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Lady Cop Pioneer100© Member  BAH HUMBUG
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A problem like Maria Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 04/11/2007 Page 1 of 3 It's 30 years since the soprano Maria Callas died, alone, in her Paris flat. To mark the anniversary, a new exhibition will show previously unseen memorabilia – all preserved by the man who launched her and whose heart she broke. By Sally Williams The opera singer Maria Callas was born in 1923, showed a talent for music by the age of three, gave her first public performance aged 14 and her last at the age of 50. In her later years she was a virtual recluse dependent on a cocktail of uppers and downers and she died aged 53, after a heart attack, in Paris on 16 September 1977.  Maria Callas: 'She was the first opera singer who really looked like a heroine on stage' That was 30 years ago, and yet Callas the legend has yet to fade. Driven, charming, difficult, flawed and infuriating, Maria Callas, the original diva, was that rare thing: an opera singer whose reputation towered above the roles she sang. Early this year a poll of opera critics, published in Gramophone magazine, voted her the most influential soprano of the recording era. In February she was awarded a posthumous Grammy lifetime achievement award. And now Sotheby's has organised a touring exhibition of memorabilia, which opens in London on 11 November, leading to a sale in Milan in December. 'This is very important for us,' says Iris Fabbri, who catalogued the archive, when we meet at the launch of the exhibition at the Villa Torrigiani di Camigliano in Lucca, Tuscany. 'Callas is a myth here in Italy, an icon, and not only in Italy, but around the world.' There have been Callas sales before, of course; the most recent was of her jewellery in Geneva in 2004. But this is different, because it reveals a softer, more personal side to La Divina of popular myth. Most people, if they know anything about Maria Callas at all, link her with the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis and see her as a celebrated jet-setter draped in Dior and Yves Saint Laurent. But this sale of about 400 items is drawn from the estate of the other man in her life, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, whom she met when she was 23 and, as one biographer described her, 'a fat, awkward girl'. Twenty-eight years her senior, Meneghini was doting and wealthy – he was the head of a family building business – had a passion for opera, and was ready to become the architect of Callas's success. 'The most touching things in the sale are the love letters to Meneghini,' says Sotheby's book specialist Esmeralda Benvenuti, who catalogued the 63 letters, mostly dating from the passionate beginning of their relationship, from 1947 to 1950. 'Later on they always travelled together, but in the beginning they didn't, and so whenever she went away she wrote two or three letters a day, and he kept them all.' There is a photograph of Callas with Meneghini in the sale. Her smile is wide, untroubled; he is touching her arm: visual proof of their happiness. But it wasn't to last. She left him in 1959, for Onassis –a fact Meneghini never got over. 'He suffered like hell,' says Fabbri. 'She became number one and without him she wouldn't have achieved that. He opened the doors of the theatres for her. I think he even paid [theatres for her to perform]. He had the photographers ready to photograph her. She had the voice, but no connections. She grew from the ugly duckling into the beautiful swan, and then she felt she didn't need him any more.' By all accounts, Meneghini retreated into his own private world after she left. 'He lived a life of mourning until the end,' says Fabbri. When Callas died (she left £7 million and no will), he inherited much of her estate, and the way he stored his ex-wife's belongings in his Paris flat says a lot about how he felt. 'They were untouched for 30 years,' explains Fabbri, recalling the day, three years ago, when she was invited to assess the collection (Meneghini died in 1981). 'Everything was in boxes, all covered with cobwebs. I found the dresses in the loft, still in their protective coverings. 'It is always violating,' she says, to go through people's possessions, 'but this felt terrible.' She pauses and then says, sotto voce, 'I was reading the diary where Meneghini is describing in 30 pages his wife's betrayal with Onassis.' This famously happened on board Onassis's yacht, the Christina O. Meneghini was seasick and so confined to his cabin. '"One o'clock, she entered the cabin. One-thirty, she went out and said she had a headache. Two o'clock, she is not back…" It's like a dramatic film, right?' says Fabbri. Maria Kalogeropoulos was born in New York to Greek immigrants and, true to form, even her beginnings were dramatic. The story goes that the first words her mother uttered after her birth were, 'Take her away.' Her mother's second child and only son, Vasily, had died aged three from typhoid fever, and she had been hoping for another son 'to fill the empty place in my heart'. So began a troubled relationship with her mother. Continued 1 2 3 Next page
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AussiePam Original500© Member  Wild Child
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I LOVE her singing!!!!!!! Her Madame Butterfly is one of my greatest musical recording treasures.
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