Maria Callas is the latest star to be given the Hollywood treatment in a biopic, Pablo Larraín’s Maria, with Angelina Jolie in the title role. The film — whose screenplay was written by Steven Knight, best known for Peaky Blinders — looks at her final moments alone in her apartment in Paris, with her glory days far behind her. Callas herself has become a myth — a fabled figure whose heart was broken by Aristotle Onassis, the Greek billionaire and her partner of nine years, when he married Jacqueline Kennedy.
Legend has it that she lost her voice and died from a broken heart. The famous voice was strained, having sung the bel canto repertoire too early and too quickly. Callas’s fame was secured in 1949 when she alternated between Die Walküre and I Puritani in Venice, the vocal equivalent of an adventurer scaling the highest mountain and diving to the depths of the ocean and living to tell the tale. What followed was a decade of triumphs, and her musical genius remains unsurpassed. But in the Sixties critics and audiences turned on her, and her vocal problems were deemed unforgivable; she had abused her precious gift. The last operas she sang were Norma in Paris and Tosca in London,in 1965, and before both she was injected with Coramine, a drug given to mountaineers to increase their endurance. Prior to that she had appeared in operas and concerts all over the world and her canceled performances contributed to her reputation for being difficult. Everything with Callas was, and is, exaggerated.
