Callas: assoluta Blu-ray offers solid video and audio in this exceptional Blu-ray release
We know that Maria Callas literally brought opera back to life.
This film sets out to do the same with Maria Callas' art and life.
It is a resurrection of the diva which brings back to life the period
of the great Callas.
The term "diva" is bandied about these days to the point where it means next to nothing. Beyonce is a diva, Mariah Carey is a diva, heaven forfend even Lady Gaga is a diva. It seems at times that every popstar who engages in melismatic overkill is a diva. This co-opting of what was once a very specifically used term is probably nowhere as bothersome as when one starts to look at the women of opera, where the term at least used to apply to a certain level of artistry mixed with a shall we say expressive temperament. Maria Callas is perhaps rightly called "the last of the divas" in this very well produced and immaculately sourced documentary by Philippe Kohly, originally broadcast on French television. Opera fans still remember Callas as "La Divina," arguably the finest diva—yes, diva in the sense it should be used—of the twentieth century. What Callas: Assoluta makes abundantly clear is that Callas both benefited and suffered from the appellation and the very reputation she fought so hard to create and sustain.
Did Jackie O know about this?
Many people think of Callas as a Greek singer, but the fact is she was actually born in New York City in 1923, the daughter of a largely absent merchant father and an overbearing mother who had wanted to be an actress. Maria was raised in a largely loveless environment, forbidden by her mother to play outdoors and certainly not to interact with other children. The mother seemed to have a serious psychological problem with Maria, perhaps because she had suffered a stillbirth of a son before Maria's birth, and had expected Maria to be a "replacement" boy for that unfortunate baby. Maria was therefore sidled with her mother's animus from an early age, and it was a dysfunctional relationship that would haunt both of them for the rest of their lives, providing a lot of fodder for the press, especially when Maria made a triumphant United States debut at the Metropolitan Opera in the early 1960's, a debut overshadowed by her mother's scathing press interviews lamenting her daughter's refusal to share her considerable wealth with the woman who had given her life.
Callas: Assoluta actually begins fairly late in Callas' life, toward the end of the 1950's, after she had achieved worldwide renown at such vaunted houses as La Scala in Milan. We're privy to her 1958 Paris Opera debut, which was broadcast live on France's only television network at the time, followed by an after party filled with glittering celebrities like Chaplin, Cocteau and the man who would later become linked with Callas' name in the public consciousness, Aristotle Onassis. Onassis was smitten with Callas from the get-go, but she was at least putatively happily married to a man 28 years her senior, Giovanni Battista Meneghini. It's interesting to note that though she's remembered solely as Maria Callas today, for the bulk of her most successful period, she was always billed as Maria Meneghini Callas.
The documentary goes on to document her voyages, both personal and professional, throughout the rest of 1958 and 1959, culminating in a decision that would prove epochal in her later life, to accede to Onassis' repeated pleas to have the iconcic soprano join him on his famous yacht Christina for a summertime cruise around the Adriatic. Though Callas and Onassis wouldn't consummate their relationship for many more more years, this was the beginning of one of the strangest but perhaps dearest "affairs" the world stage has ever seen, a loving, often tempestuous relationship between two lonely outsiders who just happened to be incredibly famous and wealthy.
Callas: Assoluta then goes back to the beginning, as it were, tracing Maria's unhappy childhood in both New York and, later, Greece, where she went when her mother returned there shortly before World War II broke out. Maria had discovered that she was unusually gifted vocally and to her mother's credit, Evangelia lined her up with some very impressive teachers in Athens. Maria made the mistake of being apolitical in a very political era, choosing to sing for Nazis and Fascists after they had occupied Greece, something that later came back to haunt her and in fact led to her leaving Athens for America when, post-War, she found herself unhirable due to her earlier choices.
