Maria Callas thanks the audience at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, 1959. Anefo, Nationaal Archief, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0).
Florence, May 1953. At the Teatro Comunale, for the Maggio Musicale, Vittorio Gui conducts Cherubini’s Medea, and in the title role of the sorceress who kills her children is a twenty-nine-year-old Greek-American soprano weighing around ninety kilos. The voice is a molten flow: a dark low register, metallic top notes, a force that fills the hall without apparent effort. She, however, looks in the mirror and sees something else. Medea is a woman consumed by hatred, and the body that carries her onstage tells another story. She decides that body must change.
Eleven months later, on 12 April 1954, Maria Callas walks onto the stage of La Scala as Elisabetta in Verdi’s Don Carlo and the scale reads 64 kilos 800 grams. She has lost at least a quarter of her weight: some twenty-five kilos by her own account, up to thirty-six according to other reconstructions. Photographs from that season seem to show two different people. On 7 December of the same year she opens the La Scala season with Spontini’s La vestale, directed by Luchino Visconti, who with that slender woman would build five productions, among them the 1955 Traviata: an actress who moves like an actress, no longer a voice relocating from one side of the stage to the other.
How she managed it remains the stuff of legend. She spoke of a sensible diet, salads and chicken. Her husband, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, told instead of a frantic phone call from the Grand Hotel and a tapeworm expelled in the bathtub, the famous tapeworm story that for seventy years has run through biographies and glossy weeklies without anyone ever proving it. What is documented is the result, and the result divided the opera world into two parties that have never signed a peace.
The first party says the voice changed with the body. The most-cited argument comes from Walter Legge, the EMI producer who recorded her: during the sessions for La forza del destino in 1954 the vibrato had widened to the point that Legge threatened, in a famous quip, to enclose a seasickness pill with every side of the record. It is a thesis with a physiology of its own: the opera singer breathes with the whole trunk, and a support built on one body does not transfer intact to a body with a quarter less mass. The voice specialist Franco Fussi, analysing the recordings with the spectrograph, described exactly this: a respiratory compensation that after the weight loss loaded the muscles of the back of the trunk and made the upper part of the voice less stable.
The second party looks at the calendar. After 1954 come the Traviata with Visconti, the Berlin Lucia conducted by Karajan in 1955, the Anna Bolena of 1957: the years in which Callas becomes Callas. The real failing comes later, from 1958 onward, with the Norma broken off in Rome in front of the President of the Republic, and it plunges in the Sixties, when her weight had not changed for some time. A diet does not present the bill ten years after opening the tab. In 2026, in the Journal of Voice, a group of Italian physicians led by Rosario Marchese-Ragona took up a hypothesis that had long been circulating, that of dermatomyositis, a rare autoimmune disease that attacks the muscles, including those of the larynx and of breathing, and set it against the documented symptoms: progressive fatigue, breath that will not hold, hoarseness that comes and goes, partial improvements with cortisone. It is a hypothesis, not an autopsy. But it shifts the weight of the accusation from where the newspapers had put it.
What remains is the simplest fact, which both schools accept. The voice of 1953 and that of 1955 are not the same voice: the first is fuller, the second more agile and less secure at the extremes, in the service of a theatre that had not existed before. Callas traded a part of the sound for a body capable of acting, and she did it knowing what she was doing. The last time she sang an opera onstage was at Covent Garden in London, on 5 July 1965: it was Tosca, and Scarpia was Tito Gobbi.