The voyages of Callas.
“There are two people in me. I would like to be María, but there is La Callas and I have to live up to her.” And if they had to face each other, who would win? “I would like to think that the two go together because Callas has been Maria and in my singing and my work I have been present every second, I have worked with total honesty. If someone really wants to listen to me, they will find everything about Maria.”
This is how the documentary starts Maria by Callas. The story of the best opera singer in history told by herself, in her own words through known and unpublished interviews, through letters in which she explains her whole life from her native New York to Greece, where she discovered her voice, and to her multiple journeys around the world, from theater to theater, from triumph to triumph. until becoming the great diva of the mid-twentieth century, a tireless traveler in search of that Maria that La Callas absorbed so many times.
The diva on stage.
After training in Greece, together with Elvira de Hidalgo, her voice and life teacher, she left to pursue her dream of succeeding in Metropolitan Opera of New York. She was rejected too young and without a career, and she had to return to Europe. Italy was the first stop. Verona the first theater of her dazzling career in 1949. Which she immediately followed Venice, where she got the great opportunity of her life: the soprano with whom she was going to sing I Puritani, by Bellini, fell ill. She ended up replacing her and the legend slowly began to take shape.
But she continued through provincial theaters, where she had to endure staying in "the service rooms, without water or heating." La Scala in Milan she kept resisting, so after her wedding to Battista, she leaves to make the Americas. To Argentina and the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico with a contract for two seasons.
A life surrounded by flashes.
Upon her return, in 1952, everything changes. Her interpretation of Rule, first in Covent Garden in London and later in Trieste, they confirm the unique nature and strength of her voice. That year she will close it fulfilling her first dream: singing Norma in La Scala in Milan.
After that Callas moved to the northern Italian city and from there she directed a career of international successes that soared in 1955, after a radical makeover: she lost 40 kilos and became that slender and elegant woman every second in front of her. the cameras.
She opens the season in the Chicago Opera with Madame Butterfly. She debuts, finally, in the New York Metropolitan: Norma, Lucia, Tosca… Where the rumors about scandals, anger, her character begin... Maria (not Callas) would spend her whole life trying to deny them without success.
In Edinburgh, in 1957, her controversy pursues her and she returns to Italy, to perform at La Scala. It is now that she meets Aristotle Onassis, who would end up being the great love of her life, and with whom Maria would prevail over La Callas.
Maria and Aristo, a tragic romance.
But La Callas had to continue singing and maintaining her status as the great lady of Bel Canto. Her successful journeys continue. And of scandals. In 1958 at the Teatro dell'Opera in Rome she must cancel in the second act when she runs out of voice. The press, on the other hand, believes that she has been a diva whim. She would never recover from that, no matter how much she explained it, and they started calling her 'La Tigresa' . Sure, they forced her to defend against her and attack her with her own claws.
Singing La Traviatta she goes from Lisbon to London, and from London to Dallas, where she receives a telegram with the end of her contract with the New York Metropolitan. New scandal. Disappointed, she leaves for Europe, to Paris, where not only the Opera Garnier welcomes her with open arms but she will end up finding her personal refuge to escape the press and the sadness of her life, like the end of the nearly decade-long romance with Onassis with the Greek tycoon's unexpected wedding to Jacqueline Kennedy.
Before that tragic end that would separate her from the stage for a while, she Callas made several world tours that took her to Bilbao, London, Stuttgart, Mallorca, her return to La Scala and to New York, although not to the Metropolitan, but to the Carnegie Hall.
“A real artist cannot be happy”, she says when in an interview.
The 60's will mark the beginning of her personal and professional decline. When she realized that La Callas had dominated her life and she admits that she regrets not having fulfilled her greatest dream of being her mother, but her work, which has also made her very happy, prevented it. In 1965 she takes a break that lasted much longer than she expected. Until 1973 when he returns to the stage looking for his old star: from Tokyo to Hamburg, from London to Palm Beach. Abandoned by Onassis, she moves into her Parisian apartment at 36 Avenue Georges Mandel, where she will end up dying alone in 1977. And she Maria reconciled with La Callas.