What Is It Like to Be in Maria Callas' Shoes?👢

Salut !

What would you think it feels like to be in Maria Callas' shoes? I'm beginning to get some sort of an idea of it now that I'm re-reading her letters and memoirs in French (Tom Volf 2019: Maria Callas, Lettres & mémoires). I read most of the 598-paged book last year, but now I felt like going through meticulously every word of the book, because it is obviously the best way to understand the entirety of her life and career. Even though my love for Callas has, shall we say, stabilized since last year, it hasn’t gone anywhere. I still think she’s great, and that we can learn a lot from her elegance, charisma and her ways of creating art with devotion!

Accomplishing such a reading project is obviously always easier with a deadline in sight, so I decided to use the book as the basis for an academic essay. Yes, besides being a ’working girl’ in Paris, I'm currently also doing remotely some courses for my Master's degree at the University of Helsinki.😅 It is just so fun to study in a program, where you can often choose to do assignments on themes that inherently interest you. For example now in my case I can kill two birds with one stone by spending time with Maria Callas’ thoughts and making an essay about it.

That said, an academic essay can’t just include me raving about the greatness of Callas; it must present an intellectual challenge for me. That is, I have to examine the subject of the essay with the help of some academic research and through a specific question — an angle or a point of view so to say. I’m not very clear on the question yet, but first, I plan to gather together everything that Callas mentions in the book that is related to clothes, appearance, stylishness and beauty. Then I’ll go through some fashion theory and maybe some research on the history of clothing, and I’ll study what it entailed for Callas to look like the woman and soprano she ’played’ in her life on and off stage.🎵

I suspect this thought might actually be the ’beef’ of my essay; the idea that Callas looked the ’part’; the part of a primadonna (”first woman/lady”) and an operatic superstar. This means that, to be able to continue to play this part well, she had to take good care of her looks, her makeup, wardrobe and costumes. She was expected to look like a 1950’s elegant and wealthy lady, which she was of course, but she did it successfully, and with style. Her remarkable beauty obviously helped in conveying a good image of herself, but she also has to have known enough about clothes and style to be able to become such a fashion icon. So, we mustn’t take it for granted that she looked that good. For sure she had help especially from her stylist/couturier Elvira Leonardi Bouyeure aka Biki from Milan, but some of the credit has to go to Callas herself, because it's clear that she learned how to rise up to the demanding standards of 1950’s elegance and glamour during the most glorious days of her career.✨

By reading her letters and memoirs I hope to uncover what all of this meant on a practical level in her life. So far I’ve gathered 63 ’data points’ (until the page 414) concerning the topic in question, and as a side product of finding them I’ve had the pleasure of living with her through the first successes of her career until the lows of discovering the instability and deceptiveness of her husband, mother and father. 

I’ve traveled with her to Buenos Aires by boat in 1949, gone through many cities and towns in Italy, felt the buzz of New York City and the lavish cruises on Aristotle Onassis’ yacht Christina. Now I’ve arrived to her move to my current hometown Paris in 1963, and it feels still sort of unbelievable that I live just a couple of kilometers away from her last home in Paris on the third floor of 36 Avenue George Mandel. (Before finding the apartment she stayed in an apartment on 44 Avenue Foch for a couple of months, near Aristotle Onassis' apartment in the number 88.) I'm now reminded of the fact that watching a lot of her archival material in 2023 had definitely a great influence on me and strengthened the desire in me to live in Paris. So here I am; still sous le ciel de Paris!

I’ll share some fun snippets of my observations from the book next time, but until then, have a stylish week!

Bisous,

Elle

❣️Recent delights

• In case you haven't heard, Rafael Nadal is retiring from professional tennis soon, but it was great to see him play an exhibition match this week with his fellow countryman Carlos "Carlitos" Alcaraz. Alcaraz beat him obviously, but Rafa still had some pretty amazing swings at the ball.🎾
• In other news, apparently there is finally a Princess Diaries 3 film in the works with Anne Hathaway!! What a treat that'll be for all of us who have grown up watching the first two films! Here's a cute interview of Chris Pine, the prince of the film, on Jimmy Fallon's show. I love that he rocks up to the interview to read some Italian and present a children's book he's written that's inspired by his dog.😜 We need more people like him in show biz!
  • This reminds me that he has also sung a duet with Barbra Streisand a few years back, and just when you thought he couldn't get any better as a talented person, he also sings very well!
• Here's a nice aria from Gaetano Donizetti's opera Poliuto (1848) performed by Callas at La Scala in Milan in 1960. It's quite a catchy aria and I love how you can hear the audience's excitement in the end. Callas said herself in a letter during the rehearsal period (p. 330 in the book) that the opera is "so difficult; I'm not joking".😆 And if Callas thinks an opera is difficult, it really must be so. Plus, she wanted to really be at her best for the opera because she was returning to La Scala after a couple of years.