Back in December I finally got to see the movie Maria on Callas, a documentary that recounts Maria Callas's life based on her own interviews and the interviews of people who knew her. It is heavy on the interview snippets and footage of the time and light on the big picture, but I still enjoyed it tremendously. As much as I love opera, I've never much listened to Callas, until I saw Norma in DC back in 2013 (time flies...), wanted to get a recording and ended up with this, where she sings her signature role at La Scala. I loved it so much I spent an inordinate amount of time listening to it again and again on my 3-hour road trips when I was driving down from B'lem to Bethesda and back, but it didn't make me want to hear Callas's singing in other roles.
I'm also fortunate to have this recording of her, offered by a student and his mother after he had graduated (long story as to why, which I can't get into in order to protect the student's privacy), and that book+CD combo I got at the Juilliard Book Shop a few weeks before I left the East Coast, thinking it'd be nice to know more about Callas and then finding other things to read. I never got around to listening to the CD from the book+CD combo until I saw Maria on Callas and then I was floored by how good she was and saddened by the way her life turned out.
After seeing Maria on Callas I watched Tony Palmer's movie about her, a more traditional documentary that gives a better analysis of her life. In both movies Callas proves herself very shrewd in commenting on human nature, people who betrayed her or tried to bring her down, although she didn't give details, yet she allowed Aristotle Onassis's betrayal to completely destroy her. The Tony Palmer movie explains the constant battle between Maria the woman and Callas the artist: after she had scaled unheard-of heights as a soprano, she also wanted to know a sweep-her-off-her-feet love story. (She had married a much older man who served as her manager.) Onassis, Greek like her, was one of the richest men of the world, although the movie presents him as a womanizer and a shady character. Callas was particularly vulnerable because her voice started giving signs of strain so it became all-important for her to "go out with a bang". Marrying Onassis would have provided that bang. Instead, Onassis dumped her and married Jacqueline Kennedy - a woman far less talented than Callas, but evolving in powerful circles and more conventionally attractive.
Now, if Onassis hadn't come about, would the end of Callas's life have been much different? It wouldn't have taken the turn of a Greek tragedy, but given the signs of strains on her voice, it is unlikely that she would have remained in the opera world much longer. What would she have done? She tried to reinvent herself, directing operas and conducting masterclasses, but her heart wasn't in it. What a terrifying prospect, to have been put on earth to mesmerize the world doing one thing, to have done it, and then, as someone quoted her as saying to him (I paraphrase), to spend the days waiting for death to come.
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