Maria Callas was a Greek-American soprano who dominated opera in the 1950s and 1960s, reviving the bel canto style and dazzling audiences with her dramatic voice and stage presence.
Her commanding voice was matched only by her reputation as a diva and her tempestuous personal life, which included a romance with Greek billionaire Aristotle Onassis, who later married Jacqueline Kennedy.
Callas’s voice began to decline in the 1960s, and the cause has inspired endless speculation. Her life and legacy have been the subject of multiple books and films, including a 2024 biopic starring Angelina Jolie.
Maria Callas's Early Life
Maria Callas was born Maria Anna Cecilia Sofia Kalogeropoulos on December 2, 1923, in New York City. She moved to Greece at 13 with her mother and sister after her parents’ separation. Her mother lied about Maria’s age so her precocious daughter could study at the Athens Conservatoire with soprano Elvira de Hidalgo. Hidalgo called her young student a “phenomenon,” saying: “She would listen to all my students, sopranos, mezzos, tenors... She could do it all.”
Callas sang throughout the occupation of Athens by Nazi and Italian forces during World War II, a time when 300,000 Athenians died of starvation.
“She sang for her life,” says Lyndsy Spence, author of Cast a Diva: The Hidden Life of Maria Callas. Her voice saved more lives than her own. “Fascist soldiers came to her apartment where she had hidden two British soldiers. Callas sang an aria from Tosca to distract them. The fascists listened and the British soldiers escaped with their lives,” Spence says.
Becoming 'La Divina'
After years of rationing and bombing, the post-war economic boom led to a revival of the arts, presenting a golden opportunity for “La Divina,” or “the divine,” as she came to be called. Her breakout role was in La Gioconda in Verona in 1947. That same year, she met Giovanni Battista Meneghini, who went on to become her manager… and in 1949, her husband.
After wowing crowds across Italy in lead roles in Verdi's Aida, Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, and as Kundry in Wagner’s Parsifal, Callas made her American debut in 1954 as the lead in Norma in Chicago, a role she’d go on to play to sold-out audiences in her birthplace of New York City at the Metropolitan Opera.
“She had a unique ability to combine a considerable size of voice—a dramatic soprano format—with great mobility. That caught everyone’s attention,” says Conrad L. Osborne, opera critic and author of Opera as Opera.
Callas distinguished herself from her peers with her ability to fully inhabit her characters. “She had an unusual ability to seek out the emotional nuance in phrases, in her arias and in her dramatic roles that went along with that particular timbre she had,” Osborne says. “There was a particular color in the voice. A kind of morbid color, a sense of melancholy, that pulled people into feeling a lot of the roles she portrayed,” says Osborne.
What Caused Maria Callas to Lose Her Voice?
In the 1960s, Callas’s iconic range began to falter. “At times, she couldn’t hit the high notes and didn’t know why when the day before or after she could,” Spence says. When Callas began to cancel shows, critics and fans pounced: “When she sang in Copenhagen, audience members said, ‘let’s go home and listen to our Callas records, she’s a shell of herself,’ says Spence. “Callas had positioned herself as the best, and she pushed herself and her coworkers so hard in her prime that there was no room for mistakes,” Spence says. Callas performed her last opera in July of 1965 at just 41 years old.
There are multiple theories explaining why Maria Callas lost her voice:
- Her Technique
“The first culprit was her technique,” says Osborne. Callas’s meteoric rise coincided with the introduction of long-playing discs, or LPS. The new recording technology led to a revolution in home music listening and a surge of interest in opera in which Callas played a leading role. Osborne says it cost her dearly.
“Some types of singing went on records better than others, and she was searching for more nuance that would come across well on recordings. She tamed and slimmed her voice down to the point that it was counterproductive,” he says.
- Extreme Weight Loss
Callas struggled with body image her entire life, and between 1953 and 1954, she reportedly lost over 60 pounds. “She wanted to look like Audrey Hepburn. She lost a lot of weight very suddenly, unwisely, and it could have contributed,” Osborne says.
- Over-Use
“She sang too much too soon—like an athlete or engine that worked too hard,” says Spence. She believes that overuse was only partly to blame, however, and that the core cause was lying in wait within the singer’s body.
- Health Issues
Callas began to experience strange symptoms in the 1950s, losing her sense of balance and even her vision. “She was classed as crazy, dramatic, a hypochondriac,” Spence says.
It wasn’t until 1975 that Callas was given a formal diagnosis: dermatomyositis. “It explains the loss of her singing voice and cut her career short,” Spence says.
The symptoms led to struggles with addiction: “In the 1950s when she was completely overworked, her husband put her in touch with a doctor who gave her ‘liquid vitamins’—speed. It worked for a time, she could go and sing everywhere,” Spence says. “When she began dating Aristotle Onassis, he introduced her to yellow jacket [Pentobarbital], and Mandrax [methaqualone/antihistamine], which sedates the nervous system. It gave her some relief but she became addicted,” Spence says.
Callas's Love Life
In 1959, Callas began an affair with shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis and divorced Meneghini, whom she accused of “robb[ing] me of more than half my money by putting everything in his name since we were married … I was a fool … to trust him.” The affair did not last; Onassis left Callas for Jackie Kennedy, whom he married in 1968.
“A lot of people blame her broken heart,” Spence says. “But she had moved on from Onassis. They became friends. She was looking forward to going on holiday in her letters, but she was struggling physically. Her body gave up—there are only so many pills you can take.”
Maria Callas died of a heart attack in Paris on September 16, 1977. She was 53 years old.
Legacy of Maria Callas
At a time when “pure, angelic voices like Renata Tebaldi’s” were in style, Spense says, Callas revived the complex 18th century style of Bel Canto favored by composers like Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini.
“When she started in Italy they didn’t like it, they weren’t used to it,” Spence says. “They thought she had a heavy, ugly voice because she wasn’t afraid to voice all the parts of a character. For her, opera was all or nothing.”
“For the time her voice allowed her to, she made an enormous impact on opera, and you can hear that in her recordings,” Osborne says. Toward the end of her life, Callas’s performances were overshadowed by her reputation as a diva and her affair with Onassis, but Callas herself was clear about how she wanted to be remembered.
“I am not an angel and do not pretend to be,” she said. “That is not one of my roles. But I am not a devil, either. I am a woman and a serious artist, and I would like so to be judged.”
