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Maria Callas after a recital at the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre des Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es, Paris 1973. Photo \u00a9 Granger Historical Picture Archive \/ Alamy\u00a0<\/p>\n
At her considerable best, Maria Callas could lay down a performance which can\u2019t be bettered. Others might do it just as well, differently \u2013 but not better. Over the course of a brief career, having been raised by a poor, abusive mother and trained far from the commanding heights of the opera world, she sang an astonishing breadth of roles, including Wagner roles like Kundry that demand sustained strength and power, high coloratura <\/em>roles in operas by Bellini and Donizetti that demand flexibility and delicacy, and even mezzo-soprano roles like Carmen. <\/em>To all of them, she brought a deep training in the art of bel canto, <\/em>scrupulous musicianship and an eviscerating psychological intensity.<\/p>\n Consider the vocal line in the sleepwalking scene in Verdi\u2019s Macbeth.<\/em> Expressing Lady Macbeth\u2019s psychotic break as she is overwhelmed by guilt and the consequences of her actions, it contains both guttural low notes and delicate filigrees at the very top of a singer\u2019s range. Singing it in 1952<\/a>, Callas not only hits all the notes but inhabits the character to such an extent that every note feels not only psychologically necessary but inevitable. The diva baggage that has accumulated around Callas\u2019s legacy is both distracting and distasteful. A dramatic temperament might help create such moments, but they are not achieved without artistic and technical seriousness, without work.<\/p>\n Callas\u2019s legend \u2013 an ugly duckling transformed into a swan and destroyed by her relationships with bad men \u2013 mirrors some of opera\u2019s worst plot points. Catherine Cl\u00e9ment argued in 1979 that opera is premised on the \u2018undoing of women\u2019. Operas repeatedly narrate women\u2019s grisly ends: being murdered, murdering others in feats of madness, killing themselves for love by extravagant means (in the memorable and difficult-to-stage climax of the verismo<\/em> potboiler La Wally<\/em>, the heroine flings herself into an avalanche). In response, other critics have offered feminist readings of the power, both physical and symbolic, of the female voice; and of the agency that women performers had in the field long before they were represented in many other artistic professions.<\/p>\n Callas has not been represented well by others, on stage or screen. Terrence McNally\u2019s trashy play Master Class<\/em> is supposedly based on the classes Callas taught at Juilliard in the 1970s. In the play, she swans on about her greatness, her co-stars\u2019 ugliness and her tortured soul. In the actual classes, recorded on tape, she drilled young artists on the specifics of production, pronunciation and interpretation. Franco Zeffirelli\u2019s film Callas Forever<\/em> features a glorious performance by Fanny Ardant but forces her into a film-within-a-film of Carmen<\/em> that Zeffirelli would clearly rather have made instead. When diva worship turns an artist into an icon, everyone loses.<\/p>\n Pablo Larra\u00edn\u2019s tawdry new biopic Maria<\/em>, starring Angelina Jolie, continues in this mould. An astonishingly self-serious supermarket tabloid profile of a film, it opens on 16 September 1977, the day of Callas\u2019s death, at 53, in Paris. Her last years were reclusive and not especially happy. Her stage career had ended in 1965, when she felt she could no longer meet her own high standards. She was addicted to Quaaludes and in mourning after the 1975 death of Aristotle Onassis, who had left her for Jackie Kennedy in the late 1960s.<\/p>\n