“Diva of divas, empress, queen, goddess, sorceress, hard-working magician, in short, divine . . . She passed through the century like a great solitary eagle whose outspread wings have concealed from us forever those who will outlive her.”
—Yves Saint Laurent, 1987
The Greek-American opera singer Maria Callas is one of the greatest artists of all time. She possessed an unparalleled synergy of emotional intensity, dramatic instinct, technical mastery, intuitive intelligence, spiritual depth, and aesthetic beauty never before seen or heard in history. When referring to Callas, Italian film director Franco Zeffirelli boldly declared, “We are speaking of an artist of the caliber of Michelangelo or Nijinsky.” Her influence has continued to dominate not only the classical and operatic tradition but the cultural imagination the world over, as evidenced by sold out hologram tours, endless reissues of her recordings, and the recently released Pablo Larrain film Maria starring Angelina Jolie. In this article, I would like to illuminate Maria’s life, work, and enduring legacy through the prism of Pope John Paul II’s call to artists who are “passionately dedicated to the search for new epiphanies of beauty” and “help to affirm that true beauty which, as a glimmer of the Spirit of God, will transfigure matter, opening the human soul to the sense of the eternal.”
Maria Anna Cecilia Sofia Kalogeropoulos (Callas) was born on December 2, 1923, in New York City. Her parents, George Kalogeropoulos and Elmina Evangelia “Litza” Dimitriadou, were Greek immigrants fleeing the post-World War I genocide by the Ottoman Empire. They had lost their newborn Vassily to typhoid fever and were desperate to have another son. Subsequently, upon Maria’s birth, her mother Litza simply remarked, “Take her away,” and refused to hold or breastfeed her daughter for four days. This was the beginning of a strained relationship between mother and daughter that endured throughout Maria’s life. Litza had unfulfilled desires of becoming a famous performer, and upon noticing the young Maria’s natural aptitude for singing, she pressed her dreams upon her daughter, as Maria recalled:
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.
Litza left her husband during the Great Depression and returned to Greece with her two daughters. She was intent on enrolling Maria in the prestigious National Conservatory in Athens where she could hone her raw talent. After initially being knocked back due to age (Maria was thirteen at the time), she was placed under the tutelage of Madame Trivella, who painted a fascinating portrait of the young pupil:
Maria, a very plump young girl, wearing big glasses for her myopia. The tone of the voice was warm, lyrical, intense; it swirled and flared like a flame and filled the air with melodious reverberations . . . a model student. Fanatical, uncompromising, dedicated to her studies heart and soul. Her progress was phenomenal. She studied five or six hours a day. . . . Within six months she was singing the most difficult arias in the international opera repertoire with the utmost musicality.
After two years with Trivella, she became a student of Elvira de Hidalgo, the supreme teacher of the mysterious bel canto technique. Elvira and her instruction in bel canto shaped the entirety of Maria’s career. Bel canto is a dramatic singing style popular during the eighteenth century and largely forgotten by the twentieth. It literally translates as “beautiful singing,” and Maria defined it many years later as “a specific training of the voice, the development of a technique for making full use of it as a player of the violin or the flute is trained to make full use of his instrument.”
Hitler joined Mussolini’s invasion of Greece (1940–1942) and instituted Nazi occupation during the World War II years. Maria continued her studies with Hidalgo but recounted the occupation of Athens as the “most painful period” in her life. The Nazi prohibition of public performances was relaxed in the summer of 1942, and the eighteen-year-old Maria had her stage debut as the titular character in Tosca, becoming an overnight sensation as the prestigious music critic Alexandra Lalaouni called her “a true miracle. . . . It seems to me there is something else about her; the deep musicianship, instinct and understanding of theater that she could not have learnt. . . . She electrified her audience.”
