Maria by Callas portrays opera star in her own words
Her fans, and they are many, call her “La Divina,” the divine one, and Maria by Callas shows the reasons why.
Closer to a deity than a singer to her devotees, Maria Callas was an extraordinary opera star who brought dramatic intensity and emotional intelligence to her roles, not to mention an offstage life that included a much-publicized love affair with one of the world’s wealthiest men, fellow Greek Aristotle Onassis.
Everything she did made newspaper headlines. But who was she and what was it like to be in her presence?
Director Tom Volf initially planned to do a conventional documentary to answer these questions and, in fact, spent a year interviewing some 30 friends of the great diva, who died in 1977 at age 53.
Instead, Volf decided it would be more intimate and revealing to do a film on Callas almost entirely in her own words, using performance footage, TV interviews and home movies as well as letters and unpublished memoirs movingly read by contemporary opera luminary Joyce DiDonato.
Despite her great gifts, Callas felt she had been pushed too hard into having an operatic career, first by her domineering mother and then by her husband, Giovanni Battista Meneghini. She would have given it all up to have children and a domestic existence, Callas informed a dubious David Frost, adding “but destiny is destiny and there is no way out.”
Because its structure is tied to Callas’s on-the-record words, not all the issues of her life are dealt with in the documentary. But it does go into detail about her most celebrated professional scandal, when illness caused her to cancel the second half of a performance in Rome and the disbelieving media pilloried her unmercifully. Maria by Callas also deals with the married singer’s romance with the equally married Onassis.
Maria by Callas is at the TIFF Bell Lightbox Nov. 6, 7 and 8.