The diva. Life. María Anna Cecilia Sofía Kalogeropoulos dazzled since she was a child. She was a star with a blinding voice that has not gone out, reaching unexplored peaks and abyssal depths. Now that 100 years have passed since her birth, the world of cinema, museums, literature and bel canto surrender at her feet, to La Divina.
His voice is in the memory of several generations and his name floats in the skies like Major Tom in David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Mariacallas is the name of a micro planet, an asteroid, 29834, that wanders through space in peace, with harmony, something that she always sought and did not always achieve.
The soprano was born an American in New York on December 2, 1923, but renounced her passport and died Greek, only Greek, and too young. She left at the age of 53 after an eventful life, marked by the curves of success and the abysses of existence.
“If one day I need help, I won’t expect anything from anyone. When I’m old, no one is going to care about me,” she once told Time magazine in a memorable report in which she appeared on the cover. She did not grow old and yet she is still alive. On her record label, in the classical section, she is still the singer who sells the most records. She was the voix du siècle, the voice of the century, the legend, the eternal.
With all the flowers they threw at him on stage, his life should have been a bed of roses, after the hardships and miseries of childhood and youth, and the overwhelming, toxic and exploitative presence of his mother. However, there was always an aftertaste of unhappiness, of insecurity, in a figure with starry eyes and a curious nose who has achieved a surprising degree of immortality. Roses and thorns.
Love to infinity (Onassis, for example, although it was Meneghini, her husband until 1959, who gave her stability) and see that your galaxy of love explodes in your insides, in your most ardent core, and you remain like ashes in love , paraphrasing Quevedo, living and burning ash. The truth is that the centenaries of illustrious figures last a year, those of the extraordinary ones do not stop being celebrated. This year’s Picasso and Callas will resonate for a long time and come from afar.
A new museum in Athens, which has taken 20 years to see the light of day, a tribute to Marina Abrámovic in her long operatic way of the cross representing the Seven Deaths of the diva Helena. Diva is the Victoria exhibition
Milan, home of La Scala, the Mount Olympus of bel canto, dedicates a series of exhibitions, events and activities to it that seem to have no end. Among them a sensational exhibition, in capital letters, by one of the four Gallerie d’Italia of the Intesa Sanpaolo that presents 91 original images of the 1,500 (negatives and originals included) that they have of the singer. The bank’s total fund is seven million photos after acquiring Publifoto, the most important agency in Italy created in 1930.
Some of the snapshots of the New York supernova have never been seen before. La Callas in a work uniform. With her pizpireta look. In situations of joy: Domestic moments, in her Milanese cove. Or on Aristotle Onassis’ yacht. That she would end up leaving with Jackie, Kennedy’s widow.
Natural and carefree scenes that cover her most notable period, from 1954 to 1970, and that reconstruct and rewrite the soprano’s life. If anything, they sweeten it, thanks to the choice of everyday images by the exhibition curator, Aldo Grasso. Snapshots that speak of La Humana no matter how divine her voice was. “The great difference about this exhibition is that it shows us the life of Maria Callas outside the stage,” Grasso explains at the opening.
“We see her on the street, in the sewing workshops, in Biki’s, trying on the models, in the restaurants… and her relationship with Milan is very powerful. It is a vision of her, of her daily life, of her daily life, we see her in her house, in Via Moradotti, with her husband-she. It is a totally unknown Callas, very different, who tells us a close essence. Behind every photo there is a world,” says the curator, who has worked extensively with the Intesa Sanpaolo archivists.
Barbara Costa is the boss of them all, responsible for the seven million negatives and photos in the bank’s mammoth collection. Yes, it has been a challenge for Magazine to choose photos for this article. How have you done it to select 91 copies out of a total of 1,500? “Well, very difficult, because there is a lot of material. Publifoto’s headquarters were in Milan, María Callas was a highly persecuted character and lived in the city for a long time.”
“All the photos – he adds – have been digitized in such a way that one can realize the variety of images there are, when he begins his career, but also some that had never been published or that were cut out in the magazines where they were published. ”. In Milan, with her second home, La Scala, the soprano was in the spotlight all the time and not always for the better.
“When she decided to divorce Meneghini, the press massacred her,” Costa testifies from the graphic material. There is an image totally contrary to it. For us it is very interesting to see what was photographed and how the photos were cut. We must remember that there was no television at that time, that the images were those that spoke of the stars and in this case, they are more domestic, more familiar photos, which speak of glory and drama.
Curiously, the exhibition opens and closes with two photos of the singer at La Scala, but not on stage. “The first is from December 1, 1954, she is sitting in the audience next to three great orchestra conductors such as –Arturo Toscanini, Victor de Sabata and Antonino Votto-. Many people have told me that they had only seen it cut out without the surroundings, which was very important,” she recalls. “It is the first time that we use only the originals, there is no copy, the negatives have not been used,” Costa confirms.
American by birth (the paternal Kalogeropoulos was shortened to Kalos and Callas was Americanized), buried in Paris, the soprano was always Greek and died Greek. Since very recently, Athens has proudly displayed a museum dedicated entirely to her figure. A museum that has been brewing very slowly, for almost two decades, and that has overcome all the crises of a country with many winged gods, but with the wings of the economy broken.
Maria Florou is its director and she is on the phone right now: “We are immensely happy to open the museum to the public. The origin lies in the purchase at auction of some objects and clothing that belonged to him, then donations arrived, contributions from private collections in which personal letters to friends and family appear. We have a personal album of images from 1947 to 1959, important years in his career,” explains Florou.
The director is proud to be able to display some of the soprano’s glasses that gave her a very glamorous look and that at the same time hid her myopia.” The museum, under municipal management, emerged with difficulties, which the Greek economy has gone through. “Yes, it was difficult, they were difficult years, but here is the museum. She is very important to us and Athens to her: they are the beginnings of her. They are her first big steps towards glory.”