Maria Callas: A Fictional Memoir

9/15/1977

I have had my moment in the limelight and now I’m left alone in the city of love. As I open the curtains this morning, I’m afraid that it will perhaps be the final time.

It is not surprising that my fame emanated from my voice, for as long as I can remember, I used it to express my inner most feelings. My favorite song as a child was "La Paloma", for I closely identified with the lyrics. When I was about ten years old, a crowd of people gathered outside our New York apartment window as I sang it and applauded enthusiastically when I finished. My mother recognized that her fat, clumsy, unpopular, ugly duckling could possibly become a white dove. After winning a few talent contests, mother thrust me on a trajectory that would bring her fame and fortune. She made sure that I was well fed and demanded that I make the most of my musical talent. To live is to suffer, and whoever tells children this is not so, is dishonest and cruel. If you live, you struggle. It is the same for all of us. What is different are the weapons you have and the weapons that are used against you. That is the combination of personality and circumstance. That is fate. My strongest weapon was my voice and my cultivated musical skill.

Mother ended my formal education after the eighth grade, and took me back to Greece to study voice with Maria Trivella. In Ms. Trivella, I found a surrogate mother, and I soon developed enough self-confidence to leave mother’s cold dominance behind me.

But it was with Elvira de Hidalgo that I found my primary mentor. During my sixteenth year, she not only taught me the path to a strong vocal technique, but she taught me how to dress, how to walk across a street, how to stand and yet pulsate with movement, and how to move and yet stand tall inside myself. She also introduced me to the great operatic roles that I began to memorize, and I discovered a process by which I could breathe life into the characters. It was through them that I could reach stardom.

By age 22, I was on my way to a successful operatic career and I had developed a self-confidence and trajectory that allowed me to do it my way. During that year, the Metropolitan Opera offered me Leonore in Fidelio and the title role in Madame Butterfly, but I didn’t have the proper connection to those roles, and thus, I turned them down. Later, I accepted contracts from the Metropolitan, but only on my own terms.

For the next 20 years, my fame and fortune grew and I rose to the top of the operatic world. I basked in the limelight and relished the title “prima donna assoluta”. As for peers, only Renata Tebaldi came close. Her’s was a beautiful voice of velvet, mine-a naturally hued wool. She was boring. I was profoundly alive.

At age 34, I met the love of my life, Aristotle Onassis. The romance changed my life, but led to despair. For nine years, I found fulfillment outside the operatic world.

Ari loved me and provided me with any item I desired, and through him, I met many of the most famous people in the world.

Callas on board the Christina with Winston Churchill

With Ari, I found my soul mate and bliss, but he was a man addicted to fame, power, and prestige and in 1968 he seriously began courting Jackie Kennedy and on October 20, 1968 they were married.

I knew that Ari loved me, not her, but publicly being the jilted woman, I tried to turn my energy once again to singing, but my spirit was broken. Within seven years, Ari became ill and passed away. Ari and I had experienced true happiness. His death sucked the remaining life out of me and now at age 53 my days are filled with sorrow.

*********************************************************************************************************

Maria Callas died on September 16, 1977. In conclusion, I offer you "Casta Diva" from Bellini's Norma.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-TwMfgaDC8

Information and some photos can be found in the books listed below.

CPW