Recent squabbles over films about conductors — Tár, Maestro — will probably be matched or exceeded by the debate over Maria, Pablo Larraín’s feature film about Maria Callas.
The reason for expecting a fierce response is that most Callas fans have far more emotional attachment to the soprano than music audiences ever felt about Leonard Bernstein (Maestro) or the fictional conductor Lydia Tár.
Premiered at the Venice International Film Festival on Aug. 29, and shown at the Telluride Festival on Sept. 2, Maria will be streamed on Netflix on a schedule yet to be announced. (Netflix is now offering another film titled Maria, but that’s about a Filipina martial arts fighter.)
The Callas film is the third of Larraín’s triptych of famous women facing overwhelming crises, after Spencer, about Princess Diana, and Jackie, about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
The script of Maria is by Steven Knight (Spencer, Serenity, Burnt); the movie’s star, Angelina Jolie, does some of the singing herself.
Jolie portrays Callas’ final days in 1977, living alone in Paris, when the 53-year-old soprano tried to return to the stage after her mostly disappointing “farewell tour” of 1973–1974.
“La Divina,” whose life and artistry have been chronicled in more than 300 books, even made it to San Francisco during that tour — for the first time since her only other visit here in 1958 — appearing in concert with tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano at the War Memorial Opera House.
During the period of her life depicted in the new film, Callas experienced severe vocal, health, and psychological problems, feeling abandoned by the previously fanatic public and becoming “an icon imprisoned by her own image.”
The longevity of Callas’s fame is described in the liner notes of La Divina, the 2023 Warner Classics collection of 131 CDs:
“A century after her birth, nearly 60 years after her last performance on the operatic stage, and more than 45 years after her death, Callas remains a defining figure in operatic history. She is a point of reference for opera lovers and opera singers of today and, in many respects, is the enduring embodiment of opera.”
The cast of Maria includes Haluk Bilginer (Winter Sleep) as Aristotle Onassis, Pierfrancesco Favino (Adagio, The Hummingbird), Alba Rohrwacher (La chimera, Hungry Hearts), Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Power of the Dog, Elvis), and Valeria Golino (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Caos calmo).
Back to conductors for a minute: they are almost as popular film subjects as romance and murder. over a hundred movies deal with them, beginning with the 1917 (!) Hearts and Flowers.
Among the many that followed, Interlude and Once More, with Feeling were perhaps the most famous. Tom & Jerry caroused in “Carmen Get it!” while Bugs Bunny impersonated Leopold Stokowski in “Long-Haired Hare.” Among improbable conductor casting: Yul Brynner (Feeling!) and Charlton Heston (Counterpoint).