The Unruly Genius of Maria Callas

She was opera's glory and its bane, an unruly genius who could electrify every follicle in the house and virtually at the same time unravel into self-caricature. In her lifetime she acquired the intercontinental fame generally reserved for wayward royalty. Even thirty years after her death, the name Maria Callas represents for opera what Picasso does for painting and Sarah Bernhardt does for the stage: the epitome of an art. If she suddenly rematerialized in her prime today, even Callas might not live up to the standards she set.

Maria Anna Sofia Kalogeropoulou was born in Brooklyn in 1923, and grew up in the New York City neighborhood of Washington Heights. It must have been a good aerie in which to mull a life in opera. The Hudson River stretches far below and on the other side, the wooded, virgin cliffs of the Palisades rear like a primeval Wagnerian landscape. At 13 and already a singer, she moved to Athens with her mother, ensuring that the immigrant's child would return a European artiste. It was not the last of her self-revisions.

She began singing professionally as a teenager, and by 1941, she made her debut as Tosca, a role that would become one of her many specialties. If such an early start is rare in opera, so was the long, grinding labor that followed. She learned immense amounts of repertoire, as if absorbing music through her skin. By the time she had turned 30, she was an icon and a workhorse. Few singers have ever ranged as she did in her early years, from the vocal trapeze acts of Bellini and Donizetti to the heavy-gauge power tests of Wagner to the impish grace of Rossini. Her schedule from one stint in Mexico City gives an idea of the workload she took on: within a month bridging May and June, 1950, she sang "Norma," "Aida," "Tosca" and "Il Trovatore."

Callas never made her job look easy. She galvanized the stage by the sheer extremes to which she was willing to go. Her mad scenes were crazier than anybody else's, her deaths more agonized, her loves more desperate. Even on muffled, scratchy recordings you can hear that when she stood over Scarpia's murdered body in "Tosca," uttering her bitter words of forgiveness ("Or gli perdono"), her ferocity could make the spotlight wince.

In the '50s, her fearless overacting came as a rebuke to all the marmoreal singers who would plant themselves at center stage and unburden themselves of an aria without worrying too much about what role it played in the story. If today, singers are trained as actors, too, and if directors conceive opera as a theatrical, as well as musical, experience, we have Callas to thank. Her range was revolutionary, too. Twenty-first century superstars like Cecilia Bartoli and Renee Fleming routinely forage for masterpieces in the bins of forgotten music, but it was Callas who proved that the bel canto scores of the early 19th century — works like "Norma" and "Lucia di Lammermoor" were gripping and grand enough for modern opera houses.

Like everything else she achieved, she made herself beautiful and glamorous by dint of toil and will. In 1954, at the zenith of her career, she whittled her frame down by 70 pounds. Some critics would never forgive her. The weight loss destroyed her voice, they said; it shortened her career; it sucked her into an ill-fated relationship with Aristotle Onassis; it led 23 years later to her premature death. She lucked into her gifts, some people thought, but she deserved her pain.

Opera is a moralizing art form, and like many of the women she played, Callas received exalted praise and self-righteous venom. One reason for these extremes lay in her voice, which was a riveting but unpredictable force. She could make it do formidable things: caress the tenderest pianissimo, then slide into a terrifying holler; slide gracefully down a cascade of rapid notes; or pack a phrase with weary suffering. But she could also be shrill. Whether overuse or psychological damage was to blame, her control lapsed in the '60s, when she was still in her forties. Her timbre became more erratic and serrated. Her long moment passed. Her love life fell apart. She interpreted her decline melodramatically: "First I lost my voice, then I lost my figure and then I lost Onassis," she said. She died of a heart attack at 53.

There is an ironic aspect to the Callas legacy. Her greatness and her shortcomings were the same thing. Her technique prepared its own destruction: shrillness was the flip-side of that fabulous extroversion. What later generations of singers gleaned from her example, though, was that if they wanted long careers, they should see Callas as a negative model. Singers learned to cosset the instrument they carry in their throat, to measure their output and regulate the flame. After Callas, opera became a more careful art.