Cecilia Sophia Anna Maria was, according to her mother, born on December 4, 1923, (although official records state that she was born two days earlier), just four months after Evangelia and Georges Kalogeropoulos arrived in Manhattan, New York from Athens with their five-year-old daughter Jackinthy – called Jackie.
Maria very early exhibited signs of her remarkable musical talent and by the age of 10, her voice began to show promise. In 1929, Georges changed the family name to Callas by court order. Against his wishes, his daughters had piano lessons, but he flatly refused to waste his hard-earned money on their vocal training.
Evangelia, however, was determined to develop Maria’s voice, and as the couple’s marital relationship was not a happy one, he raised no objections when, in 1937, his wife wished to return to Athens with their daughters.
Maria first studied singing with Maria Trivella at the Conservatory of Ethnikon and later under the famous Spanish soprano, Elvira de Hidalgo, who taught her the difficult and beautiful art of bel canto. De Hidalgo was full of admiration not only for her pupil’s genius but also for her discipline and her determination to work hard.
World War II over, Maria turned her attention to New York and her career. In 1945, she returned to New York and to the name Callas.
Callas’ extraordinary soprano voice, with its vast range, permitted her to interpret coloratura, lyrical and dramatic parts, and some mezzo-soprano roles.
With the blossoming of the verismo style, the bel canto opera with its appealing melodies and sparkling caballettas had fallen into neglect. Through her creative art, dramatic power and remarkable musicality, her astonishing agility, and her express ornamentations which were no empty displays, but which added to the dramatic intensity, Callas was instrumental in reviving with a new interest the shelved repertoire of the Rossini-Donizetti-Bellini “golden age”.
On April 21, 1949, she married entrepreneur Giovanni Battista Meneghini, 28 years her senior. In 1959, Maria and Meneghini’s marriage was over, she having left him for the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. For a few years, her opera performances dropped sharply, but in 1964 and 1965 she played Tosca and Norma at Covent Garden and in Paris, and again Tosca at the Metropolitan. In 1968 Onassis abandoned Maria; she was shattered.
Meanwhile, her voice, the instrument that projected her remarkable talent, had for years been prematurely declining. Overwork and unhappy emotions, as well as her intense absorptions into her roles, her music, as had been the case with other great singing actresses before her, had all taken their toll.
After that, loneliness, gnawing loneliness, in seclusion at her apartment in Paris, her spent voice stifling her artistic genius, until it all ended in her untimely death at the age of 53.
Callas’ ashes were conserved in Paris for over a year before they were absorbed into nothingness in the Aegean Sea. Carefully preserved on records, with a great artist shadowed behind it, her voice travels down the ages to bewitch, as it has done in the past, music lovers for generations yet to come.