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Maria Callas (born Maria Anna Cecilia Sophia Kalogeropoulou, December 2, 1923 – September 16, 1977) was an American-born Greek soprano, raised in Astoria, Queens, New York, to Greek immigrant parents. She received her musical education in Athens, studying at the Greek National Conservatoire under Maria Trivella and later at the Athens Conservatoire under Spanish coloratura soprano Elvira de Hidalgo, making her professional stage debut in 1941. After the war she established her career in Italy, making her Italian debut in La Gioconda at the Arena di Verona in 1947, and marrying Italian industrialist Giovanni Battista Meneghini in 1949, who managed her career until their divorce in 1959. Her 1949 performance as Elvira in Bellini’s I puritani in Venice — learned on six days’ notice while she was performing Wagner’s Brünnhilde in Die Walküre in the same season — proved a turning point that redirected her career toward the bel canto repertoire, and she became the resident star of Teatro alla Scala in Milan through the 1950s, working with directors including Luchino Visconti and Franco Zeffirelli. She retired from the stage after a final performance as Tosca at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in July 1965, and died of a heart attack in Paris in 1977 at the age of 53.
Callas is widely regarded as one of the most significant opera singers of the 20th century, credited with reviving interest in the long-neglected bel canto operas of Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini, and the works of Cherubini, at a time when that repertoire had largely fallen out of the standard rotation. Conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein called her “the Bible of opera,” and she was hailed in her lifetime as “La Divina” for combining exceptional vocal technique and a wide-ranging, dramatic soprano voice with unusually committed dramatic acting — influencing generations of singers, including Montserrat Caballé, who said Callas “opened a new door for us, for all the singers in the world.” She received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and decades after her death she remains, in the words of Opera News, “still the definition of the diva as artist—and still one of classical music’s best-selling vocalists.”
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