Maria — the new Maria Callas biopic directed by Pablo Larraín and starring Angelina Jolie, which started streaming on Netflix last week — brought to my mind a strange but meaningful take on the legendary singer from a onetime San Francisco figure.
I’m thinking of Mrs. Beverly, the head usher of the War Memorial Opera House’s orchestra level, who stood ramrod straight in the back of the main floor night after night for 50 years. She began her tenure in 1932 with the building’s inaugural production, Tosca. Throughout her time, she maintained strict discipline among ushers and imposed order on thousands in the audience, even among the disorderly children and often worse parents attending San Francisco Ballet’s countless Nutcracker performances.
Asked on the occasion of her half-century anniversary as an usher about her greatest experience at the War Memorial, Mrs. Beverly said she didn’t pay much attention to what happened onstage because she had a job to do. But when pressed, she said she would never forget Maria Callas. She didn’t, however, recall what Callas sang. What she remembered was Callas coming onstage, picking up the end of her long shawl, and tossing it over her shoulder.
A single gesture that was the highlight of 50 years at the opera. What better describes the unique and mostly inexplicable Callas magic, that stunning intensity that comes across in the soprano’s recordings, master classes, and even in the current 10-second excerpts of her singing in Samsung commercials?
Callas’s only War Memorial performance was on May 9, 1974, shortly before her death in 1977 at age 53, but her vocal decline had begun well before then, when she underwent dramatic and rapid weight loss in 1953 and 1954.
Among Callas’s clashes with opera’s most powerful gatekeepers, such as General Manager Rudolf Bing at the Metropolitan Opera, was her quarrel with San Francisco Opera General Director Kurt Herbert Adler, which kept her out of the War Memorial, except for that one recital, presented independently from the company.
Larraín’s Maria arrives at a time of passionate international squabbles over films about symphonic conductors — Todd Field’s Tár, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro — and yet classical music fans are far less emotional about Leonard Bernstein or the fictional character of Lydia Tár than Callas fanatics are about La Divina.
(A note of caution to Netflix viewers: The platform is also offering another film titled Maria, but that’s about a Filipina martial arts fighter.)
Maria is the third in Larraín’s triptych of films about famous women facing overwhelming crises, after Spencer (about Princess Diana) and Jackie (about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis).
The script of Maria is by Steven Knight (whose previous films include Spencer, Serenity, and Burnt). Jolie plays the title role, bravely doing some of the singing herself after months of intensive vocal training — a great effort that seems to make no sense. Why imitate the inimitable? The film’s rich operatic soundtrack includes performances by Callas at various times in her career.
Jolie portrays the soprano’s final days living alone in Paris in 1977, when the 53-year-old tried to return to the stage after her mostly disappointing farewell tour of 1973–1974.
Opinions of the portrayal will vary, but one view is that while Callas looked eminently real in any role onstage and self-consciously grand offstage, Jolie seems to be performing as Callas in any situation. In an effort to look natural, the film’s acting and writing combine for something frequently affected and stagy.
Capturing La Divina — whose life and artistry have been chronicled in more than 300 books and several stage plays, most notably Terrence McNally’s 1995 Master Class — is a great, perhaps impossible challenge that Larraín describes in positive terms:
“This film is my most personal work yet. It is a creative imagining and psychological portrait of Maria Callas who, after dedicating her life to performing for audiences around the world, decides finally to find her own voice, her own identity, and sing for herself.”
During the time portrayed in the film, Callas experienced severe vocal, psychological, and health problems and felt abandoned by the previously fanatic public. The film is a “portrait of an icon imprisoned by her own image,” as The Hollywood Reporter put it.
Callas’s self-absorption is an obvious fact, but should a film have no variation? Should there be no moments of her taking a break from that prison and reaching out? Maria’s writer and director give only brief glimpses of the character’s ordinary humanity.
The longevity of the soprano’s fame is well described in the liner notes of La Divina, the 2023 Warner Classics collection of 131 Callas 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 talented cast of Maria includes Haluk Bilginer as Aristotle Onassis, Pierfrancesco Favino as Ferruccio, Alba Rohrwacher as Bruna, Kodi Smit-McPhee as Mandrax, and Valeria Golino as Yakinthi Callas.
