melodious reverberations like a carillon.” Callas had been presented to Trivella as a contralto, but the teacher soon decided that Callas was most likely a dramatic soprano and set to work on refining her singing technique. Trivella would later say that Callas had been a “model student, fanatical [and] uncompromising”, studying between five and six hours a day.
Maria Callas made her professional debut in Feburary 1941 in a small role at the Greek National Opera, before securing her first lead role as Tosca in Puccini’s opera of the same name in August 1942. Callas filled the following years with opera performances throughout Greece, and by the time she left for America in September 1945, not yet 22, she had performed more than 56 times in seven different operas. Her big break came in 1949, when she was called on to perform the lead role in Bellini’s I puritani at just six days’ notice, after their original soprano fell ill. Callas triumphed in the role, and by 1951 had performed in every one of Italy’s major theatres bar one. The most famous of them all, Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, had so far evaded her. Nevertheless, in December of that year she made her official debut there, and spent much of that decade with La Scala as her theatrical home. She made her debut with New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1956, opening the season with Norma, and reprised the role a year later in her Royal Opera House debut in Covent Garden, London.
Callas would go on to call her experience at the Royal Opera House as “a love affair”, returning again and again throughout the 1950s and 60s. It was on this stage in 1965 that she would take her final bow, too, in the role that began her career – Tosca.
After the breakdown of her marriage to industrialist Giovanni Meneghini, and the end of her affair with shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, Maria Callas lived alone in Paris for several years. It was there that she died of a heart attack, aged 53, on September 16 1977. Her funeral took place four days later at St Stephen’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral, on rue Georges-Bizet named for the famous French composer, just a stone’s through from the Arc de Triomphe.
