Maria: Legacy of la Divina

Angelina Jolie gives a stunning performance as opera singer Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín’s movie Maria. The American-born Greek soprano, called La Divina by her fans, rose to the heights of her profession against the odds. Born in 1923 in the US, Callas trained at the Conservatory in Athens under Spanish soprano Elvira de Hidalgo. She became renowned for her bel canto technique, her wide-ranging emotive voice, and her dramatic interpretations. She was also quite robust, but began to be cast in leading roles in the mid 1950s after an extreme weight loss programme reduced her to her desired size, that of Audrey Hepburn. 

scandal

Soon rumours began to circulate around the charismatic singer: her marriage of convenience to her manager Giovanni Battista Meneghini, her tendency to have tantrums and storm out of rehearsals, her complicated relationship with her mother, and her apparent rivalry with Italian opera star Renata Tibaldi. Callas was also having an affair with shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, who ditched her to marry political widow Jacqueline Kennedy.

DECLINE

Callas began cancelling shows. She performed her last opera in 1965 at the age of just forty-one. By that time she was addicted to the sedative Mandrax, and her voice was in terrifying decline; a combined effect of poor technique, overuse crash dieting and, it is now believed, the autoimmune disease dermatomyositis. Callas holed herself up in a flat in Paris, seeing only her maid Bruna and her butler Ferruccio, who remained devoted to her until she died.

THE MOVIE

Larraín centres his film on Callas’ final years. As he explains, a defining moment was a disastrous public recital in 1974, after which Callas became a recluse. However, the film is not meant to dismay audiences, says Larraín, but to celebrate Callas’ life and art. On its premiere at the Venice Film Festival last year, Maria was met with rapturous applause. After the screening, the director and stars gathered for an encounter with the press. The Chilean director began by talking about his interest in opera.

Pablo Larrain (Chilean accent): I’m intrigued by the fact that there’s [there are] almost no movies about opera singers. So I thought about making a movie about probably the greatest voice of [in] history, who had a very difficult life. Callas was so isolated from the world because of the public pressure, the state of her voice, the conflict with her blood family, with the entire planet. Culture creates the illusion of these people having these extraordinary lives. But then in reality, once you are inside doors, every soul has the same existential problems.

PRIVATE LIFE

While there are many ways to interpret how Callas felt, Angelina Jolie’s performance has been universally praised. The American actor was asked about her decision to play the part, especially as she herself has been out of the limelight for some time. 

Angelina Jolie (American accent): I’ve needed to be home more with my family and in that time I’ve become maybe more grateful to have the opportunity to just be an artist, to just be in this creative world that we are all fortunate to be in some way a part of. Opera’s been in our house for a while, and I do hope that this film, if anything, brings more people to opera, to explore it and to let it affect them and move them because it’s such a powerful art form. And to me, the immensity of the feeling encapsulated within the sounds of opera, there is nothing like it.

FAMILY DRAMA

The film is about intimate relationships, not blood relatives in this case, but Callas’ reliance on her butler Ferruccio Mezzadri and maid Bruna Lupoli, and their reliance on her. Scriptwriter Steven Knight says more. 

Steven Knight (English accent): The relationship that’s within that family, and it is a family, it’s one lots of people are familiar with, it’s where service and subordination becomes protection and defence. So in the end it wasn’t an employer-employee situation, it was a bond of love between three people, and two people watching a third person disappearing, dissolving. It’s something I think many people are familiar with in family situations. And just the fact that the central character was so extraordinary, had such an extraordinary gift, means that other people orbit around that person. It’s not forced: it’s an attraction. 

BEAM OF LIGHT

Pierfrancesco Favino plays the butler Ferruccio, who remained with Callas until her death. While the real Ferruccio is still alive, his character is fictionalised for the film, as Favino explains. 

Pierfrancesco Favino (Italian accent): We decided not to refer directly to his life and to who he was, since the script was so clear. I think I understood a lot of things about the devotion he had for her and then we transformed it into what the movie needed. But I think that if you meet somebody as [like] Maria Callas, that gives you the possibility of getting a little beam of that light. My feeling is that their identity became what it was because they had the chance to meet her.

TRAGIC DESTINY

Maria’s story is told through snippets of opera and through flashbacks of her younger self, a role played by Aggelina Papadopoulou. While the film is not a musical, says Jolie, pieces have been selected to tell Callas’ story through the great tragic heroines she played.

Angelina Jolie: The pieces themselves really speak more than you realise about the moments in her life, and it’s not accidental and it’s not a distance. I think she became these characters and she let these characters transform her. And I think in the end, these pieces of work become who she was.

Pablo Larraín: Most of the stories that she sang, whether they were more into [in] the bel canto tradition or the Germanic tradition, they were tragedies. So there’s something in there that Steve and I discussed extensively: how can we make a movie where the main character slowly becomes the sum of the tragedies that she sang? We didn’t want to make a dark movie about a tragic situation. I think it’s more like a movie where a woman that has spent her life singing for others, taking care of others, worrying about her relationships, now she’s ready to take care of herself and find her own destiny.