Family life, childhood and move to Greece The name on Callas's New York birth certificate is Sophie Cecilia Kalos, although she was christened Maria Anna Cecilia Sophia Kalogeropoulou (). She was born at
Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital (now the Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center) on December 2, 1923, to Greek parents Elmina Evangelia "Litsa" (, originally Dimitriadou; –1982) and George Kalogeropoulos (–1972). Callas's father had shortened the surname Kalogeropoulos, first to Kalos and subsequently to Callas to make it more manageable. George and Litsa Callas were an ill-matched couple from the beginning. George was easy-going and unambitious, with no interest in the arts, and Litsa was vivacious and socially ambitious and had dreamed of a life in the arts, which her middle-class parents had stifled in her childhood and youth. Litsa's father, Petros Dimitriadis (1852–1916), was in failing health when Litsa introduced George to her family. Petros, distrustful of George, warned his daughter, "You will never be happy with him. If you marry that man, I will never be able to help you." Litsa ignored his warning but soon realized that her father was right. The situation was aggravated by George's philandering and was improved neither by the birth of their daughter Yakinthi (later called "Jackie"), in 1917, nor the birth of their son Vassilis, in 1920. Vassilis's death from
meningitis in the summer of 1922 dealt another blow to the marriage. In 1923, after realizing that Litsa was pregnant again, George moved his family to the United States, a decision that Yakinthi recalled was greeted with Litsa "shouting hysterically" followed by George "slamming doors". The family left for New York in July 1923, moving first into an apartment in
Astoria, Queens. Litsa was convinced that her third child would be a boy, and her disappointment at the birth of another daughter was so great that she refused even to look at her new baby for four days. Maria was christened three years later, in 1926, at the
Archdiocesan Cathedral of the Holy Trinity. When Maria was four, George Callas opened his own pharmacy, settling the family in Manhattan on 192nd Street in
Washington Heights, where Callas grew up. Around the age of three, Maria's musical talent began to manifest itself, and after Litsa discovered that her younger daughter also had a voice, she began pressing "Mary" to sing. Callas later recalled, "I was made to sing when I was only five, and I hated it." George was unhappy with his wife favoring their elder daughter, as well as the pressure put upon young Mary to sing and perform, and Litsa was increasingly embittered with George and his absences and infidelity and often violently reviled him in front of their children. The marriage continued to deteriorate, and in 1937 Litsa returned to Athens with her two daughters.
Relationship with mother Callas's relationship with her mother continued to erode during the years in Greece, and in the prime of her career it became a matter of great public interest, especially after a 1956 cover story in
Time magazine, which focused on their relationship, and later by Litsa's book,
My Daughter Maria Callas (1960). In public, Callas recalls the strained relationship with Litsa and her unhappy childhood spent singing and working at her mother's insistence, saying, My sister was slim and beautiful and friendly, and my mother always preferred her. I was the ugly duckling, fat and clumsy and unpopular. It is a cruel thing to make a child feel ugly and unwanted ... 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. Everything I did for them was mostly good and everything they did to me was mostly bad. In 1957, she told Chicago radio host Norman Ross Jr, "There must be a law against forcing children to perform at an early age. Children should have a wonderful childhood. They should not be given too much responsibility." Biographer Nicholas Petsalis-Diomidis says that Litsa's hateful treatment of George in front of their young children led to resentment and dislike on Callas's part. According to both Callas's husband and her close friend
