  
| Maria Callas [Cecilia Sophia Anna Maria Kalogeropoulou] was born in New York City on December 2, 1923; the daughter\nof Greek immigrants. Because of her family's financial difficulties, she went with her mother to Greece in 1937. She enrolled at\nthe Athens Conservatory, studying with Elvira da Hidalgo, a renowned soprano and an excellent teacher.\n\nCallas made her debut in 1941 in Puccini's Tosca at the Athens Opera, a role that she would sing many times, and which\nbecame her operatic farewell a quarter of a century later. She sang in Athens for several years, before making her Italian debut\nin Ponchielli's La Gioconda in Verona in 1947. This production of Gioconda was conducted by Tullio Serafin, who became\nher musical mentor.\n\nIn the early days of her career, Callas sang a variety of repertory, including very heavy roles like Isolde in Wagner's Tristan\nund Isolde, but she soon gave up such parts to concentrate on the Italian operas, and particularly the bel canto works by\nRossini, Bellini, Donizetti and early Verdi.\n\nIn 1949 Callas met and married Giovanni Meneghini, an Italian, who with Serafin, helped to guide her career. During the ten\nyears that they were married, she took the entire musical world by storm. She made her debut at La Scala in Milan, singing\nAida in 1950. She first appeared in New York in 1956, singing Bellini's Norma, another role that became her specialty.\n\nShe was always interested in reviving neglected works, and sang in performances of rarely-heard operas by Cherubini, Gluck,\nHaydn and Spontini. She worked with some of the foremost stage directors and conductors of the day, including Luchino\nVisconti, Leonard Bernstein, Carlo Maria Giulini and Herbert von Karajan. She also developed a close musical relationship\nwith a handful of singers, most notably tenor Giuseppe di Stefano and baritone Tito Gobbi, appearing frequently with them on\nstage and on recordings. Extremely self-critical and demanding, Callas was considered temperamental, and had frequent (and\nwell-publicized) run-ins with impresarios and opera house managers.\n\nIn 1959, Callas met Greek oil tycoon Aristotle Onassis, and left her husband, Meneghini. She went into a brief retirement\nduring the beginning of the affair, but, even after she returned to the stage, her voice started to show signs of strain. In 1965,\nshe gave her final operatic performance (in Tosca) at London's Covent Garden. She was 41 at the time. Three years later,\nOnassis left Callas for Jacqueline Kennedy.\n\nDuring the last decade of her life, she lived in semi-seclusion in Paris. She made some intermittent concert appearances with di\nStefano, and gave an acclaimed series of master classes at the Juilliard School in New York (1971-72). She died in Paris on\nSeptember 16, 1977; the cause of her death was never fully determined.\n |
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