But that's been changed by the Callas documentary called "Maria By Callas," which is now out on DVD and Blu-ray. Maria Callas is one of the most recorded opera singers of all time, though there are relatively few films or videos of her compared to the number of her recordings. Maria By Callas can be seen at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.This is FRESH AIR. Also memorable is a concert performance of Georges Bizet’s Carmen-Habanera, where Callas performs, not in the character of the Andalusian femme fatale, but as an adored performer reveling in her talent and flirting with her audience.Īt least on one level Maria on Callas succeeds admirably: It leaves you wanting more. The years and dates of the soundtrack and filmed performances aren’t always clearly identified onscreen, which can be frustrating of those of us who have not internalized Callas’s career history.Īmong the milestones, we do see her 1958 Paris Opera debut, performing the famously demanding Casta Diva aria from one of her signature roles as the druidic priestess in Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma. Callas comes across as a sympathetic figure, highly intelligent, personally self-deprecating but artistically uncompromising. She describes how she compartmentalizes herself into Maria, a shy homebody, and Callas, the intense Artist, although she says "If someone really tries to listen to me, he will find all myself there." The most intimate of the conversations is the Frost interview, which is thread throughout the film. (In her later years, she was treated for dermatomyositis, a disease which causes muscle and tissue failure and may have caused her vocal deterioration the treatment may have led to the heart attack that killed her.) In one interview, Callas refers to stopping performance because of health issues, though the nature of those issues is not mentioned. We see little about her marriage to Giovanni Battista Meneghini and nothing about her dramatic weight loss in her early thirties from about 200 to 120 pounds (which launched an ongoing debate about how her weight loss affected her voice). But for those of us not steeped in her history, the defense lacks context. There’s a sense here that Volf wants Callas speak for herself as a corrective to the myth of the demanding diva. Instead, we get a lot of soundtrack and scenes of Callas arriving at airports, looking devastatingly glamorous in her Kohl-eye makeup and fur stoles, as she meets a press throng and grants on-the-fly interviews to the likes of Edward R. One of the problems of Volf’s “in her own words” approach is that it makes for a very elliptical biography. And currently, there’s a world-wide concert tour featuring a hologram of Callas performing to pre-recorded music. Along with the books, documentaries and steady stream of posthumous recordings, there was Terrence McNally’s 1995 play, Master Class and Franco Zeffirelli’s 2002 feature film, Callas Forever (starring Fanny Ardant). The business of resurrecting Callas, who died in 1977 at the age of 53, has become a form of cultural necromancy. Most of Callas’s fans today won’t have seen her live and none of her opera performances were recorded on film in their entirety. In the 1950s, her fame became worldwide as her revered vocal technique, acting skill and beauty (and a scandalous extra-marital affair with shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis) established her as the most famous opera singer of the century. She trained in Greece and later Italy, where she became a star in the 1940s. Callas, was born to a Greek-American family in New York in 1923, who then moved back to their home country before the Second World War.