by Lyndsy Spence in the Air Mail: Maria Callas is the latest star to be given the Hollywood treatment in a biopic, Pablo Larraín’s Maria, with Angelina Jolie in the title role. The film — whose screenplay was written by Steven Knight, best known for Peaky Blinders — looks at her final moments alone in her apartment in Paris, with her glory days far behind her. Callas herself has become a myth — a fabled figure whose heart was broken by Aristotle Onassis, the Greek billionaire and her partner of nine years, when he married Jacqueline Kennedy.
Legend has it that she lost her voice and died from a broken heart. The famous voice was strained, having sung the bel canto repertoire too early and too quickly. Callas’s fame was secured in 1949 when she alternated between Die Walküre and I Puritani in Venice, the vocal equivalent of an adventurer scaling the highest mountain and diving to the depths of the ocean and living to tell the tale. What followed was a decade of triumphs, and her musical genius remains unsurpassed. But in the Sixties critics and audiences turned on her, and her vocal problems were deemed unforgivable; she had abused her precious gift. The last operas she sang were Norma in Paris and Tosca in London, in 1965, and before both she was injected with Coramine, a drug given to mountaineers to increase their endurance. Prior to that she had appeared in operas and concerts all over the world and her canceled performances contributed to her reputation for being difficult. Everything with Callas was, and is, exaggerated.
“By nature I consider I’m not worth much,” she said, a belief instilled in her since she was born on December 2, 1923, to Greek parents in New York. She was a replacement child, conceived to alleviate their grief after losing their only son, Vasily, in 1922. Astrologers and the Phatoe (the Greek Ouija board) promised she would be Vasily reincarnated. George and Litsa Kalogeropoulos were so disappointed when she was born that they forgot the day of her birth and nobody looked at her for days. They could not agree on a name and she was eventually christened Sophie Cecilia Maria Anna, called Mary and Marianna throughout her childhood.
Maria was 13 when her parents separated and she moved to Athens with her mother and older sister, Jackie. They became homeless and took refuge in an apartment with no electricity or furniture. “I didn’t bring you into this world for nothing. I gave birth to you, so you should maintain me,” Litsa told her daughters. Maria was enrolled in the National Conservatory and would later study with the Spanish soprano Elvira de Hidalgo at the Athens Conservatory. Jackie was pimped out to Milton Embirikos, a shipping magnate who paid for their new apartment and bought a piano for Maria. Those formative years coincided with the Second World War and the invasions of the Italian and German soldiers, to whom Litsa prostituted herself and tried to barter a price for Maria’s virginity. Instead, Maria sang for enemy soldiers in exchange for payment. She also dropped out of the Conservatory after a teacher attempted to rape her. “A pity he didn’t manage it, then we would have made him marry you and that would have been that,” Litsa said. Maria severed ties with her mother in 1950.
After the war, Callas returned to New York and lived at the Times Square Hotel, on the fringes of Hell’s Kitchen. She had three jobs, as a babysitter, waitress and assistant to a retired opera singer. An audition for the Metropolitan Opera failed and she began an affair with Eddy Bagarozy, a small-time gangster and husband of the opera singer Louise Caselotti, who gave her singing lessons. Bagarozy convinced her to sign a contract, citing him as her manager. He later sued her for lost commission and threatened to sell her love letters to the press.
More here.
