Maria Callas Live & Alive

Listen - Buy

Maria Callas sang her first opera in 1939 and made her international operatic debut in Verona in 1947 in Ponchielli’s La Gioconda. South America first saw her in 1949, and she reached La Scala, which was to become her artistic home, in 1950. In Milan she performed a remarkable range of works, from early classics by Gluck, Cherubini, Spontini and Mozart, through bel canto operas by Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti to the dramatic masterpieces of Verdi and Ponchielli and verismo works by Giordano. London acclaimed her in 1952, Chicago in 1954, Berlin in 1955, Vienna ’56. That same year also saw her long-expected, long-delayed arrival at the Metropolitan, New York, and the next brought her back home to Athens. Venice, Rome, Palermo, Mexico City, Philadelphia, Dallas, Madrid, Lisbon and Edinburgh were other cities to witness the triumphs and controversies of this extraordinary decade. Her final appearance at La Scala was in Cherubini’s Medea in 1962, by which time she had almost totally given up the operatic stage for the lure of a more glamorous life with the international jet set, led by the American society hostess Elsa Maxwell. The main attraction for Callas, however, was the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, with whom she had developed an intimate relationship. Throughout 1963 Callas gave several more concerts and continued recording sporadically for EMI in Paris, but her relationship with Onassis was coming under strain and she welcomed the opportunity to return to the operatic stage in a new production of Puccini’s Tosca at Covent Garden early in 1964. This was to prove her last great triumph.