SiEtIn1 - it’s the Greek look, I know since I’m Greek also - lol

She should have stopped her weight loss in December of 1953. When she did Medea that month, she looked wonderful and her voice still functioned beautifully. It's interesting that during much of her vocal prime, for example when she did Orfeo and Eurydice, she was not really that fat, merely voluptuous. I think once she got below a certain weight, her breath support system just never functioned the same, and her voice shrank in size and power and the top became strident and the wobble started. In the Scala Medeas she looked like a Caryatid.

Shahrdad I think you are right...but I always wondered wether she was aware of beeing exeptional. One side in her certainly was but ultimately her inborn pessimism and insecurity brought on her decline. Martha Moedl quoted that she never thaught Maria Callas to be fat but well proportionned , a "junonesque figure" as she put it. But her voice was an akward instrument and even in her worst moments that instrument was still able to make music with an intensity that others only can dream of. In 1963 she gave a wonderful rendering of "Ah, non credea mirarti" and "Adieu ma petite table" . She uses her voice very delicately and by not pushing the instrument too much she sounds absolutely beautiful...Ah, Maria, why did you spoil me for all the others even when I take pleasure to listen to them? Why do I always creep back and listening to you discovering again and again that you start where all the others stop. So unfair isn't it????

Shahrdad, once again I agree with you. There have been many strange stories about Maria being fat as a whale in her youth, also brought in to the world by some of her collega singers in Greece that did not like her. Pictures taken in America show her to be of normal size, rather on the thin side actualy, with long legs, and a beautiful rather excotic face. As a teenager she was of normal size, often badly dressed, the beach pictures taken when she was 18 show an attractive young girl with beautiful hair,a bit heavy in the legs, but like all the other girls around herShe was never fat in the years when singing in Greece, hardly possible in the war with food hard to come by. Up till 1950 she looked like a healty, well proportioned young woman, it is from 1950 to 1952 that she became bigger, and dressing the way she didin those years , like matrone did not help at all. By slimming down she became the coplete artist she was, it was the last part missing. Being able to dress in beautiful clothes must have given her enormous selfconvidence, Menghini said she became a different woman. I think she never considered there was a price to pay, If she knew, I think she prefered to be beautiful. Nobody knew how she saw her life, if she really wanted a long career.All I know she wanted a family and children, she mainained she would have given up her career on the spot if that was possible.

Christian Wijnoogst Callas was by no means ever morbidly obese, but just a tall, big, voluptuous girl. Her husband said that she had the physical strength of a young bull in those years. She did get a little too heavy for a little while, but again, not THAT heavy. William Weaver, the renounced translator of Italian literature who was a fan and a friend of Callas wrote in 1992 that once he went to greet her backstage after a performance, and in her typical candid manner, she lifted her skirt and showed him the terrible bruises on her legs, which she got from landing on her legs too hard when required to kneed for a scene. She said, "This happens all the time" and said she was determined to get rid of the menacing weight. I think feeling beautiful added to her interpretations. I just wish it hadn't affected her voice as it did. I just wish she had kept the voice she had when she sang Armida and Medea.

Shahrdad, when I first heard Maria's voice I was about 13 years old, in1957. My first record of her was the second Lucia, a friend of me bought the first Lucia. When I heard that recording, I was shocked I remember, I did not like that big voice at all. I grew up with the voice of the slimmed down Maria, and for me that was the most beautiful voice in the world.You have to remember in those years you could not buy the pirated records from her early career, nor where there books written about her. It was years later that I started to buy the early recordings in London and New york, from BJR and discovered the voice of young Callas. How I miss those times; I used to go to the customs to get the records, Casenave, our balletmaster and many collega's used to come to my house in the evening to hear them. I remember we where all tense before I put the records on, like we where in the theatre waiting for her first entrance. The splendor of that voice, we where all shaken into our core when we heard her lady Macbeth, Medea, Armida and so many other roles for the first time! Through me countless other people got infected with the Callasvirus, the whole company knew I adored La Callas, so they gave me a nickname ; La Divina! Some still do after all those years, when I met them they ask me "" how are you doing La Divina"? I always took it as a compliment!