La Voz de Galicia – January 24, 2025 →
I’ve always been fascinated by opera and by opera singers. In my teenage years, I closely followed the careers of those who were still alive at the time, like Montserrat Caballé and Victoria de los Ángeles, and I devoured the biographies of those who were no longer with us, like Maria Callas and María Malibrán. And although my passion for opera remains intact, over time, I gradually set aside my other passion—biographies. Looking at my bookshelf, I see four books about Callas, and I know I devoured them because they are marked, annotated, and worn. Yet, I remembered little about her personal life when I sat down with Xan this week to watch “Maria”, the latest film about Maria Callas, directed by Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín and starring Angelina Jolie. And the same thing happened to me as always—I was moved by simply hearing her voice. Callas has that effect on me, and in that intoxication, I let myself be carried away by the delicate story the film tells—a psychological reimagining of the last seven days of the great opera diva, who, at the time of her death, at fifty-three years old, had already withdrawn from public life.
Larraín said in an interview that despite his meticulous research, despite reading everything about Callas, no one really knows who she was as a person, and that is something he shares with the actress portraying her, Jolie. And that mystery surrounding the solitude of those who rise so high, those who can no longer separate the persona from the person, transcends in the film and imbues this work of fiction with magic. Which, in some way, also captures all those universal emotions tied to the passage of time, to what we are and what we cease to be at certain moments in our lives…
