Maria Callas

Maria Callas was born in New York in December 1923 to Greek immigrant parents, and moved with her mother and sister back to Greece in 1937 at the age of thirteen. She studied at the Athens Conservatory with Elvira de Hidalgo, who recognised the unusual flexibility of her voice and guided her toward the bel canto repertoire that her contemporaries had largely abandoned. She made her professional début at the National Lyric Theatre in Athens in 1942 and her major Italian début at the Verona Arena in 1947 as Gioconda.

Her career across the next fifteen years redefined twentieth-century operatic performance. She effectively brought back the dramatic soprano repertoire of Bellini, Donizetti and the earlier Verdi — Norma, Lucia, Anna Bolena, the title role in *Medea*, Imogene in *Il pirata* — by demonstrating that the technical requirements of these works could carry dramatic and psychological weight equal to that of the verismo and Wagner repertoire. She held a near-monopoly on the leading dramatic-soprano roles at La Scala from 1951 to 1958 under Visconti, Zeffirelli, Karajan, Bernstein and others. Her recordings with conductors including Serafin, Karajan, Votto and Pritchard left a recorded legacy that continued to define operatic performance long after her own retirement.

Callas withdrew progressively from staged performance from 1959 onwards as her voice deteriorated, and gave her last operatic performance in 1965. She died in Paris in September 1977, aged fifty-three. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of her operatic work.