I on the World: Jolie, Callas and the new Oscar-bound film 'Maria': A remembrance of Callas's final Carnegie Hall concert
December 11, 2024 at 11:29 p.m.
This is a story about the actress Angelina Jolie, opera star Maria Callas and me. But it is mostly about Callas's final performance at Carnegie Hall Apr. 15, 1974, the story I wrote back then about that historic performance even though I wasn't there, and the memories that come to life anew, resurrected by Jolie completely disappearing into the role of Callas in the newly released movie "Maria" after studying voice for months so she could try to sing, look and move like her.
The film focuses on the fading beauty Callas in her dying days in her nightgown alone in her Paris apartment.
The movie was released on Nov. 27 and is now playing in select theaters including Village East by Angelika at 181-189 2nd Ave. in NYC.
The flick was released on Netflix on Wednesday, Dec. 11. But Callas's final performance at Carnegie Hall has never ended for me. It has been eerily playing in my mind for more than half a century.
And not just because my story about that concert was written under deadline pressure unmatched in my lifetime in journalism because of the circumstances involved.
And not just because Callas, the Greek goddess, the diva known as La Divina, one of the greatest operatic sopranos who ever lived, would die just three years later at age 53, her voice and body in decline, with only her housekeeper and butler nearby.
Life as opera, opera as life
She died a shell of her former self with only painful memories of some of the men in her life to keep her company, including the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, one of the world's richest men, who called her his songbird during their long relationship and jilted her to marry Jacqueline Kennedy.
Hers was a final curtain that could have been written by the composing operatic greats whose arias she sang, Donizetti, Bellini, Puccini, Verdi and more, her wide vocal range, dramatic interpretations and otherworldly good looks revitalizing the roles she played to the point where she brought them to life. Because being on a stage was what her life was all about.
December is just hours away as I write those words, my umpteenth Dec. 5 birthday lurking as a reminder that there are a lot less hours, days, months, maybe even years ahead of me than there are behind me. And hearing about Jolie playing Callas in "Maria" stirs up an inexplicable impulse that makes me want to hear that final Callas performance at Carnegie Hall again.
And through the now taken-for-granted miracle of the internet, lo and behold, I can hear that "Ave Maria" Callas again.
Voice from beyond the grave
I call up that performance on my computer screen and once again hear the voice of Callas, the vocal goddess The New York Times referred to as "the most exciting voice of her time," singing from beyond the grave.
And once again I hear Callas’ voice singing arias from that final performance I reviewed for a major New York newspaper even though I wasn't there. Because I had just returned to the newsroom from an assignment elsewhere, not knowing I was about to write the most unorthodox story I would ever write in a journalistic lifetime of filing stories from all over the world.
Callas has stopped singing to me in that online rendition of her final Carnegie Hall performance. I have stopped crying, the tears coming I know not why. Maybe because I am using my computer as my typewriter to write what happened that long ago night. And maybe because I now knew what had happened to Callas before she died. Or how soon after that concert she would die.
Setting stage for drama
It was a Monday night. I had just come back to the newspaper drama desk from the Empire Room of the Waldorf-Astoria to write my review of the Peggy Lee cabaret opening night there during the height of her "Is That All There Is?" fame. It was around 10 p.m. when I called for a copy boy to send my story down the chute from the seventh floor editorial department to the composing room below where the typewritten pages would be set in type to go into that night's final theatre pages. But I was soon to find out that wasn't all there was to the story.
As junior man in the paper's drama department, my job was also to lay out the final theatre pages, write the headlines for those stories and supervise the make up of those pages in the composing room for the replate editions that would put the late-breaking stories in the paper's final four- and five-star editions. And the lead story was missing because the freelance reviewer, a critic of renown from a once great newspaper that had folded, had yet to return to write his version of Callas's final Carnegie Hall performance.
As the minutes clicked closer to deadline, I began to fear the worst. Because that critic was known to be a heavy drinker. And in those days before the cell phone, I couldn't reach him. And there was no televised performance from Carnegie Hall and certainly no such thing as Zoom. So I did the only thing I could think of. I called a copy boy and asked him to get me the Callas advance obituary and special feature articles about her contained in clippings from the morgue, as the newspaper's library was called. I dialed Carnegie Hall hoping for a miracle. Miraculously someone picked up and responded when I asked to be connected backstage to Sheila Porter, the head of public relations for impresario Sol Hurok whose organization was staging the Callas performance. Even more miraculously, Porter picked up.
