A photograph taken in the summer of 1959 shows Maria Callas laughing freely on the deck of the yacht Christina. She appears to be a woman at the height of her life and career. Within three years, her voice would begin failing on stages she had once owned, and within a decade she would be waiting in Paris for a man who had already married another woman. By the mid-1950s, Callas was the most talked-about operatic voice in the world, known as La Divina.
Born Maria Anna Cecilia Sophia Kalogeropoulos in New York City on December 2, 1923, to Greek immigrant parents, she trained in Athens under the Spanish soprano Elvira de Hidalgo. Her marriage to the wealthy Italian industrialist Giovanni Battista Meneghini, nearly 30 years her senior, provided stability and professional management. She transformed her public image by losing a dramatic amount of weight between 1953 and 1954, emerging as both a vocal and visual icon. Aristotle Onassis, born in Smyrna in 1906, built a shipping empire after his family lost everything in the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War.
By 1959, he was one of the wealthiest men in the world, married to Tina Livanos, with whom he had two children. He was known for his intense personal magnetism and his ability to make anyone in a room feel like the only person who mattered. Callas joined the cruise aboard the Christina in the summer of 1959, partly suggested by Winston Churchill, a longtime friend of Onassis. She and her husband Meneghini were among the guests.
By the time the yacht docked in Monte Carlo in early August, Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis were inseparable. Within weeks, Meneghini publicly confirmed the marriage was over. The press quickly reported that Callas had left her husband for a married shipping billionaire. The backlash was ferocious, particularly in Italy, where Callas had built the foundation of her career.
Italian society, conservative in its public morality, did not celebrate a woman who had abandoned her husband, and tabloids constructed a version of her as a calculating seductress. The affair did not cause the initial deterioration of Callas’s voice, which was already changing before that summer. Years of punishing performance pace and her dramatic weight loss had taken a toll. But the relationship disrupted the professional structure that Meneghini had built around her, a structure she depended on for the emotional stability to perform.
Onassis expected her to be present for his constant traveling and social events and sometimes discouraged her from taking engagements. Her career slowed markedly between 1959 and 1965. Her 1964 return to Covent Garden in London in a new production of Tosca, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, was a sensation, though the voice was uneven. Zeffirelli remained one of her closest friends and later recalled that while she still had all her instincts and understanding, she had lost confidence in her own instrument and was afraid.
Onassis divorced Tina, but despite Callas’s hopes, no marriage followed. In 1968, he married Jacqueline Kennedy, the widow of President John F. Kennedy, who was seeking safety and financial security. Callas reportedly learned of the wedding from newspapers.
The marriage of Onassis and Kennedy was widely described as unhappy. During those years, Onassis continued to see Callas. In 1969, director Pier Paolo Pasolini cast her in his film Medea, which was not a commercial success. Onassis’s son, Alexander, died in January 1973 from injuries sustained in a plane crash.
Onassis was devastated and his health declined rapidly after that, including a diagnosis of myasthenia gravis. He died on March 15, 1975, in a Paris hospital, without Callas present. Callas spent her final years largely alone in her Paris apartment, having withdrawn from the world. She died on September 16, 1977, at age 53, with the official cause of death listed as heart failure.
Her death prompted worldwide tributes. Her legacy includes hundreds of recordings that are studied by singers today. She changed the relationship between opera singing and acting, and revived bel canto repertoire that had been largely unperformable.
She became a cultural figure in the broader sense, portrayed in stage productions and films, and remains a symbol of both artistic greatness and its costs.