Callas’ love letters….for sale?

Considering she was how she was…what would Maria think?



http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17142847

Yesterday, as I listened to NPR, I was very surprised to hear that Maria Callas’ love letters were for sale in an auction. This bothered me a little. I relate to Callas on many levels, she was a master of keeping the world at an arms length while having an extremely complex emotion life. I don’t think that people were aware at the time of (what seems to me as) her intense sadness, and I believe she wanted it that way.

Personally, I would be very upset if someone were selling my personal letters for profit. These letters are from the period in Callas’ life when she was very young, overweight and unconfident. They are between her and her husband from a happy time for them, that is all that I know about what is contained in the letters. I have been considering how interesting it would have been to meet Callas before opera turned her into one of it’s myths (she is a tragic heroine as much as Mimi or Violetta) and to see what she was like then. These letters are of course of great interest to me, and I wonder about them.

Any Callas fan would love to get their hands on Maria’s thoughts from this period. She was married and was just becoming a star. Three times a day she wrote to her husband. Oh, what must be contained in them. I wonder if it talks about who was a bitch to her, and if she was a bitch back at that time….so interesting!

Honestly I suspect that we wouldn’t learn much about the person who Maria was from them. I feel I know her very well, even while I never have met her. When you hear a recording of her “Casta Diva” or the Willow Song from Otello, you learn so much about the woman they call La Davina. Any true Maria Callas fan will tell you this is true. For all of the illusion she created about herself, she put it all aside and really lived when she took the stage…she offered a part of herself, one which we are glad to have taken it.

As long as there is opera, there will be a cult of Maria Callas, a great woman and a very private person. Knowing that she was how she was is clear in her music…I don’t know if I want to know too much about her every day life. I wish that people would respect her private nature and not read her letters…or sell them.