Celebrity Name : Maria Callas

Celebrity Real Name : Maria Kalogeropoulos

Date of Birth : December 3,1923

Birth Location : New York City

Biography of Maria Kalogeropoulos :
Maria Callas (December 3, 1923 – September 16, 1977) was an American-born Greek soprano and perhaps the best-known opera singer of the post-World War II period. She combined an impeccable bel canto technique with great dramatic gifts, making her the most famous opera singer of the era. An extremely versatile singer, her repertoire ranged from classical opera seria, to the bel canto operas of Donizetti, Bellini, and Rossini, to Verdi, Puccini, and in her early career, the music dramas of Wagner.
She was born Maria Anna Sofia Cecilia Kalogeropoulos to Greek parents in New York City, on 2nd December, 1923. At the age of 13 in 1937, she moved with her mother Evangelia to Athens, Greece.

Education :
Maria received her musical education in Athens. Initially her mother tried to enroll her at the prestigious Athens Conservatoire, without success. At the audition her voice, still untrained, failed to impress, while the conservatoire’s director Filoktitis Oikonomidis refused to accept her without her satisfying the theoretic prerequisites (solfege). Therefore, in the summer of 1937, her mother visited Maria Trivella at the younger Greek National Conservatoire, asking her to take Maria as a student for a modest fee. After listening to her voice Trivella agreed to tutor her completely, waiving her tuition fees. In April 11, 1938 Maria ended the show of Trivella’s class at the Parnassos music hall with a duet from Tosca. This was her first official public appearance. Callas’s progress in the first six months was impressive, and this allowed her mother to secure another audition at the Athens Conservatoire with the well-known soprano Elvira de Hidalgo, who immediately agreed to take her as a pupil. However, because Maria would be graduating in a year from the National Conservatoire and could begin working, her mother asked de Hidalgo to wait for a year. In April 2, 1939 Maria made her debut at the Olympia theater, as Santuzza in Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, and in the fall of the same year she enrolled at the Athens Conservatoire in Elvira de Hidalgo’s class. Naturally, Trivella was embittered by Evangelia’s and Maria’s conduct and Maria also felt guilty. One of the first things Maria did in 1957 when she returned to Greece was to call her old teacher.

Operatic career :
After a few appearances as a student and in secondary roles, Callas made her professional debut at the Athens Opera on July 4, 1941, as Tosca, going on to sing in Tiefland and Leonore in Fidelio.
After returning to the United States and reuniting with her father, she was soon engaged to re-open the opera house in Chicago as Turandot, but the company folded before opening. The renowned basso Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, aware that Tullio Serafin was looking for a dramatic soprano to cast as La Gioconda at the Arena di Verona, recommended Callas to impresario and retired tenor Giovanni Zenatello, who auditioned Callas. Upon hearing her, Zenatello was so excited that he jumped up and joined her in the duet. It was in this opera that Callas made her Italian debut.
After La Gioconda, Callas had no further offers. However, Serafin was looking for someone to sing Tristan und Isolde, and he remembered his Gioconda from Verona. He called on Callas, who out of desperation, told him that she already knew the score, even though she had looked at only the first act out of curiosity while at the consevatoire. She sight-read the first two acts of the opera for Serafin, who was very impressed and praised her for knowing the role so well. She then admitted that she had bluffed and had sight-read the music. Serafin was even more impressed and immediately cast her in the role. Serafin proceeded to become Callas’s greatest mentor and supporter, and she performed and recorded many of her greatest triumphs with him.
Callas created a sensation in Venice in 1949 by immediately following a series of performances of Brunnhilde in Die Walkure with performances as Elvira in I Puritani (learning the role in five days in order to step in for an indisposed Margherita Carosio). Her performance in I Puritani immediately passed into legend. The critics were amazed and ecstatic that a huge dramatic soprano voice so well suited to Brunnhilde could handle Elvira’s coloratura with such ease and grace. Her performance also awakened the public’s mind to the dramatic possibilities of the bel canto repertoire, which had become the property of canary-type singers such as Lily Pons.
Franco Zeffirelli likened the scale of Callas’ achievement in Venice to asking Birgit Nilsson to subsitute overnight for Beverly Sills. An even more apt description would be asking a champion heavy weightlifter to enter a gymnastics competition on five days’ notice and then having him win the gold medal.
Callas repeated this amazing test of her learning ability and memory by learning and performing Cherubini’s Medea and Rossini’s Armida on very short notice. She also demonstrated her vocal versatility in 1952 in an RAI recital in which she opened with Lady Macbeth’s “letter scene,” followed by the Mad Scene from Lucia di Lammermoor, followed by Abigaile’s treacherous recitative and aria from Nabucco, and she finished with the “Bell Song” form Lakme capped by a ringing high E in alt.
Throughout the 1950s, Callas made numerous appearances at the world’s great houses: La Scala, the Opera Garnier, the Metropolitan Opera, the Dallas Opera, the Royal Opera House in London, Mexico’s Palacio de las Bellas Artes, and the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires.
During her initial performances in Médée in May of 1953, Callas decided that she needed a leaner face and figure to do dramatic justice to this as well as the other roles she was undertaking. During 1953 and early 1954, she lost almost 80 pounds and transformed herself into the glamorous figure most remember. It is thought by some that the loss of body mass made it more difficult for her to support her voice, triggering the vocal strain which became apparent later in the decade. Her later stereo recordings evidence masterly musical interpretations with an increasingly unstable higher register that wobbled uncontrollably at times. In 1960, she made her final appearance in a new production at La Scala in a new production of a Donizetti’s Poliuto, a role chosen to accommodate her vocal capacities. Her final performances at La Scala were as Medea, in the legendary 1958 Dallas production.[wikiapedia]