Con’s Score: 4 Divas
The tricky title comes from an answer Maria Callas gave to interviewer David Frost, where she says she feels like two people are inside her. The plain Maria, who wants to be ordinary, and Callas, the opera singer who is expected to perform. But there’s nothing ordinary about this woman.
This documentary is all in Maria’s own voice; either through interviews or a narrator reading her letters to friends. (Joyce DiDonato is an opera star in her own right.) There’s no narration to summarise the facts. As she is as articulate, honest and engaging in English as she is in Italian or French, it’s a joy to listen to Maria talk about La Callas.
Director-writer Tom Volf spent four years researching this. He’s written three books on her, so he’s a fan. This isn’t a detailed step by step description of her turbulent life, but her essence is captured.
She was born in New York and returned to Greece as a 13 year old, tall enough to fake her age as 17 to enter the Conservatorium of Athens. Her teacher remembers how driven and talented she was. She wasn’t a gifted student; she was talented and simply worked hard. Callas had no choice – she was driven by her mother and first husband, Battista Meneghini.
Then after all the grainy footage we’re treated to a full song, Norma, which she sings in a red dress as she holds her arms, and you realise what the fuss is about. She doesn’t just sing. Hers was a voice that sears as high as it soars. All 12 Greek Gods were known to cry.
There are many full songs shown, and for me, they’re the highlights. It’s not just her voice that made her. It’s her phrasing, pauses and pure emotions she pours into her work on show.
It goes into a controversial performance when she cancelled halfway through a show in Rome in 1958 when the President of Italy was in attendance. She had caught a cold, suffered laryngitis and struggled through one act. The outrage was front page news and it scarred her. (The Italians have always been jealous of the Greeks) and rumours of her being a tempestuous diva surfaced. (A Greek woman? Never.) There is vision of her being testy, and joking, with reporters, but all I saw was a demanding perfectionist who didn’t want to sing the same operas over and over. She didn’t sing at New York’s Met for another seven years.
It doesn’t shirk from her marriage breakdown with Meneghini or long on/off affair with ‘Aristo’ Onassis, another Greek icon. He dumped her for Jackie O without so much as a ‘yiasou’, and reportedly made her have an abortion, so she never fulfilled Maria’s dream of being a mother. Or a wife again. She does say at one point that being a singer was ‘her destiny. And you can’t escape destiny; never ever.’ Greeks know this fatalistic sentiment well.
We also realise she suffered depression – it was announced at another mid-show cancellation that she was suffering a sore throat and depression. The audience applauded and forgave her. She was neurotic before science understood it. She made a comeback in 1974, Onassis died in 1975 and she suffered a fatal heart attack while rehearsing in 1977 at age 53.
We only hear her speak Greek briefly, but it’s not her culture which defines her. She was simply one of the greatest ever opera singers with a voice that could cut diamonds. She was an artist and a gracious lady who would never have regretted a minute of her life… just as fans wont regret a minute of this documentary.
Con Nats, On The Screen