Giulietta Simionato, Callas related to them that her mother, who did not work, pressed her to "go out with various men", mainly Italian and German soldiers, to bring home money and food during the
Axis occupation of Greece during World War II. Simionato was convinced that Callas "managed to remain untouched" but never forgave her mother for what she perceived as a kind of prostitution forced on her. Litsa, beginning in New York and continuing in Athens, had adopted a questionable lifestyle that included not only pushing her daughters into degrading situations to support her financially but also entertaining Italian and German soldiers during the Axis occupation. In an attempt to patch things up with her mother, Callas took Litsa along on her first visit to Mexico in 1950, but this only reawakened the old frictions and resentments, and after leaving Mexico, they never met again. After a series of angry and accusatory letters from Litsa lambasting Callas's father and husband, Callas ceased communication with her mother altogether. covered Callas's response to her mother's request for $100, "for my daily bread." Callas had replied, "Don't come to us with your troubles. I had to work for my money, and you are young enough to work, too. If you can't make enough money to live on, you can jump out of the window or drown yourself." Callas justified her behavior ... "They say my family is very short of money. Before God, I say why should they blame me? I feel no guilt and I feel no gratitude. I like to show kindness, but you mustn't expect thanks, because you won't get any. That's the way life is. If some day I need help, I wouldn't expect anything from anybody. When I'm old, nobody is going to worry about me." However, when interviewed by Pierre Desgraupes on the French program ''L'invitée du dimanche'', Callas attributed the development of her chest voice not to Trivella but to her next teacher, the Spanish
coloratura soprano Elvira de Hidalgo. Callas studied with Trivella for two years before her mother secured another audition at the Athens Conservatoire, with de Hidalgo. Callas auditioned with "Ocean, Thou Mighty Monster" from
Weber's Oberon. De Hidalgo recalled hearing "tempestuous, extravagant cascades of sounds, as yet uncontrolled but full of drama and emotion". She agreed to take her as a pupil immediately, but Callas's mother asked de Hidalgo to wait for a year, as Callas would be graduating from the National Conservatoire and could begin working. On April 2, 1939, Callas undertook the part of Santuzza in a student production of
Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana by the
Greek National Opera at the
Olympia Theatre, and that autumn she enrolled at the Athens Conservatoire in Elvira de Hidalgo's class. In 1968 Callas told
Lord Harewood, De Hidalgo had the real great training, maybe even the last real training of the
bel canto. As a young girl—thirteen years old—I was immediately thrown into her arms, meaning that I learned the secrets, the ways of this
bel canto, which of course as you well know, is not just beautiful singing. It is a very hard training; it is a sort of a strait-jacket that you're supposed to put on, whether you like it or not. You have to learn to read, to write, to form your sentences, how far you can go, fall, hurt yourself, put yourself back on your feet continuously. De Hidalgo had one method, which was the real
bel canto way, where no matter how heavy a voice, it should always be kept light, it should always be worked on in a flexible way, never to weigh it down. It is a method of keeping the voice light and flexible and pushing the instrument into a certain zone where it might not be too large in sound, but penetrating. And teaching the scales, trills, all the
bel canto embellishments, which is a whole vast language of its own. Callas said that she would go to "the conservatoire at 10 in the morning and leave with the last pupil ... devouring music" for 10 hours a day. When asked by her teacher why she did this, her answer was that even "with the least talented pupil, he can teach you something that you, the most talented, might not be able to do."
