In Maria by Callas , Celebrating an Opera Icon in Her Own Words
“My predecessor, Rudolf Bing, fired Maria Callas at the peak of her career,” Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, said from the stage at Alice Tully Hall on Sunday night, where he introduced the new documentary Maria by Callas. “So on behalf of the Met, I’m here to make amends.” (Bing, for the record, perhaps less charitably chose to use the word sever to refer to the termination of the Met’s relationship with Callas in 1958.) The film, which is directed by Tom Volf entirely from found footage in the manner of Asif Kapadia’s award-winning Senna and Amy, or Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s Love, Cecil, has managed an interesting (and admittedly pretty timely) trick: Rather than impose a narrative on his subject, Maria by Callas lets a woman whose voice made her a superstar tell her own story.
Callas has been dead since 1977, and so the film braids together her life story from letters to her friends—voiced by present-day mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato—and previously recorded interviews. (Volf’s visuals come courtesy of home videos, filmed performances, and press and paparazzi captures.) It is in the televised interview Callas does with David Frost in 1970 that she introduces the idea that her life is essentially bifurcated into the famous half (La Callas) and the human half (Maria), from which Volf gathers the narrative thread of the project. Opera lovers will be thrilled with the result. Performances like “Casta Diva” from Bellini’s Norma and “Love Is a Rebellious Bird” from Bizet’s Carmen are played in their entirety and much to the film’s benefit—to see Callas perform is to comprehend the power she held over both an audience and an art form. “Callas said it herself, that her singing communicated everything she needed to say,” Volf said after the screening. Those who might like to know more than Callas apparently deemed necessary—about her cultural importance or career—would benefit from brushing up on some of the context before viewing.
Maria by Callas quickly hopscotches from the singer’s early life in New York (“Children should have a marvelous childhood,” she tells Frost, “and I didn’t”) to her family’s departure to Greece at age 13, where she studied at the Athens Conservatory under Spanish soprano Elvira de Hidalgo, to whom she credited all of her later success and with whom she would remain close for the rest of her life. Callas joined the Greek National Opera in 1940, a year before the Nazi occupation (beyond the odd head of state arriving in finery at one of her concerts, however, the political scene never enters the frame). Volk’s film shows the singer transformed in Greece into a stunning (and noticeably svelter) stage presence, and then we are off like a shot into diva territory: a never-ending whirlwind of well-heeled plane exits and grand stage entrances; the ambition and drive that translated into a reputation for “turbulence”; the dashed (and seven years later regained) relationship with the Met; the hordes of celebrity fans (Brigitte Bardot, Sacha Distel, Jean Cocteau, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Grace Kelly, Prince Rainier, Queen Elizabeth, and the Queen Mum, too); the keening, captivated audiences (among the film’s best scenes are those of the everyday New Yorkers who huddle under blankets outside the theater in a days-long queue for tickets to see La Callas upon her return to New York); and an ill-fated love affair with Aristotle Onassis, the shipping tycoon known to the tabloids as the Golden Greek and whom she called Aristo. (If I don’t dwell on the decade she spent before meeting Onassis married to Italian industrialist Giovanni Battista Meneghini, it’s because the film doesn’t either.)
Callas was the leading soprano of the 20th century and one of the most famous women in the world. The lion’s share of Volf’s film shows her at her most glamorous: heavily jeweled, never less than perfectly attired, frequently clutching a toy poodle, the very picture of a diva. We watch her accepting bouquets at airports and onstage and on the city streets (one fan greets her at her car with a life-size cut-out of herself, hoisted at his hip), all the while gamely charming scrums of press as if it’s the most normal thing in the world to be greeted by hundreds of flashbulbs every time you open the door. She is a little bit of an actress, she says, as well as a singer, but more than both she is a star: She does more with her eyes in these interviews than she does with her words.
It’s possible, while watching this movie, to wonder if there was ever a woman as uniquely gifted at being famous—as simultaneously talented, clever, charming, and interesting to watch—as Callas, though, as she would write to her friends in her later years, when nerves and “ill health” kept her cooped up in her flat in Paris, there’s little evidence to show that any of it made her any happier. She tells Frost, and later Barbara Walters, about her (mostly) dashed hopes of a “Prince Charming,” and how she found herself in service of her otherworldly talent, saddled to her career instead. There are grand triumphs (mostly onstage), one shattering love affair (Onassis throws her over to marry Jacqueline Kennedy, and then comes crawling back, and then is lost again, to cancer), and a sense, to hear her tell it, that she missed her chance at what she says is a woman’s true happiness: in the home. “I would have preferred to have a family and children rather than a career, but this was my destiny,” she tells Frost, and then she explains to him with just the tiniest lift of her eyebrow that there’s no denying your destiny, as he appears to visibly melt a little.
Those seeking an indication of the lasting impact of Callas’s legacy need look no further than the after-party of Sunday’s screening, where some of the stars in the Met’s present firmament were on hand at Lincoln Ristorante: Angel Blue, Nicole Car, and Etienne Dupuis from La Bohème; Iestyn Davies and Isabel Leonard from the upcoming new opera Marnie; Eva-Maria Westbroek from the forthcoming La Fanciulla del West; and Anna Netrebko and Anita Rachvelishvili, who are both currently starring in the rave review–inducing Aida, all of whom gamely waved from the spotlit balcony before the film began. “There they are,” Gelb said, “Callas disciples.” And after watching this film, who wouldn’t want to be?
Sony Pictures Classics will release Maria by Callas in select theaters on November 2.
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