Programme Notes: Maria

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Maria Programme Notes

Please note: these programme notes contain descriptions of plot and characters and are best read after watching the film.

Following Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021), director Pablo Larraín completes a trilogy of tragic women with Maria, a look at the last week of operatic soprano Maria Callas’s life in 1977 Paris. Like his explorations of Jackie Kennedy and Princess Diana, Maria reflects an icon through the dazzling central performance – here, Angelina Jolie, inhabiting Callas’s speech and mannerisms while recognisably the movie star. Another similarity is the three films’ time-bound collage approach; they refuse to condense a life into a Campbellian arc, instead refracting it through a momentous event: an assassination, a fraught family Christmas, a singer’s final days without her voice.

Perhaps Maria, beginning at the end and thus working with a broader canvas, is the most conventional of the unofficial trilogy. However, the meteoric rise, catastrophic decline, and early death of opera’s most iconic 20th century performer is perfect fodder for myth-making. In his 1993 book The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, Wayne Kostenbaum says, ‘She was Callas long before she died, but she would be a little less Callas if she were still living. Untimely death assists her legend...’. Larraín works from this thesis, treating Callas’s life as one of the bel canto or Romantic operas that her interpretations redefined for a generation. (Opera is a vast art form, but Callas’s most iconic roles include those subgenres’ tragic heroines who lose their minds and/or die for love.)

Callas’s opera career was remarkably brief. She made her professional debut in 1941 at the age of 18 (when most opera singers are only beginning training) and performed in her last fully-staged production in 1965. But in this short time, she became ‘La Divina’ – ‘the divine one’ – a performer who reshaped the operatic performance practice and the repertoire itself, reviving unfashionable 19th century bel canto works. She also personified the prima donna, both onstage through her vocal and dramatic intensity and offstage in fiery feuds with singers and management – some were real, some PR, but all sold tickets. Offstage, she was known for her glamorous figure and socialising with artistic and political leaders. Three years after her final bow, her lover of 11 years, shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, suddenly married Jackie Kennedy. Less than a decade after this, after an attempted comeback and Onassis’s death, Callas died of a heart attack in her Paris apartment, aged only 53.

A great diva dying a recluse is another thread picked up by Kostenbaum in The Queen’s Throat. In chapter two, ‘The Shut-In Fan: Opera at Home’, Kostenbaum explores the isolation engendered and cultivated by gay opera fans in the home audio era, making opera supreme nostalgia. Jolie’s Callas wanders through her daily routine and past glories, often accompanied by Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee) – her medication, embodied. Each day they meet, Mandrax asks her if he should refer to her as Maria or as ‘La Callas’ – the woman, or the legend?

The entire score of Maria is taken from opera – sometimes diegetically as Callas’s performances, rehearsals, or records of past glories, other times as music only Callas hears. As she walks through the city, passers-by sing choruses from Verdi’s Il trovatore and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly – heightening her quotidian existence. Planning a vocal recovery, she sings ‘Casta diva’ from Bellini’s Norma to her maid Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) and rehearses Anna Bolena’s mad scene in Donizetti’s eponymous opera and Lauretta’s plaintive ‘O mio babbino caro’ from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi with conductor Jeffrey Tate (Stephen Ashfield). The Ave Maria from Verdi’s Otello signals moments of beauty before the inevitable in suspended animation. A wistful look at Callas’s relationship with Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), where he shows off antique acquisitions aboard his yacht, is set to Wagner’s Parsifal prelude. This musical tale of redemption through suffering, underscoring scenes filmed aboard Onassis’s real yacht, blurs fiction and reality – making history and memory tangible and heightened, turning life into art. In Parsifal, Kundry (the role Callas played in 1949) is cursed to seduce Knights of the Grail to their ruin; here, Callas becomes the one charmed, but through Wagner, she seems to know and accept the stakes.

No one knows for sure how Callas damaged her voice; theories include rapid weight loss, poor technique, taking on ‘heavy’ roles such as Parsifal’s Kundry before vocal maturity, and connective tissue disorders. Regardless, vocal damage is almost impossible to reverse, and from the late 1950s a wobble became ever more apparent in Callas’s tone.

Her final 1965 performance was as Puccini’s Tosca at London’s Royal Opera House, in a production designed for her by Franco Zeffirelli. Maria culminates with Callas, having sent Bruna and her butler Ferrucio (Pierfrancesco Favino) away on errands, singing Tosca’s aria ‘Vissi d’arte’. In Tosca, the aria is a dramatic pause: the great diva Floria Tosca, facing the choice to save her lover by giving in to the lecherous advances of the chief of police, bargains with God. ‘I offered songs to the stars, to the sky, so that they would shine more beautifully,’ Tosca/Callas laments, ‘why, Lord, do you reward me thus?’.

Unlike Larraín’s previous tragic women, who married into their fame and (good and ill) fortunes, Callas made her own. Like them, and like the doomed heroines she portrayed, she cannot escape the hand fate dealt. Tosca murders the corrupt police chief and chooses suicide after her lover’s execution. The opera of Callas did not end at the stage or even her death.

Examining an album cover featuring Callas’s image, Kostembaum explains, ‘Tawdrily, I adore her, and I believe, irrationally, that she, dead Maria Callas, departed diva, is grateful for this devotion, that she intangibly depends on it.’ Perhaps Maria leans too much into existing Callas mythology rather than seeking a new lens, but its reverence for its subject and her beloved world – brought to life in exquisite, hyper-realistic detail – evokes the gravity, poignancy, and dignity of Norma approaching her pyre. ‘There is no reason in opera,’ Jolie’s Callas declares, synthesising the life she lives with the one she lost. Maria argues that opera is reason enough.

Carmen Paddock, Publications Editor at Scottish Opera and freelance film critic

10 January 2025

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