Early operatic career in Greece After several appearances as a student, Callas began appearing in secondary roles at the Greek National Opera. De Hidalgo was instrumental in securing roles for her, allowing Callas to earn a small salary, which helped her and her family get through the difficult war years. Callas made her professional debut in February 1941, in the small role of Beatrice in
Franz von Suppé's
Boccaccio. Soprano Galatea Amaxopoulou, who sang in the chorus, later recalled, "Even in rehearsal, Maria's fantastic performing ability had been obvious, and from then on, the others started trying ways of preventing her from appearing." Fellow singer Maria Alkeou similarly recalled that the established sopranos Nafsika Galanou and Anna (Zozó) Remmoundou "used to stand in the wings while [Callas] was singing and make remarks about her, muttering, laughing, and point their fingers at her". Despite these hostilities, Callas managed to continue and made her debut in a leading role in August 1942 as Tosca, going on to sing the role of Marta in
Eugen d'Albert's
Tiefland at the Olympia Theatre. Callas's performance as Marta received glowing reviews. Critic Spanoudi declared Callas "an extremely dynamic artist possessing the rarest dramatic and musical gifts", and Evangelos Magkliveras evaluated Callas's performance for the weekly
To Radiophonon: The singer who took the part of Marta, that new star in the Greek firmament, with a matchless depth of feeling, gave a theatrical interpretation well up to the standard of a tragic actress. About her exceptional voice with its astonishing natural fluency, I do not wish to add anything to the words of Alexandra Lalaouni: 'Kalogeropoulou is one of those God-given talents that one can only marvel at.' Following these performances, even Callas's detractors began to refer to her as "The God-Given". Some time later, watching Callas rehearse
Beethoven's
Fidelio, rival soprano Anna Remoundou asked a colleague "Could it be that there is something divine and we haven't realized it?" Following
Tiefland, Callas sang the role of Santuzza in
Cavalleria rusticana again and followed it with
O Protomastoras (
Manolis Kalomiris) at the ancient
Odeon of Herodes Atticus at the foot of the
Acropolis. During August and September 1944 Callas performed the role of Leonore in a Greek-language production of
Fidelio, again at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus. German critic
Friedrich Herzog, who attended the performances, declared Leonore Callas's "greatest triumph": When Maria Kaloyeropoulou's Leonore let her soprano soar out radiantly in the untrammelled jubilation of the duet, she rose to the most sublime heights ... Here she gave bud, blossom and fruit to that harmony of sound that also ennobled the art of the prima donna. After the liberation of Greece, de Hidalgo advised Callas to establish herself in Italy. Callas proceeded to give a series of concerts around Greece, and then, against her teacher's advice, she returned to America to see her father and to further pursue her career. When she left Greece on September 14, 1945, two months short of her 22nd birthday, Callas had given 56 performances in seven operas and had appeared in around 20 recitals. Callas considered her Greek career as the foundation of her musical and dramatic upbringing, saying "When I got to the big career, there were no surprises for me."
Main operatic career After returning to the United States and reuniting with her father in September 1945, Callas made the round of auditions. In December of that year, she auditioned for
Edward Johnson, general manager of the
Metropolitan Opera, and was favorably received: "Exceptional voice—ought to be heard very soon on stage". Callas said that the Metropolitan Opera offered her
Madama Butterfly and
Fidelio, to be performed in Philadelphia and sung in English, both of which she declined, saying that she felt too fat for
Butterfly and did not like the idea of opera in English. Subsequently he recommended Callas to retired tenor and impresario
Giovanni Zenatello. During her audition, Zenatello became so excited that he jumped up and joined Callas in the act 4 duet. She was engaged to sing the role of Brünnhilde, in
Die Walküre, at the
Teatro la Fenice, when
Margherita Carosio, who was engaged to sing Elvira in
I puritani, in the same theatre, fell ill. Unable to find a replacement for Carosio, Serafin told Callas that she would be singing Elvira in six days. When Callas protested that she not only did not know the role, but also had three more Brünnhildes to sing, he told her "I guarantee that you can".
Franco Zeffirelli recalled, "What she did in Venice was really incredible. You need to be familiar with opera to realize the size of her achievement. It was as if someone asked
Birgit Nilsson, who is famous for her great
Wagnerian voice, to substitute overnight for
Beverly Sills, who is one of the great
coloratura sopranos of our time." Scott asserts that "Of all the many roles Callas undertook, it is doubtful if any had a more far-reaching effect." and he directed her in lavish new productions of
La vestale,
La traviata,
La sonnambula,
Anna Bolena and
Iphigénie en Tauride. Callas was instrumental in arranging
Franco Corelli's debut at La Scala in 1954, where he sang Licinio in
Spontini's La vestale opposite Callas's Julia. The two had sung together for the first time the year previously in Rome in a production of
Norma.
