The Enduring Magic of Maria Callas in Vision and Sound
Cover art for the album, Pure: Maria Callas (2014).
Callas, much like iconic soprano herself, has a timelessness to it. Tony Palmer directed the documentary film for an initial release in 1978, but it feels almost contemporary to me in 2024. Likewise, Maria Callas (1923—1977) feels as alive as ever. Conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein famously described Callas as “pure electricity.” This spiritual force travels across time and through the screen to vitalize to this day.
What is it about Maria Callas that is so mesmerizing? How does she continue to find space in the popular imagination, well beyond opera fans? How has the power of her magic not faded? I was not at all surprised to learn, for example, that Angelina Jolie will portray Callas in an upcoming feature film directed by Pablo Larraín. (The first stills from production were released this past fall.)
Callas as icon embodies many of the key features and contradictions of the divine feminine. I believe that this helps to explain her enduring affective power across generations and lifeways in contemporary cultural consciousness. As an emblem and symbol, she exemplifies the prepossessing beauty, mesmerizing gifts, and fierce exactitude of so many goddess figures.
The film, Callas, was released a year after her transition back to spirit at the age of 53, while she was passing time in a reclusive private life in Paris. Her great love, Aristotle Onassis, had betrayed her by marrying Jacqueline Kennedy entirely without any notice to Callas, who was given to understand that she and Onassis would marry or at least be together. They did resume seeing each other, and Onassis died four years before Callas.
Callas’ tragic and sudden ending, striking many as untimely and possibly a matter of heartbreak, perhaps has even further enhanced her appearance of otherworldly qualities. Did her majestic magical powers ultimately yield an ill-fated fall? Did she simply elect to leave the mortal realm for more pleasing ethereal planes?
Although the film of course does not give the answers, it contains much direct footage of Callas and her colleagues, who offer close views of her extraordinary force of will and her unwavering devotion to her creative genius. The work also revels in her mystique and in the dreamlike qualities of her experiences on stage.
At the start of the film, a disembodied male voice hovers above Callas’ regal walk through adoring crowds. The voice belongs to music critic John Ardoin, the film’s writer who also was Callas’ friend. She glides in a priestess-like white dress and a royal blue wrap.
“It’s been a year since Maria Callas died, yet the fascination she exerts today is as great as it was during her career. It’s like she’s reaching out from the grave to grab hold of our imagination. She won’t let go of it,” Ardoin reflects. “Her records today are outselling those of other artists. There have been over thirty books written about her, which is a great deal more than figures such as [Charles] Naginski or Laurence Olivier, and the question is why. It’s a difficult question, but it has to do with that enormous theatrical personality as reflected by her voice. But it has to do with another facet, because there is not just Callas the artist but Maria the woman. And the story of Maria is just as fascinating – fascinating, it’s really one of the great tragic love stories of our time.”
The film eye flashes to footage of Callas singing in a production of Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville:
“I am obedient /
sweet and loving /
I can be ruled.”
The film then jumps to a grounded airplane, with an implication that she has landed and is about to emerge, before switching back to Callas onstage, wrapped in a white scarf. She continues lines from the opera:
“But if crossed in love /
I can be a viper.”
In an interview segment following these scenes, Callas reflects on the general lack of understanding and the injustice of the public narratives that swirled about her.
“You might be, as I have found out, frequently misunderstood, hated, attacked. And I have not been able to fight back. I’ve had to sit back and take it in absolute silence. It hurts. You hate it, because it is unjust. The world is full of unjustness,” Callas says.
The indictments and cruel judgments of public opinion even tainted Callas’ experience of going onstage in all her triumphant glory. The whole ordeal at times terrified her.
A co-performer, the Italian soprano Graziella Sciutti, recalled this terror she observed in Callas.
“She was there waiting to go onstage for the last big aria…. I saw, she was in a state of nervousness. I went and said, ‘Maria, for God’s sake… you’re the glory, and you have performed…’ She grabbed my arm – like she squeezed – and said, ‘You know, every time I go out there, they are waiting to get me.’”
The scene then switches to a vexed Callas onstage, hand to her heart. She looks stricken, as the orchestra thunders and crashes with sounds of calamity or ruination.
