Maria Callas Arias
Maria Callas Opera Arias

NPR’s sites use cookies, similar tracking and storage technologies, and information about the device you use to access our sites (together, “cookies”) to enhance your viewing, listening and user experience, personalize content, personalize messages from NPR’s sponsors, provide social media features, and analyze NPR’s traffic. This information is shared with social media, sponsorship, analytics, and other vendors or service providers. See details.

About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators. Callas became the greatest opera diva after those tortuous years. During those years, musician and Spanish soprano Elvira Hidalgo was her solace and inspiration to show the world what she was capable of. She was radiant, elegant, strong, and a little bit arrogant. She made her debut in 1942, at the Greek National Opera, in Puccini's Tosca. Official website of Maria Callas: soprano, opera legend, ‘La Divina’. Diva of La Scala, celebrated as La traviata, Tosca, Norma, Lucia di Lammermoor, Medea.

You may click on “Your Choices” below to learn about and use cookie management tools to limit use of cookies when you visit NPR’s sites. You can adjust your cookie choices in those tools at any time. If you click “Agree and Continue” below, you acknowledge that your cookie choices in those tools will be respected and that you otherwise agree to the use of cookies on NPR’s sites.

September 17, 1977

OBITUARY

Maria Callas, 53, Is Dead of Heart Attack in Paris

By RAYMOND ERICSON

Maria Callas, the soprano whose intensely dramatic portrayals made her the most exciting opera singer of her time, died of a heart attack yesterday at her home in Paris. She was 53 years old.

Miss Callas had told some friends this summer that she was concerned about her health, but other associates reported that she had been in perfect health and was preparing to write her autobiography for a New York publisher.

She once said, 'Wherever I am, it is hectic.' This may even have been an understatement. Controversy, legend and myth surrounded the soprano throughout the major part of her career. Those who admired her felt that she was one of the greatest opera singers of all time, while others believed that her vocal inadequacies precluded any such claim.

Disputes and legal action seemed to arise wherever she sang. Her private life was seldom out of the limelight. Yet there was no denying that it was the magic of her personality that made every move of hers newsworthy.

Maria Callas Arias

'Awesome Stage Projection'

A balanced reaction to Miss Callas's artistry was expressed by Harold C. Schonberg, the music critic of The New York Times, after her return to the Metropolitan Opera in 1965 in the title role of Puccini's 'Tosca.'

'If you want brains, an awesome stage projection, intensity and musicianship, Miss Callas can supply those commodities more than any soprano around,' Mr. Schonberg wrote. 'But if you look for voice and vocal splendor in your Tosca, Miss Callas is not the one to make you happy.'

Earlier in the review he had written that 'her conception of the role was electrical. Everything at her command was put into striking use. She was a woman in love, a tiger cat, a woman possessed by jealousy. . . . This was supreme acting, unforgettable acting.'

There is no question that Miss Callas sparked new interest in the largely forgotten bel canto operas of the 19th century. These were the words of Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini, most of which had not been heard since the era when they were written. They were considered too difficult and too uninteresting musically to be worth reviving. Miss Callas showed that they could be sung, that the melodies and all the embellishments that were thought to be for virtuoso display could be turned to genuine dramatic use. It opened up a whole new repertory for singers such as Joan Sutherland and Beverly Sills to follow the path set by Miss Callas.

When the soprano was told that she was considered temperamental, her answer was, 'I will always be as difficult as necessary to achieve the best.' Everyone who worked with her agreed that she was a hard worker, willing to rehearse more than expected, even when a role or a production was not new. Early in her career she sang as many as 16 roles in one season, and she was a quick study. Her own interest in bel canto grew in 1948 in Venice, when she learned the difficult part of Elvira in Bellini's 'I Puritani' in five days in order to substitute for an ailing singer.

Unhappy Manhattan Childhood

Maria Anna Sofia Cecilia Kalogeropoulos was born Dec. 3, 1923 in Manhattan's Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospitals, her Greek parents had arrived in the United States a few months earlier. Her father was a pharmacist. Years later, in discounting the rumor that she had been born in Brooklyn, Miss Callas said that she remembered living in Upper Manhattan over a drugstore owned by her father. She attended Public School 164 at Wadsworth Avenue and 164th Street in Washington Heights, and by the age of 9 was singing for her schoolmates.

The soprano spoke often of her unhappy childhood, which was marred by the squabbles between her parents and her jealousy of her older sister--Maria was squat, while her sister was attractive and favored by the parents. The family returned to Athens when Maria was 13. She won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, where one of her teachers was Elvira de Hidalgo, a famous Spanish soprano in her day. She remembered Maria as being 'square and fat, but she put such force, such sentiment, such wonderful interpretation into all she sang. She would want to sing the most difficult coloraturas, scales and trills. Even as a child her willpower was terrific.'

Before she was 15, the student was singing the dramatic role of Santuzza in Mascagni's 'Cavalleria Rusticana.' Four years later she made her official debut with the Athens Opera.

At the end of World War II, she went back to New York on her own. She auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera at the time that Edward Johnson was the general manager. She was offered the title roles in Puccini's 'Madama Butterfly' and Beethoven's 'Fidelio.' 'Fidelio' was to have been sung in English. Miss Callas recalled the impossibility of singing Butterfly: 'I was then too fat--210 pounds.' As for 'Fidelio': 'Opera in English is so silly. Nobody takes it seriously.' She turned down the offers.

She came close to making her American debut in Chicago with a group of Italian singers, but that fell through for financial reasons. In 1947, she was given a contract to appear in Verona, and she sailed for Italy. She made her debut in the famous Arena in the title role of Ponchielli's 'La Gioconda.' Also making his debut in the opera was the late American tenor, Richard Tucker.

Met Conductor in Verona

In Verona, Miss Callas met one of her most important mentors, the Italian conductor Tullio Serafin. He took her to Venice, where she sang roles that required a dramatic voice, Isolde in the Wagner opera, Turandot in the Puccini opera, even Brunnhilde in Wagner's 'Die Walkure.' In other cities she sang the name parts in Verdi's 'Aida' and Bellini's 'Norma.'

The natural goal of every opera singer in Italy then, as now, was La Scala in Milan. Miss Callas sang an Aida there in 1949, but it was not in the regular season. She would not join the company officially until 1951, because already independent minded. She would sing only leading roles in major operas and would not share a percentage of her salary with a powerful artist agency in Milan.

In the early 50's, Miss Callas sang in a number of rarely heard operas in Italian houses. These included Haydn's 'Orfeo ed Euridice,' Gluck's 'Alceste' and Cherubini's 'Medea.' She had a notable triumph in the last work, which was staged by Luchino Visconti and conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

She was offered a contract at the Met in 1952 by the general manager, Rudolf Bing, but this did not work out because she would not come to New York without her husband, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, who was unable to get a visa.

In this period, she had gained experience and a large measure of success not only in Italy, but also in South America, Mexico and Covent Garden in London. She took off 70 pounds, which left her at a slim 135 pounds. At 5 feet 8 inches tall and with a face made striking by her broad cheekbones, she became one of t

Maria Callas Opera