AN ARIA OF ANGUISH
HER fans called her La Divina – the divine – and Maria Callas seemed to heartily agree with this description of her. “I have been touched by the hand of God,” said the singer, who was hailed by her devotees as the greatest soprano.
A new biography, drawing on her previously unpublished letters, makes exactly the opposite claim, however: based on all the suffering and betrayal she endured in her glittering but turbulent life, it might seem to some that Maria was cursed.
She was regularly drugged by her violent lover, Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, so he could sexually abuse her; swindled by her husband and father; and blackmailed by a mother who tried to force her into prostitution.
Maria the singer may have had the upper hand in the music world but Maria the woman was a victim of circumstance, says biographer Lyndsy Spence, author of Cast a Diva: The Hidden Life of Maria Callas.
Maria has been the subject of almost 30 biographies, but Spence has been able to shed revealing new light on the operatic superstar after obtaining access to boxes of her letters that have been sitting unexamined in an archive