Anthony Tommasini wrote that Corelli had "earned great respect from the fearsomely demanding Callas, who, in Mr Corelli, finally had someone with whom she could act." The two collaborated several more times at La Scala, singing opposite each other in productions of
Fedora (1956),
Il pirata (1958) and
Poliuto (1960). Their partnership continued throughout the rest of Callas's career. where Callas lived with Giovanni Battista Meneghini between 1950 and 1959 The night of the day she married Meneghini in Verona, she sailed for Argentina to sing at the
Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. Callas made her South American debut in Buenos Aires on May 20, 1949, during the European summer opera recess.
Aida,
Turandot and
Norma roles were directed by Serafin, supported by
Mario Del Monaco,
Fedora Barbieri and Nicola Rossi-Lemeni. These were her only appearances on this world-renowned stage. Her debut in the United States was five years later in Chicago in 1954, and "with the Callas
Norma,
Lyric Opera of Chicago was born." Her Metropolitan Opera debut, opening the Met's seventy-second season on October 29, 1956, was again with
Norma, but was preceded by an unflattering cover story in
Time magazine, which rehashed all of the Callas clichés, including her temper, her supposed rivalry with Renata Tebaldi, and especially her difficult relationship with her mother. She further consolidated this company's standing when, in 1958, she gave "a towering performance as Violetta in
La traviata, and that same year, in her only American performances of
Medea, gave an interpretation of the title role worthy of Euripides." ; performers in
Cherubini's
Medea, Milan, 1957 In 1958, a feud with general manager
Rudolf Bing led to Callas's Metropolitan Opera contract being cancelled. Impresario
Allen Oxenburg realised that this situation provided him with an opportunity for his own company, the
American Opera Society, and he accordingly approached her with a contract to perform Imogene in
Il pirata. She accepted and sang the role in a January 1959 performance that according to opera critic
Allan Kozinn "quickly became legendary in operatic circles". Bing and Callas later reconciled their differences, and she returned to the Met in 1965 to sing the title role in two performances as Tosca opposite Franco Corelli as Cavaradossi for one performance (March 19, 1965) and
Richard Tucker (March 25, 1965) with
Tito Gobbi as Scarpia for her final performances at the Met. In 1952, she made her London debut at the
Royal Opera House in
Norma with veteran
mezzo-soprano Ebe Stignani as Adalgisa, a performance which survives on record and also features the young
Joan Sutherland in the small role of Clotilde. In 1968, Callas told
Edward Downes that during her initial performances in Cherubini's
Medea in May 1953, she realized that she needed a leaner face and figure to do dramatic justice to this as well as the other roles she was undertaking. She added, I was getting so heavy that even my vocalizing was getting heavy. I was tiring myself, I was perspiring too much, and I was really working too hard. And I wasn't really well, as in health; I couldn't move freely. And then I was tired of playing a game, for instance playing this beautiful young woman, and I was heavy and uncomfortable to move around. In any case, it was uncomfortable and I didn't like it. So I felt now if I'm going to do things right—I've studied all my life to put things right musically, so why don't I diet and put myself into a certain condition where I'm presentable. This incident began the rivalry, which reached a fever pitch in the mid-1950s, at times even engulfing the two women themselves, who were said by their more fanatical followers to have engaged in verbal barbs in each other's direction. Tebaldi was quoted as saying, "I have one thing that Callas doesn't have: a heart", However, witnesses to the interview stated that Callas had said only "champagne with cognac", and that it was a bystander who had quipped: "... No ... with Coca-Cola." Nevertheless, the
Time reporter attributed the latter comment to Callas. Callas visited Tebaldi after a performance of
Adriana Lecouvreur at the Met in 1968, and the two were reunited. In 1978, Tebaldi spoke warmly of her late colleague and summarized this rivalry: This rivality was really building from the people of the newspapers and the fans. But I think it was very good for both of us, because the publicity was so big and it created a very big interest about me and Maria and was very good in the end. But I don't know why they put this kind of rivality, because the voice was very different. She was really something unusual. And I remember that I was very young artist too, and I stayed near the radio every time that I know that there was something on radio by Maria.
