As we celebrate the centenary of legendary soprano Maria Callas, Ashutosh Khandekar explains why she has remained such a powerful influence on successive generations of fans and singers
Maria Callas
‘This woman is a miracle!’ Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s exclamation still resonates a century after Maria Callas’s birth, celebrated this December. Recent years have seen the continuing apotheosis of the singer dubbed ‘La Divina’ during her lifetime. The mounting tributes are testament to the enduring breadth and depth of the Callas legend.
Hundreds of books in dozens of languages explore every detail of a complex, eventful life. Recordings, good and bad, continue to be rediscovered, remastered, repackaged and rereleased, as every advance in technology attempts to capture the ‘real’, unvarnished voice of Callas. Exhibitions abound, devoted to the photographs, costumes, fashion and jewellery that show Callas, after her notoriously punishing regime of weight loss, in perfect tune with the style of the 1950s and ’60s. CALLAS’S LIFE AND ART HAVE been captured in plays, films and documentaries, portrayed by performers as diverse as Meryl Streep, Fanny Ardant and most recently Marina Abramović, whose 7 Deaths of Maria Callas toured the world before arriving at English National Opera earlier this season. In this work, the celebrated performance artist portrays Callas on her deathbed in Paris, revisiting her life through the ‘alter egos’ she inhabited on stage, exploring the notion of immortality through art.
Today’s great opera singers continue to pay homage to their inspirational idol. One memorable example is Angela Gheorghiu’s 2019 solo album Homage to Maria Callas, the cover of which features the Romanian diva made up to look like La Divina. Perhaps, though, the most extreme example of Callas-veneration to date was her reincarnation as a hologram: a three-dimensional replica of the singer, computer-generated from film footage of her performances, was taken on a world tour in 2019. The ghoulish experiment served merely to demonstrate the limitations of virtual reality: the New York Times described the show as more like a séance than a concert.
Meanwhile, the tributes keep coming: at the Cannes Film Festival this year, it was announced that the Chilean director Pablo Larraín would be filming a new biopic focusing on the singer’s final, lonely years in Paris before her death in 19
