Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic If ever a star cried out to be immortalised on screen, surely it was the glamorous and tempestuous Maria Callas. The centenary of the most feted operatic soprano of the 20th century fell in 2023, but it has taken until now for two films to turn up. One is a cinema biopic with Angelina Jolie in the lead role. The other is an old-fashioned TV documentary.It is puzzling that they are late to the party. Last year’s centenary sparked a worldwide outpouring of mementos of Callas’s short but dazzling career — biographies, boxed sets of recordings, even a staged event in which performance artist Marina Abramović took on Callas’s persona.Callas’s story offers not just inspiring artistry, but a rise from humble beginnings in an immigrant Greek family in New York, a cast list boasting some of the most famed celebrities of her era, including John F Kennedy and Winston Churchill, and a high-profile love triangle involving Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis and former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy. Here was the Marilyn Monroe or Diana, Princess of Wales of the opera stage, a media icon to her fingertips.The biopic is Maria, a $20mn-plus production with Oscar ambitions. It is the third in a series of similar films directed by Pablo Larraín, following his earlier successes with Jackie, a post-assassination profile of Kennedy, and Spencer, which imagined Diana, Princess of Wales’s first Christmas with the Windsors.The documentary is Maria Callas: The Final Act, directed by Clare Beavan for the BBC. It follows in a long line of Callas documentaries, though this one promises a fresh viewpoint, claiming that Callas’s life may have been a tragedy, but not for the reasons usually given. It is now almost 50 years since Callas’s death, and although there is not much that is new in terms of documentary material, each film presents its own take on the life of “La Divina”, as she was known by fans. For a singer whose career was disappointingly short, with a peak of only a decade or so, her enduring reputation is extraordinary. As soprano Beverly Sills once said, “I would rather have 10 sensational years like Callas than 20 years like another.”Through a combination of training, operatic instinct and an unmistakable voice smouldering with emotional heat, Callas set new standards in expressing drama through music. She was fortunate in her timing, as her career coincided with the rise of the LP era in the 1950s, allowing singers to record operas complete, not just individual arias. That played to her strengths and her recordings sold in vast quantities. The lost opportunity is that so little was filmed of her in the opera house — only one, official, 45-minute live television relay of act two of Tosca at the Royal Opera House in 1964. How we would love to see more of this famed operatic actress, who worked tirelessly with some of the most celebrated film and stage directors of her day, such as Luchino Visconti and Franco Zeffirelli. Most reviews of Maria, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August, have focused on Jolie’s portrayal of the prima donna, which is probably fair. She captures the glamour and the dignity of her subject without turning the biopic into operatic melodrama. What is missing is the feisty spirit that fired up Callas on stage and off. Just look at the scalding fury in the photos of her as Cherubini’s Medea. “Imagine me on stage if I was not temperamental,” she once told an interviewer. That may be due to the way Larraín frames the story. The film homes in on the last week of Callas’s life, spent roaming through her lavish Paris flat on Avenue Georges Mandel. Outside the door, the legend is still giving a performance as fans in the street stop to pay their respects (“Book me a table at a restaurant where the waiters know who I am,” she tells her staff). Inside, she is reduced to ordering her trusty servant in daily moves of the grand piano and secretly raiding her supplies of sedatives. Behind her eyes, the curtain has already come down. To leaven the impending gloom, highlights from Callas’s life are interspersed as flashbacks, a technique familiar in biopics (think Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady). The footlights dazzle in these skilful recreations, but however well Jolie reincarnates these scenes, it is hard not to miss Callas herself — that unique voice, the stage charisma, the smouldering passion. As Zeffirelli said, “The magic of a Callas is a quality few artists have . . . It is something which lifts them from the ground; they become like semigods.”All of that is vividly present in the short archive clips chosen to illustrate Maria Callas: The Final Act. Most of them are familiar, though we do get to see some photos and handwritten notes from Callas’s private collection.The story of Callas’s life and career is told in a straightforward manner, but the real purpose of this documentary is to put forward a theory as to why she cut down her appearances so dramatically from 1959. Talking heads are threaded throughout, led by expert witness Will Crutchfield, American conductor and musicologist. Many hypotheses have been put forward in the past, most of them plausible. A dramatic loss of weight so as to look slimmer on stage caused her voice to decline (similar cases could be cited). Or, she attempted too wide a variety of roles (there are again similar cases). Or, she fell in love with Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, joined high society and lost interest in performing (less likely, given her dedication to her art). Crutchfield proposes that the vocal weaknesses so noticeable in Callas’s later performances had been simmering since the start, and she effectively lost her voice. The point is well made and exhaustively examined, right down to comparisons of wavelengths, but the most likely reason is surely a combination of all the above. Callas had become so famous that the pressures on her from every side had become intense. There has been nobody to equal her in opera since, and these films help add to the legend. If the subject appeals, you may wish to seek out more of Callas as she would want to be remembered — as an all-round operatic artist of exceptional gifts. That solitary live film of Tosca remains a treasure. Try also some of the live concerts, such as Paris in 1958 or Hamburg in 1959 or 1962 (just read her face in Eboli’s “O don fatale”), easy to find on YouTube. The 2017 documentary Maria by Callas, directed by Tom Volf, is a mine of previously unseen footage, both public and private, and a must-see, currently available on streaming services. At this rate, the legend will never die. ‘Maria Callas: The Final Act’, BBC2, December 29, 9pm and BBC iPlayer; ‘Maria’ is on Netflix in the US now and in UK cinemas from January 10
