Maria Callas, Sfogato is an intimate performance that shows us a vulnerable woman, harassed by the press and admirers, but also a major artist, boundless and invincible, as befits a sfogato soprano.
Maria Callas was one of the most famous sopranos in the world. Countless articles and books have been written about her, films and documentaries have been made about her, and yet her mystery continues to fascinate. She was everything in art and lost it through love and heartbreak. Passion was her driving force: passion for art, passion for love.
With the only company of Bruna, her housekeeper and perhaps the person who was closest to her intimacy, Maria reveals some of her secrets, those that filled her with life and those that led her to a tragic death at the young age of 53.
100 years of Callas.
Callas, of Greek descent, was born in New York on December 2, 1923 and died, a little more than two months before her 54th birthday, in Paris on September 16, 1977, officially of a heart attack, although some say she committed suicide by ingesting a lethal amount of tranquilizers; it seems that in 1970 she tried to take her own life with barbiturates.
The action of the play, which is as much a farewell as an emotional and moving evocation, takes place on that last day. The soprano, in the company of Bruna, her housekeeper and the person closest to her, is locked in her Parisian residence, while in the street the journalists crowd to try to catch a glimpse of her presence. In this aimless and perhaps hopeless waiting, Maria, exhausted and very low in spirit, reviews some moments of her life, her beginnings, her marriage to Giovanni Battista Meneghini, her passion for the ominous Aristotle Onassis, who perhaps only wanted to exhibit her as a trophy in his record of alpha male, her disappointments, her performances with Giuseppe di Stefano, the tenor with whom she sang the most…
Maria Callas, her name makes vibrate in our ears and in our hearts the sound of a unique and privileged voice that earned her the name of “La Divina”.
