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Undoing Maria Callas

Ben Miller

Maria Callas after a recital at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris 1973. Photo © Granger Historical Picture Archive / Alamy 

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.


Comments


  • 16 January 2025 at 1:11am
    St. Sie. says:
    Thank you. The film poster already reeks of high gloss tabloidism. For this insightful critical review you had to endure two hours of Larraín's narcisstic projection. Your pain is appreciated.

  • 16 January 2025 at 4:56am
    Tom Roach says:
    Thoroughly enjoyed reading this review and thoroughly validated in my intuition that this film is trash.

  • 16 January 2025 at 8:49pm
    steve kay says:
    Anyone thinking this reviews was less than charitable should look at some opera blogs, perhaps in particular Parterre Box, home of New York’s opera queens. The film is universally reviled. As for merely choking at the climax of “vissi d’arte’ rather an anticlimax than a climax. No battlements? No Werther like pistol? No leaping into flames? Not even the latest theatrical gesture at the Met by Broadway boy Michael Mayer whose Amneris stabs herself with a sickle whilst Aida and Radames asphyxiate below? Never mind, the Grauniad’s Peter Bradshaw liked it.

  • 16 January 2025 at 11:30pm
    Gene Bender says:
    This review is over the top ridiculous as the author says of the film. (Nor am I saying I'm a fan of the film).
    The reviewer is as "dramatic" as 2 opera queens fighting about Callas vs Tebaldi.
    I should have realized how slanted and silly the comments would be after he called Terrance McNally masterpiece Master Class. The play won a Tony Award as Best PlayStation, Drama Desk Award as Best Play, and a Tony and Drama Desk Award for Best Actress.
    Come off your soap box, remember that you're *not* Norma Desmond, and have another Vodka Stinger while you look for a Hat

  • 19 January 2025 at 9:09am
    Colin Sutton says:
    "What posesses actors who do not sing to play famous singers and do their own singing?" Some actors learned to sing very well in 'A Complete Unknown'.

    • 22 January 2025 at 6:44pm
      Geoff Hatherick says: @ Colin Sutton
      The good thing about impersonating Zimmy is that he’s not far removed from all we frogs croaking away in the bath.

    • 22 January 2025 at 11:29pm
      Lesley Jordison says: @ Colin Sutton
      There’s pop singing and there’s singing opera.

  • 22 January 2025 at 6:44pm
    Nic says:
    "Jolie’s quavering mouth distractingly recalling the drag queen Detox."
    I cackled.

  • 22 January 2025 at 6:49pm
    Geoff Hatherick says:
    Having seen the film, all of this chimes with what I felt. Angelina looks like Angelina and, in the odd moments when her vocals are called for, sings like her too. The half-baked artiness - the conversations with people who may not be there, the interviews that don’t really exist - means that a coherent story is never told. I read that this is “the performance of Jolie’s life”. That may be the case, although it would sat little for the remainder of her oeuvre. Nice shots of Paree, though.

  • 22 January 2025 at 8:08pm
    GC says:
    I watched it last night. Paris always looks great in the fall. That was a plus for the movie. As for the rest, not so sure. Mike Wallace did an interview with her years ago and I thought she handled the old boy well enough. I liked her. And the voice? Well, just go back and listen. Pretty amazing.

  • 22 January 2025 at 9:41pm
    Aloisia Sorop says:
    I liked the film a lot - it gave me goosebumps when Callas was singing her "memories" so to speak. I am sorry, I consider your review simplistic and superficial. I found the film highly symbolic - not much of it must be taken ad litteram - except for a few details such as her depression/servants/ rehearsals/diva status. The rest is a symbolic tapestry of the moments and persons that shaped Callas's path into her ups and downs - her drug-induced visions/interview, her easy transgression of borders between present and past, her struggle with her broken status/voice etc. I particularly loved the metaphor of the piano -continuously moved from one place to another to accommodate her whims - a reflection of her own uncertainty/vacillating self confronting a reality devoid of singing. No, the film does not tell that singing killed her - it is obvious that she was under the pressure of many things that eventually destroyed her . The film is a symbolic and melancholy trip into her last week and a wonderful tribute to a great artist. And Jolie had moments when she was the spitting image of Callas herself.

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