The New Yorker:

Legend persists that the opera diva ruined her own voice for the sake of vanity and café society. But what she really sacrificed herself to was the music.

By Will Crutchfield
November 5, 1995

If only Maria Callas hadn’t got mixed up with Ari and Jackie, we would be less aware of her life after singing, and that would be better. The most celebrated operatic soprano of the twentieth century, unable to find peace or purpose in her twelve years of premature retirement and unable to rehabilitate herself as a performer, wound up an overmedicated recluse in Paris, a city that never knew her in her prime. By the time she died there, in 1977, at the age of fifty-three, her career had long since ebbed into fitful and mostly unfulfilled comeback projects, and her fame—the pure, resonant fame of noble achievement—had been admixed with notoriety. The stormy, capricious diva who abandoned husband and stage for a seductive billionaire, only to be dumped in favor of a President’s widow, attained a level of name recognition that singing in opera could never have brought.

Within the opera house, Callas mattered in a way no opera singer had since Fyodor Chaliapin and none has yet mattered after her. She was not just celebrated and dominant in her field but permanently influential and artistically important in it. She achieved in her singing a level of musicality and technical capacity which places her among the greatest musicians (in any genre) of the century; she acted her roles with a physical eloquence that impressed audiences deeply; she restored to circulation a body of operatic literature that had lacked a commanding exponent for many years; and, finally, she gave a stunning example—unprecedented, at least in this century—of a major singer going to pieces vocally in mid-career.

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