Pro's pro to the rescue
Sheila, a pro's pro, knew me from my ballet critic role as someone who had written about Hurok productions including the Bolshoi, Kirov and Stuttgart Ballet long runs at the Met. So she listened when I said our critic hadn't shown up to write his review and I needed her help. "I was afraid of that," she said. "He was drinking heavily during intermission. And it wasn't tea." And then, with British understatement, she asked: "What can I do?"
And I said: "Could you please hold the phone out towards the stage so I can hear the final arias?" And Sheila, being Sheila, did without asking any questions. She also filled me in concisely on all that had gone before during the pauses between the final arias. And as Callas sang, one part of me listened and the other part of me read through the Callas advance obit and special features. I began to pound away on the typewriter writing the only story I could. I focused on those last arias and the beautiful voice singing them. And segued into how even a goddess like Callas couldn't help but think of all that had gone before leading up to those moments.
Literature in a hurry
So I was basically writing a quickie profile that evolved from a lede about those final arias leading into a lifetime condensed into 20 minutes of words written to meet a deadline, four triple-spaced pages of journalese handed to a waiting copy boy page by page to hand deliver to the waiting typesetter on the floor below. A printer in turn was waiting to take that type and place it into a waiting form. The empty space was like a grave waiting to be filled with the bare verbal bones of Callas's life.
In skeletal form, the story highlighted the Callas basics: She was born Maria Anna Cecilia Sofia Kalogeropoulous Dec. 2, 1923, in Manhattan to immigrant parents (her father, a philandering pharmacist, shortened the name to Callas, her overbearing mother wanted a son). The family returned to Greece just before World War II, endured all kinds of wartime horrors, and yet Maria, short, fat, nearsighted, still received her early musical education at the Athens Conservatoire. She made her public debut at the age of 17 in 1941. She returned to NYC after the war and began touring. Conductor Tullio Serafin gave Callas her first big break in "I Puritani" at La Fenice in Venice when he asked her to sub for a soprano who got sick. She got raves and went on to establish her career in Italy where she met and married wealthy industrial parts magnate Giovanni Battista Meneghini, 20 years her senior, in 1949. He became her tyrannical agent and manager. But he also helped make her a success. She made her United States debut in 1954 at Chicago Lyric Opera and her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1956.
Beginning of the end
It was there in that operatic temple that she became a legend, revitalized bel canto operas, rivaled any actress on Broadway, embarked on an epic feud with rival soprano Renata Tebaldi as well as her own mother and underwent a mid-career weight loss, which might have contributed to her later vocal decline, neurological problems and the premature end of her career. She divorced Menghini in 1959, the year she met Onassis. And she lived the heartache of the roles she sang, all of that feeling embodied in those final arias she sang at Carnegie Hall.
Like I said, it was a bare bones Callas profile, but it was enough to flesh out the Carnegie Hall story, make the deadline, make the newspaper and leave me wondering what came next. I found out the next day when the arts and leisure editor asked me about the Carnegie Hall story. I told him what happened. He just shook his head and said, "Incredible. Nice going. No more assignments for that guy." And walked away like nothing happened.
But a lot had. That missing critic enrolled in Alcoholics Anonymous but didn't last and never wrote for the paper again. I went on to write countless more stories on travel, theatre and the arts from all over the world for more than a quarter of a century before retiring. And still write regularly for the Westmore News where the ex-college athletic scholarship runner in me, now crippled after a near fatal accident, covers local sports as a way of staying young one day at a time. And Angelina Jolie, in the middle of a contentious divorce from Brad Pitt, is being talked up as a potential Academy Award nominee for the way she brings Callas to life in the title role of "Maria." If you want to see and hear more, check out the film or log on to the Maria Callas final concert at Carnegie Hall and listen to "La Divina" sing one more time as though underlining her own words:
"You are born an artist, or you are not. And you stay an artist, dear, even if your voice is less of a fireworks. The artist is always there." She is. And so are the fireworks. At least in the dying embers.
Michael Iachetta is a freelance writer and regular contributor to Westmore News covering scholastic sports.
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