At the end of the war, she briefly went to America to visit her father and met with the esteemed Metropolitan Opera. She turned down a Met debut and decided to return to Europe and establish herself in the heart of the operatic tradition: Italy. In 1947, she debuted on the Verona stage with conductor Tullio Serafin, who like Hidalgo became another pivotal influence and mentor throughout her career. She described, “He taught me that there must be an expression; that there must be a justification. He taught me the depth of music, the justification of music. That’s where I really drank all I could from this man.” In Verona, she also met Giovanni Battista Meneghini whom she married in 1949, and he became her agent/manager until the dissolution of their marriage in 1959. It was during this decade that Maria Callas earned the title of La Divina, or “the Divine One,” and changed the course of operatic and cultural history forever.
St. Thomas Aquinas defined beauty in terms of integritas (integrity/wholeness), consonantia (proportion), and claritas (clarity/radiance). In his 1999 letter to artists, Pope John Paul II built upon Aquinas’ definition and described the special vocation of artists in service to beauty as “obedient to their inspiration in creating works both worthwhile and beautiful, they enrich the cultural heritage of each nation and of all humanity.” He continued, “Beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence.” Maria Callas was the supreme servant to beauty whose voice illuminated truth with integritas, consonantia, and claritas as she explained, “The voice is the greatest means for expressing beautiful feelings, beautiful worlds. . . . The voice is the soul of the orchestra.” She transcended her personal identity and became an avatar for the divine to stir wonder in the hearts of humankind and offer a glimpse into the beauty, grace, and love of God. Maria always attributed her artistic triumphs to God, as her ex-husband Meneghini expressed in Maria Callas Mia Moglie (1981):
[Maria] had an almost fanatical attitude to religion. In the language she used, in the letters she would write to me, the name of God was in practically every sentence. Success, health, fine weather, and all the good things in life, Maria believed had been bestowed on her out of God’s goodwill. . . . God was always on her side, and would protect her from all her enemies. She even attributed her triumphs to God’s justice, and would say, ‘God has seen my sacrifices and my sufferings, and has rewarded me.’
Meneghini also gave us an insight into Maria’s performance routine, further illuminating the orientation of her art to God:
Before entering the stage she would first go to a church, and remain genuflected for long periods—like a lifeless statue. Whenever she sang at Milan’s La Scala theater, I had to first accompany her to the Duomo, the city’s great Gothic cathedral, where she would kneel in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary which was then located near the entrance, and she would remain there in prayer for over half an hour.
In 1959, Maria slowly gave up her career and began a relationship with Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. Onassis refused to marry Callas and left her for the recently widowed Jacqueline Kennedy, whom he married in 1968. Maria never truly recovered from the emotional and psychological betrayal. When she did return to the stage, the critical reception was harsh, but the public love was strong, with dedicated fans camping out in the streets in hope to see La Divina. Unfortunately, these performances were short lived, and she spent the majority of her remaining years in her Parisian apartment until her untimely death on September 16, 1977, from a heart attack at the age of fifty-three.
The woman, the myth, and the legacy of Maria Callas will endure until the end of human art. Maria has gone on to inspire artists as diverse as Yves Saint Laurent, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Diamanda Galás, Marina Abramović, Patti Smith, and Celine Dion. She has been awarded the lifetime Grammy Award, inducted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame, voted the greatest soprano of all time by BBC Music Magazine in 2007, and has now been portrayed by Hollywood superstar Angelina Jolie in the new film Maria, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival to an eight-minute standing ovation. But I would argue her greatest legacy was her inspired channeling of the beauty, truth, and goodness of God, so that we may all hear and experience our extraordinary human potential for worship and love through the discipline of music and art. Maria Callas is the artist par excellence who through natural talent, rigorous work, and prayerful devotion overcame poverty, war, and personal tragedy to become La Divina, the God-given voice who has transcended time and space to share with us a glimpse into the beauty of God and his plan for salvation.
I would like to leave you with this humble prayer Maria would utter in her quiet moments:
God, give me what you want,
I have no choice, good or bad.
But give me the strength
Also to be able to overcome it.