Louise Caselotti, who worked with Callas in 1946 and 1947, prior to her Italian debut, felt that it was not the heavy roles that hurt Callas's voice, but the lighter ones. Several singers have suggested that Callas's heavy use of the chest voice led to stridency and unsteadiness with the high notes. In the same vein,
Joan Sutherland, who heard Callas throughout the 1950s, said in a BBC interview, [Hearing Callas in
Norma in 1952] was a shock, a wonderful shock. You just got shivers up and down the spine. It was a bigger sound in those earlier performances, before she lost weight. I think she tried very hard to recreate the sort of "fatness" of the sound which she had when she was as fat as she was. But when she lost the weight, she couldn't seem to sustain the great sound that she had made, and the body seemed to be too frail to support that sound that she was making. Oh, but it was oh so exciting. It was thrilling. I don't think that anyone who heard Callas after 1955 really heard the Callas voice. Michael Scott has proposed that Callas's loss of strength and breath support was directly caused by her rapid and progressive weight loss, This continual change in posture has been cited as visual proof of a progressive loss of breath support. It was at this time that unsteady top notes first begin to appear. Voigt explained how her dramatic weight loss affected her breathing and breath support: Much of what I did with my weight was very natural, vocally. Now I've got a different body—there's not as much of me around. My diaphragm function, the way my throat feels, is not compromised in any way. But I do have to think about it more now. I have to remind myself to keep my ribs open. I have to remind myself, if my breath starts to stack. When I took a breath before, the weight would kick in and give it that extra whhoomf! Now it doesn't do that. If I don't remember to get rid of the old air and re-engage the muscles, the breath starts stacking, and that's when you can't get your phrase, you crack high notes. Callas attributed her problems to a loss of confidence brought about by a loss of breath support, even though she does not make the connection between her weight and her breath support. In an April 1977 interview with journalist Philippe Caloni, she stated, My best recordings were made when I was skinny, and I say skinny, not slim, because I worked a lot and couldn't gain weight back; I became even too skinny ... I had my greatest successes –
Lucia,
Sonnambula,
Medea,
Anna Bolena – when I was skinny as a nail. Even for my first time here in Paris in 1958 when the show was broadcast through Eurovision, I was skinny. Really skinny." And shortly before her death, Callas confided her own thoughts on her vocal problems to Peter Dragadze: I never lost my voice, but I lost strength in my diaphragm. ... Because of those organic complaints, I lost my courage and boldness. My vocal cords were and still are in excellent condition, but my 'sound boxes' have not been working well even though I have been to all the doctors. The result was that I overstrained my voice, and that caused it to wobble. (
Gente, October 1, 1977) Whether Callas's vocal decline was due to ill health, early menopause, over-use and abuse of her voice, loss of breath-support, loss of confidence, or weight loss will continue to be debated. Whatever the cause may have been, her singing career was effectively over by age 40, and even at the time of her death at age 53, according to Walter Legge, "she ought still to have been singing magnificently". At an event hosted by the journal
Il Saggiatore Musicale, Fussi and Paolillo presented documentation showing when and how her voice changed over time. Using modern audio technology, they analyzed live Callas studio recordings from the 1950s through the 1970s, looking for signs of deterioration. Spectrographic analysis showed that she was losing the top half of her range. Fussi observed video recordings in which Callas's posture seemed strained and weakened. He felt that her drastic weight loss in 1954 further contributed to reduced physical support of her voice. Fussi and Paolillo also examined restored footage of the infamous 1958
Norma "walkout" in Rome, which led to harsh criticism of Callas as a temperamental superstar. By applying spectrographic analysis to that footage, the researchers observed her voice was tired and she lacked control and that she had bronchitis and tracheitis as she claimed, and that the dermatomyositis was already causing her muscles to deteriorate.
