Undoing Maria Callas

At her considerable best, Maria Callas could lay down a performance which can’t be bettered. Others might do it just as well, differently – but not better. Over the course of a brief career, having been raised by a poor, abusive mother and trained far from the commanding heights of the opera world, she sang an astonishing breadth of roles, including Wagner roles like Kundry that demand sustained strength and power, high coloratura roles in operas by Bellini and Donizetti that demand flexibility and delicacy, and even mezzo-soprano roles like Carmen. To all of them, she brought a deep training in the art of bel canto, scrupulous musicianship and an eviscerating psychological intensity.

Consider the vocal line in the sleepwalking scene in Verdi’s Macbeth. Expressing Lady Macbeth’s psychotic break as she is overwhelmed by guilt and the consequences of her actions, it contains both guttural low notes and delicate filigrees at the very top of a singer’s range. Singing it in 1952, Callas not only hits all the notes but inhabits the character to such an extent that every note feels not only psychologically necessary but inevitable. The diva baggage that has accumulated around Callas’s legacy is both distracting and distasteful. A dramatic temperament might help create such moments, but they are not achieved without artistic and technical seriousness, without work.

Callas’s legend – an ugly duckling transformed into a swan and destroyed by her relationships with bad men – mirrors some of opera’s worst plot points. Catherine Clément argued in 1979 that opera is premised on the ‘undoing of women’. Operas repeatedly narrate women’s grisly ends: being murdered, murdering others in feats of madness, killing themselves for love by extravagant means (in the memorable and difficult-to-stage climax of the verismo potboiler La Wally, the heroine flings herself into an avalanche). In response, other critics have offered feminist readings of the power, both physical and symbolic, of the female voice; and of the agency that women performers had in the field long before they were represented in many other artistic professions.

Callas has not been represented well by others, on stage or screen. Terrence McNally’s trashy play Master Class is supposedly based on the classes Callas taught at Juilliard in the 1970s. In the play, she swans on about her greatness, her co-stars’ ugliness and her tortured soul. In the actual classes, recorded on tape, she drilled young artists on the specifics of production, pronunciation and interpretation. Franco Zeffirelli’s film Callas Forever features a glorious performance by Fanny Ardant but forces her into a film-within-a-film of Carmen that Zeffirelli would clearly rather have made instead. When diva worship turns an artist into an icon, everyone loses.

Pablo Larraín’s tawdry new biopic Maria, starring Angelina Jolie, continues in this mould. An astonishingly self-serious supermarket tabloid profile of a film, it opens on 16 September 1977, the day of Callas’s death, at 53, in Paris. Her last years were reclusive and not especially happy. Her stage career had ended in 1965, when she felt she could no longer meet her own high standards. She was addicted to Quaaludes and in mourning after the 1975 death of Aristotle Onassis, who had left her for Jackie Kennedy in the late 1960s.

A comeback tour in 1973-74 had been a financial success but a critical disaster, although recordings from the end of the tour demonstrate that there was still tremendous vitality and artistry even in the ruins of her voice. She was working with répétiteurs until the very end – a private tape of a Beethoven concert aria made in 1976 is thrillingly, if imperfectly, sung. Unhappy she may have been, but she was also working.

We first see Larraín’s Callas in black and white singing Verdi’s Ave Maria, Jolie’s quavering mouth distractingly recalling the drag queen Detox. Unwrinkled, gloriously made up and angelically coiffed, Jolie’s Callas pops pills and floats through her gilded flat like Norma Desmond: alternately praising and punishing her devoted servants, making accompanists wait for hours, and narrating the story of her life to a television reporter who doesn’t really exist because he is a personified Quaalude.

This is the actual plot. The insult of the implication that Callas’s deepest psychological wish was to act the grande dame while being interviewed by journalists is added to the injury of moments such as the reporter-cum-Quaalude screaming to Callas that ‘this is the part of the film where you’re expected to sing … so fucking sing!’

After popping a pill, in response to her butler’s asking what she just took, Callas says: ‘I took liberties. All my life. And the world took liberties with me.’ Later, musing about her plans to her rehearsal pianist, she says: ‘You know, blackbirds have a song that if you buy a recording, on the label it just says, “Blackbird Song”. There must be a song which is just called “Human Song”. I would like to sing it before I stop.’ Any hope that such lines might froth up into a Verhoeven-level camp spectacular is banished by the film’s lugubrious pacing and suburban banality.

What posesses actors who do not sing to play famous singers and do their own singing? In Judy (2018), Renée Zellweger acted up a storm as an aging Judy Garland but then felt her weak, wan, uncomfortable way through song and dance numbers that needed desperate, coltish energy. Any viewer not familiar with Garland’s actual voice would wonder why everyone was making such a fuss about this woman.

No one was stupid enough to suggest that Jolie do all of her own singing. Instead, AI and fuzzy sound design combine various percentages of Jolie and Callas, as though the two were flavors of soda. In the flashbacks to Callas’s glory days, the effect is merely distracting. When Jolie is supposed to be an older Callas at work on her voice, it is laughable. These scenes depict a vain woman who refuses to work, who sings through something once and then gives up at the first sign of imperfection. She peters out on a high note, grabs at her throat, and storms out. It may be true that Callas was sometimes difficult to work with and that in her late years she was addicted to pills and behaved erratically, but no one who spends their life approaching rehearsal like this has sung professionally anywhere ever.

Without the substance of her art, the story of Maria Callas is a soap opera about a woman undone by her relationships with bad men. Andrea Long Chu, analysing the novelist Hanya Yanagihara’s cruel narrative obsession with gay male suffering, described it as ‘not sadism’ but ‘closer to Munchausen by proxy’. A similar condition appears to afflict Larraín, who has also directed similarly constructed biopics of Princess Diana and Jackie Kennedy. He presents Callas as the willing victim of Aristotle Onassis. In the film, she is warned by doctors that her determination to sing again will kill her.

Finally, after two long hours, it does: in a climactic apartment performance, with hallucinated orchestra, of the aria ‘Vissi d’arte’ from Tosca: the heroine’s lament that she has lived simply, for art and for God, and has been rewarded with a cruel fate. As the aria reaches its climax, Jolie’s Callas chokes and collapses on the floor. The film proposes that singing killed Callas: not drugs, not the cigarettes she began smoking when she was with Onassis, not the prying public and prurient press attention, not the dermatomyositis she suffered from, but singing. At least the obsessive Callas queens of yore – my kissing cousins – venerated her art. This film mistakes boring and prurient tabloid tales for the stuff of legend, and reframes her achievement as her undoing.