Maria by Callas review – an autobiographical stroke of genius
The clue to this blockbusting 2017 biopic from director Tom Volf, with commentary by mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, is in the title’s preposition, “by”. The highly-praised film, which bowled opera aficionados over on first showing, is currently available on BBC iPlayer until mid-October. Do yourself a favour and prepare for a ’50s and ’60s nostalgia romp.
Almost entirely in Maria Callas’ own words, accompanied by fascinating footage, this 113-minute feature reveals the fabled Greek American soprano as having a split personality. Maria talks about Callas’ world-conquering career. Doppelganger Callas regrets how Maria might have been more fulfilled as an ordinary mum.
On the one hand, the diva is a frustrated mother explaining searing sacrifices made inevitable by career demands. On the other, we have a statuesque opera icon professing a yearning for simple family life. The backdrop smiley, glitzy scenes on planes, opulent 10-star hotels, perpetual paparazzi, and mag-cover luxury life on “Christina”, her lover Aristotle Onassis’ steam yacht, rather give the lie to that. Pull the other one, Maria.
As the prima donna pouts this homely explanation to David Frost in a grainy black and white interview, viewers across the land can be heard yowling the “Come Off It” chorus from “Who d’ya Think You’re Kidding, Honey”, a pot-boiler musical aimed at alerting the gullible to the wiles of stars. Ms Callas comes across as disingenuous from beginning to end. But that’s her to a tee. She is a self-justifying Twitter machine before Twitter was even born.
Her impish delight in denying her reputation as the opera singer from hell is wonderful to behold. “Miss Callas, did the Met end your contract because you were unmanageable?” “Of course not” (wide-eyed innocence). Cut to Rudolf Bing, the Metropolitan Opera’s then – this is the late 1950s – General Manager: “You don’t end contracts with Maria Callas. You sever them”. Snarl. Ouch! She would not sing at the Met again for seven years. But by 1965, her voice was in all too apparent decline. La Scala, Milan saw her best years in the mid to late ’50s. America’s Met never did, courtesy of the Callas/Bing feud. Before the Met, she sang at Chicago’s Lyric Opera, at its opening in 1954. When Bing pulled the plug Callas showed him two fingers by appearing with the unknown American Operatic Society instead.
Volf, not an opera fan, came across Maria Callas quite by chance. A spur of the moment decision to drop into a performance of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda at New York’s Met had him googling famous opera singers. He became fixated by the Callas legend.
Then he discovered Callas’s interview with David Frost, originally broadcast live in 1970 but not archived and thought lost. Callas’s butler, Ferruccio Mezzadri, whom Volf met and interviewed, had a copy. In the interview, she opens up as never before. The Frost technique, honed to perfection by 1977 when he famously made Richard Nixon blub, brought out aspects of Callas’ personality never seen before.
The interview is threaded through the programme and provides the scaffolding on which the other footage rests. And there is plenty of that to take viewers down nostalgia alley. Fancy the Dolce Vita? Here you go. In her heyday, Callas was as popular in the ’50s as the Beatles were in the ’60s. Callas-mania followed wherever she went.
The relationship with her lifelong mentor, coloratura soprano Elvira de Hidalgo, who crafted the young Callas into the best bel canto singer on the planet, is touchingly told. The passionate artistry of an opera singer more famous today for public grandstanding can be in no doubt.
Footage of turboprop planes, glitzy hotels, flashbulb wielding press scrums, hysterical fans lay on the tones of glamour. And then, private life on the yacht Christina.
Some facts are glossed over. These are, after all, Callas’ own words so she is often self-serving. We are watching more an assisted autobiography than a documentary. The fact that Ms Callas was an awkward, chubby child from Manhattan with a decent voice who gained local recognition when her mother took her back to Greece is omitted. As is the short-sightedness that plagued her acting onstage.
Little is made of the fact that Callas fell out with her family in her swift rise to stardom. The truth is she saw them as spongers and ruthlessly cut them off. No holds barred, though when she denounces her husband Giovanni Batista Meneghini – 28 years her senior – as a sponger and greedy control freak who manipulated her career and was the cause of rifts with opera houses.
Maria was not the same Callas throughout her career. At the peak of her singing powers in 1955, she underwent a transfiguration. Within 18 months, she lost 200 lbs. One meal a day of raw meat and salad. The ugly duckling soprano with the great voice had morphed into the more familiar cover-girl swan, who commanded headlines if she lifted a little finger. Eventually, to swim in the waters of a shipping tycoon, Aristotle Onassis.
But that voice was never the same again. Her more petite frame made it somewhat shrill. And while she could still wow audiences until the late 1950s, that and her early, overgenerous use of the power that issued from a palate once described by a voice coach as a Gothic cathedral, headed her on an irreversible downward drift. Her high Cs became brittle and she tempered her delivery to disguise breaks in her register.
For the very best in Callas, check out the EMI close-miked recordings, mostly produced by the legendary Walter Legge, in the mid ’50s. The recently reissued set runs to 70 CDs! The Swedish Geriatric Ensemble, Abba, managed only 23 albums. Mind you, for them it’s early days.
Callas’ bel canto delivery was ideal for the Bellini, Rossini and Donizetti operas that made her famous. And here Maria by Callas understates. She may have achieved superstar status, but she comes across almost as if she is unaware of her own significance. The simple fact is that she was the supreme artist of the age.
She never says so, restricting herself to sly digs at the opposition, mostly Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi. They both seem to have relished a catty relationship. They were the Lewis Hamilton – Max Verstappen rivals of the opera stage. Spectacular crashes were unavoidable.
It is most impossible to over-recommend Maria by Callas. The Volf genius, allowing the star to talk directly to her public 45 years after her death at the tragically early age of 53, was a stroke of genius.
Maria Callas’ first duty to her art form, opera, shines through. More technically proficient bel canto singers of today should watch. Perhaps they need to be inspired by the visceral force that Maria Callas risked deploying onstage. Many on today’s circuit sound more perfect, but none take the breath away as she did.