“What is that fateful sound?” Callas sings, right hand to her temple. “Is it the day of judgment?”
The film also travels parts of Callas’ incredible origins story. She was born in 1923 in Manhattan. Later, after her mother split from her father, she moved with her mother and sister to Athens, Greece. Callas’ mother insisted that her daughter would be a singer and artist. The mother sent Callas to a conservatory in Athens, where she excelled with a diligence and a tenacity that many said surpassed those of her peers. Though Callas was not thought to have the most technically beautiful voice, she outpaced others with her unflinching determination and unrelenting work ethic.
When Callas was a teen, she asked one of her teachers what she might be able to do. Her teacher, featured in the film, recalls:
“I said that, if she continued like this, she would be able to achieve everything. Everything.”
During World War II, Callas was given an agreement with the recently established opera in Greece. She consented to not perform elsewhere in exchange for payments, which freed her to focus on further study.
A fellow student, Arda Mandikian, recalls the dire wartime circumstances during Callas’ study.
“It was a terrible time. Hunger. Seeing people walking in the streets because there was no transport whatsoever,” Mandikian remembers.
Callas would travel to the conservatory, which was a considerable distance from her home, sometimes several times a day. People often would have to sell any valuable things they may have had in exchange for food.
“She was pushed in a way, but Maria had to do what she did,” Mandikian adds.
Callas’ professional operatic debut was in a cinema, the Pallas. The National Theater did not contain an air-raid shelter.
The conductor Leonidas Zoras remembers the young Callas’ uncompromising position on rehearsals. They must be had, no matter circumstantial difficulties.
“There was no electricity, so we used to sit every night with oil lamps. Every ten minutes, the lamps would go out, but Maria would insist on cleaning them and lighting them again. ‘We must rehearse, rehearse, rehearse!’”
Italian-American conductor Nicola Rescigno echoes this sentiment about Callas’ fierce determination.
“I think the secret was her willpower. Callas was born with all sorts of disadvantages … Her voice was not of the most beautiful quality, and still, she made this instrument the most expressive, the most telling, the most true to the music that she interpreted of all the singers of her day,” Rescigno says.
Callas evocatively speaks about serving the music and opening to listen with the soul, where she could find every gesture already within the composed music.
“What I learned from [conductor, Tullio] Serafin is that you must serve music, because music is so enormous and can envelop you into such a state of perpetual anxiety and torture, but it is our first main duty,” Callas says. “He always found a reason for something. What he said [that] impressed me was, ‘When one wants to find a gesture, when you want to find how to act onstage, all you have to do is listen to the music. The composer has already seen to that. If you take the trouble to really listen with your soul and with your ears – and I say soul and ears because the mind must work, but not too much, also – you will find every gesture there.”
The Italian director, producer, designer, and politician Franco Zeffirelli offers, to my mind, one of the film’s most revelatory reflections on the magic, mystery, and dreamworlds of Callas’ performances and life.
“She lived a total fantasy … because, first of all, she was absolutely blind. When she was on stage, she was in a kind of haze. She couldn’t see anything. So, in her fantasies, she was dreaming on stage … That’s why she changed complete personality. She brought out what the character was supposed to be. It happens in the magic,” Zeffirelli shares. “It’s easy to say, ‘Callas was magic.’ But then, there was something superhuman that happened. I don’t know how to describe it, and the right words for it, but she was possessed.”
About the Author
Lauren Coyle Rosen is a cultural anthropologist, artist, and author who focuses on the roles of spirituality and creative inspiration in art, music, and culture. She is the author of The Spirit of Ani (with Ani DiFranco, forthcoming), Hannibal Lokumbe (with Hannibal Lokumbe, Columbia University Press, 2024), Law in Light (University of California Press, 2024), and Fires of Gold (University of California Press, 2020), as well as eight volumes of poetry. Coyle Rosen is currently a fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. She was a cultural anthropology professor at Princeton University, where she received the President’s Award in Distinguished Teaching. She lives in Washington, DC, and in Philadelphia with her husband, Jeffrey Rosen. She has a JD from Harvard Law School and a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago.
