By the time the soprano Maria Callas died, she’d lost the voice that’d made her an icon.
Her voice, which basso Nicola Rossi Lemeni once called “a great ugly voice,” and one critic described as “shocking, like biting into a lemon,” was what captivated the culture at large.
“One colleague said that Callas had three hundred voices,” writes the critic Wayne Koestenbaum. As the books, documentaries, plays and films since her death in 1977 attest, our fascination with her voice endures to a large degree because of the operatic misery of life of the woman behind it.
Maria, a new film by the Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín and starring Angelina Jolie, re-imagines the last days of the diva assoluta as a hallucinatory expedition towards resurrection.
“I lived for my art,” she famously sang as Tosca in “Vissi D’Arte.” “I lived for love.”
Maria is the story of how she died from a lack of that love, and the loss of inspiration.
Maria: The Voice
Early on in the film, Maria sings a rendition of Verdi’s “Ave Maria” to her maid Bruna, played by Alba Rohrwacher, and asks for her honest opinion.
“It was magnificent,” Bruna lies with a smile, flipping a sizzling omelette.
Jolie — who allegedly trained for seven months to prepare for the role — does in fact sing a few lines here and there, her voice blended with Callas’ historical recordings. But, in order to give us a sense of Callas’ former power, the film flashes back to the past in these sequences, overriding her voice’s immaturity with original recordings.
As it cuts back and forth, between Jolie and Callas, the juxtaposition between the quality of two voices — the original and the copy; the artist at her prime and the artist playing her shrinking shadow — effectively positions the film as a sympathetic, reverential, opulent tragedy.
“Naturally the voice is not what it used to be 20 years ago,” Callas once said in a TV interview. “The audience know that, I know it. What is a legend? The public made me.”
What happens, Maria seems to ask, once the illusion fades for artist and audience alike?
The Comeback
Desperately wanting to make a comeback, Maria allows Bruna’s words to give her the courage to rehearse with the conductor Jeffrey Tate, played by Stephen Ashfield, who said of his time with Callas that he, “occasionally got glimpse of the glory through the tatters.”
It is in these scenes, in a near-empty concert hall, where Maria steps into the spotlight and we witness the artist at work — albeit at her worst. She comes up against her inability to reach the high notes she once excelled at, before a wobble, that was manageable, cuts itself off.
“That was Maria singing,” Tate shouts. “I want to hear La Callas!”
By the look on her defeated face, she knows we’ll never hear it. But, rather than expand on scenes and sentiments associated with her artistic process, the film proceeds to steep itself in the realm of melodrama, to, in Larraín’s words, “arbitrarily invent” what he and the screenwriter Steven Knight imagine what might’ve happened behind those infamously curtained windows.
Similar to documentaries such as Callas, from 1978, and Maria By Callas, from 2017, 2024’s Maria can’t resist the temptation to focus on the impact of her torrid relationship with Aristotle Onassis, played by Haluk Bilginer, or to use the childhood abuses she faced during World War II, or her relationship with her weight, to furnish her traumas to wrangle with.
From time to time resentment — towards the public who celebrated and venerated her; the press that praised then defamed her — bubbles up and pushes hard-won tears from Jolie’s feline eyes. But, rather than — as was Callas’s way — express herself, Jolie restrains Maria, so the potential for a range of emotions remains beneath the surface of its botoxed container. What Jolie does excel at is exuding the attitude of a diva, rather than try to impersonate her, but what makes a great performance is a total embodiment of a character, of a dissolution between two souls.
Final Thoughts
“Nobody can double Callas,” Maria once chided to the press; alas, no one has.
Maria’s most glaring omission, though, is Callas’s relationship to the music itself.
“If someone tries to listen to me seriously one will find all of myself in there,” she’d said.
It was not only the masters, then, that Callas served in her decades-spanning career, but in the making of a self-image. It is in the ecstasies and discontents of opera’s great heroines — Elvira, Medea, Aida, Isolde, Anna Bolena, La Gioconda — that one might piece together a portrait that served to complicate the myth rather than compliment what already exists.
Maria Callas — the artist, the woman — was not a mere vessel, for what she did for opera was use her voice to revitalize it and bring the strength of drama back to the stage.
“Your voice is in heaven and a million records,” a doctor in the film says to her.
Her mortal heart stopped. But her heavenly voice goes on, and on.
By: Nirris Nagendrarajah for LvT
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