The secret shame that saw Callas retreat into obscurity

She was the opera diva with a tumultuous and tragic private life but something else would derail her career as one of the greatest singers of all time, as Meghan Lloyd Davies explains

- Meghan Lloyd Davies

Her talent saw her transcend poverty to achieve global fame, her work ethic made her the greatest opera star the world had ever seen, and her style made her an icon. Add it all together and it becomes clear how Maria Callas wanted history to remember her. “I am a woman and a serious artist,” the great singer once said. “And I would like so to be judged.”

Almost 50 years on from her death, however, the public perception of Callas all too often skews towards one persona: that of the tortured female star. From demanding diva to a heartbroken lover who gave it all up for a man, the iconography of Callas’s art is indelibly linked to – and often overshadowed by – a private life in which tragedy, ambition, talent, and melodrama collided.

Biographer Lyndsy Spence, author of Cast a Diva: The Hidden Life of Maria Callas, says: “Maria Callas lived her life trying to meet the demands of the public, who were often unforgiving in their criticism, especially when Maria, the woman, could not channel the supernatural power of Callas, the artist.”

Such is her continued grip on the popular imagination that Spotify, where her music has been streamed more than 7 billion times, marked the centenary of her birth last year, and later this month, Maria, the Netflix biopic starring Angelina Jolie that depicts the singer’s final days, will be released.

But separating the woman from the world-famous soprano known as “La Divina” – the divine one – is something even Callas herself found hard. “It’s a very terrible thing to be Maria Callas because it’s a question of trying to understand something you can never really understand,” she once said to friend and music critic John Ardoin.