Scandals and later career The latter half of Callas's career was marked by a number of scandals. Following a performance of
Madama Butterfly in Chicago in 1955, Callas was confronted by a process server who handed her papers about a lawsuit brought by Eddy Bagarozy, who claimed he was her agent. Callas was photographed with her mouth turned in a furious snarl. The photo was sent around the world and gave rise to the myth of Callas as a temperamental
prima donna and a "Tigress". In 1956, just before her debut at the Metropolitan Opera,
Time ran a damaging cover story about Callas, with special attention paid to her difficult relationship with her mother and some unpleasant exchanges between the two. Callas's relationship with La Scala had also started to become strained after the Edinburgh incident, and this effectively severed her major ties with her artistic home. Later in 1958, Callas and Rudolf Bing were in discussion about her season at the Met. She was scheduled to perform in Verdi's
La traviata and in
Macbeth, two very different operas which almost require totally different singers. Callas and the Met could not reach an agreement, and before the opening of
Medea in Dallas, Bing sent a telegram to Callas terminating her contract. Headlines of "Bing Fires Callas" appeared in newspapers around the world.
Onassis, final years, and death In 1957, while still married to husband Giovanni Battista Meneghini, Callas was introduced to Greek shipping magnate
Aristotle Onassis at a party given in her honor by
Elsa Maxwell after a performance in Donizetti's
Anna Bolena. In his book about his wife, Meneghini states categorically that Maria Callas was unable to bear children. Various sources also dismiss Gage's claim, as they note that the birth certificates Gage used to prove this "secret child" were issued in 1998, twenty-one years after Callas's death. Still other sources claim that Callas had at least one abortion while involved with Onassis. In 1966, Callas
renounced her U.S. citizenship at the
American Embassy in Paris, to facilitate the end of her marriage to Meneghini. This was because after her renunciation, she was only a Greek citizen, and under Greek law of that time, a Greek could legally marry only in a
Greek Orthodox church. As she had married in a Roman Catholic church, this divorced her in Greece. The renunciation also helped her finances, as she no longer had to pay U.S. taxes on her income. Her relationship with Onassis ended two years later in 1968, when he left Callas for
Jacqueline Kennedy. However, the Onassis family's private secretary Kiki writes in her memoir that even while Aristotle was with Jackie, he frequently met with Maria in Paris, where they resumed what had now become a clandestine affair. A funerary liturgy was held at
St Stephen's Greek Orthodox Cathedral on rue Georges-Bizet, Paris on September 20, 1977. She was later cremated at the
Père Lachaise Cemetery and her ashes were placed in the
columbarium there. After being stolen and later recovered, they were scattered over the Aegean Sea, off the coast of Greece, according to her wish, in the spring of 1979. During a 1978 interview, upon being asked "Was it worth it to Maria Callas? She was a lonely, unhappy, often difficult woman", music critic and Callas's friend John Ardoin replied:That's such a difficult question. There are times, you know, when there are people – certain people who are blessed, and cursed, with an extraordinary gift, in which the gift is almost greater than the human being. And Callas was one of these people. It was almost as if her wishes, her life, her own happiness were all subservient to this incredible, incredible gift that she was given, this gift that reached out and taught us all – taught us things about music we knew very well, but showed us new things, things we never thought about, new possibilities. I think that's why singers admire her so; I think that's why conductors admire her so; I know that's why I admire her so. And she paid a tremendously difficult and expensive price for this career. I don't think she always understood what she did or why she did. She knew she had a tremendous effect on audiences and on people. But it was not something that she could always live with gracefully or happily. I once said to her, "It must be very enviable to be Maria Callas." And she said, "No, it's a very terrible thing to be Maria Callas, because it's a question of trying to understand something you can never really understand." Because she couldn't explain what she did – it was all done by instinct; it was something, incredibly, embedded deep within her. This claim is corroborated by Callas' sister Yakinthi "Jackie" in her 1990 book
Sisters, wherein she asserts that Devetzi conned Maria out of control of half of her estate while promising to establish the Maria Callas Foundation to provide scholarships for young singers; after hundreds of thousands of dollars had allegedly vanished, Devetzi finally did establish the foundation. == Voice ==