The next decade was spent refining her craft and building her reputation until by the mid-1950's she was the undisputed queen of opera, ultimately replacing Renata Tebaldi at La Scala as that house's reigning (yep, you guessed it) diva. (Tebaldi of course made her reputation with verismo roles, while Callas, rightly or wrongly considering her dramatic range, was usually associated with bel canto). What Assoluta makes at times devastatingly clear is the shattered soul underlying one of the most unique voices of the past 100 years, a sould which saw itself as "alien" no matter where it was, and which probably never overcame its early browbeating by its mother.
Assoluta is filled to the brim with brilliantly chosen source clips from all periods of Callas' life. We get everything from what is probably the first radio broadcast featuring Callas, to her last on air interview, shortly before she died of a pulmonary embolism at the tender age of 53, where she tells the interviewer she's "useless," the relic of a bygone age. Callas: Assoluta delves rather explicitly into the repeated heartaches the diva suffered, starting of course with her rocky relationship with her mother, but later when she was accused of that bugaboo that haunts so many strong female artists, being "tempermental." Various scandals Callas weathered are also gone into in at least passing detail, including her infamous walkout during a performance in Rome, something that almost ended her career. Her relationship with Onassis is also dealt with fairly, if not always in complete depth, including the stillbirth of a child she supposedly had by the shipping magnate, something which has been vigorously denied by several people, none of which makes it into this documentary.
If Assoluta has one flaw, it's that it takes the diva's side unquestioningly as it moves through one tempestuous incident after another. Callas actually does come off as surprisingly sympathetic and even vulnerable at times here, and she obviously possessed a wonderful sense of humor, even about herself, as is demonstrated in a brief audio clip from one of her master classes at Juilliard. (These classes of course became fodder for playwright Terence McNally, who turned them into his acclaimed play appropriately titled Master Class).
Through it all, though, the shining intelligence and wounded psyche of Maria Callas herself come through loud and clear. Great artistry is often born of great pain, and Callas: Assoluta shows that the diva experienced a tremendous amount of pain in her brief, incredibly eventful, life.
(A trivial, yet somewhat comic, aside: this show was originally broadcast in French, but an English soundtrack is included here. While the narrator sounds like a native English speaker, my jaw dropped when she pronounced "epitome" as a three syllable word with a long "o" and silent "e." It seems like something got lost in translation).
Most of Callas: Assoluta is comprised of archival footage, and some of that footage is in pretty rough condition. Older black and white images are frequently covered with scratches and other debris, and a lot of the 1960's and 1970's color footage is extremely grainy and soft looking. Actual high definition images are utilized mostly as interstitials, helping to show the various locales being discussed as the documentary progresses. The high def segments look very sharp indeed, with gorgeously robust colors and excellent detail. The rest of the documentary is hit or miss, image wise, but the historical value of all of the footage so far outweighs any complaints about its quality issues that one would have to be a complete curmudgeon to make an issue out of it. Just know going in that you're going to be seeing some very, very rare footage of one of the great artists of the 20th century, and thank your lucky stars that that imagery even exists.
Unfortunately Callas performed and recorded even before the age of stereo, let alone modern, digital recording techniques, and so while we're offered two lossless tracks here (the original French in LPCM 2.0, and the supplementary English LPCM 2.0 track), the fact is that the source material for a lot of the archival recordings utilized in Assoluta have a very narrow, boxy and hissy sound. Callas had an extremely bright upper register to begin with, and that becomes at times almost painfully apparent in both of these lossless tracks. The narration is crisp and clear (despite that hilarious mispronunciation of "epitome" noted above), with an understated female voice declaiming the facts and figures about Maria's life. Callas' own husky speaking voice is also well represented here, though, as with the singing segments, it's from decades ago and often is accompanied at least by omnipresent hiss.
Callas: Assoluta is one of the most compelling documentaries I've seen recently. If it errs a bit too much on taking Callas' side in the many conflicts in which the diva found herself, it nonetheless offers a heartfelt and often heartwrenching portrait of a wounded little girl who just happened to become the most famous opera singer of her generation. Filled with an incredible assortment of archival footage and recordings, Assoluta is a must-see for all opera and classical music fans and comes very highly recommended.
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