Genesis of a collection

By Tom Volf, President of the Maria Callas Foundation.

In 2013 I attended a performance at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. It was my first night at the opera. I knew nothing about the lyric art, but that evening made me want to hear more. On the way home I searched online for other interpretations, and La Callas came up. The shock was so violent that I spent the night listening to her entire repertoire.

I recount that evening because it explains the nature of this collection better than any statement of intent. It was not assembled by a musicologist, nor by an institution that had decided to gather a corpus. It was born of ignorance and curiosity. That is a weakness of method, and I believe it is also what made it possible: having no thesis to defend about Callas, I looked for nothing beyond what people were willing to show me.

The drawers

Four years of searching followed, across the world, to find those who had known her — family, collaborators, friends, those who dressed her, those who drove her, those who answered her letters. Some thirty interviews were recorded. Many of these witnesses were very old; several have since died.

At every meeting it was the human being who prevailed. Each revealed a moment, a memory, and often the emotion surfaced. Most of them opened their drawers and brought out personal photographs, letters from Maria, Super 8 films shot during an afternoon among friends, recordings. I looked at all of it after eighteen months and realised that the material was unpublished and precious.

From private memory to document

This is the point that sets this collection apart from most others. The archives of the Teatro Regio in Turin, of La Scala, of Ricordi, those of the Zeffirelli Foundation, are institutional archives: they hold what a house produced, within its walls, under its own rules. What I gathered was in no institution. It was in private hands, uncatalogued, without conservation conditions, often without the owner realising the interest of what they kept.

A Super 8 reel in a wardrobe in Milan is not an archive: it is a family memory. It becomes an archive only when someone names it, dates it and puts it into safekeeping.

That moment of transition — from private memory to document — is the only work I can claim as my own. See what the Foundation holds.

In her own words

My first intuition was to give Callas back her voice and to place her at the centre of the account of her own life, a legend riddled with untruths. She left behind the image of a capricious diva. That is ridiculous. Her impetuous temperament very often underlines the demands and the perfection of precise, rigorous work.

From that principle follows a first choice: the absence of outside commentary. In the film as in the books, no expert voice comes in to explain Callas.

Restoring without inventing

The second choice concerns restoration, and here I can describe a protocol rather than state an intention.

In 2021 we recovered the original 16 mm reels of the recital Callas gave at the Paris Opera on 19 December 1958 — reels that had not been consulted for at least fifty years and whose deterioration was advanced. These documents were digitised and then scanned frame by frame to obtain a quality comparable to 4K: one hundred and thirty thousand frames in all, treated one by one. The work took two years.

From the original black-and-white images came the next stage, colourisation. It was done by consulting every colour photograph produced during that December 1958 evening — the sets, the costumes, the stage elements are documented. The sound was treated with the same rigour: from the original magnetic tape, up to Dolby Atmos quality.

I know what can be objected to the colourisation of a document. I maintain that it is not a matter of adding colour to a black-and-white archive, but of restoring the colour the medium had lost — and that the only acceptable method consists in colouring nothing for which one lacks photographic proof.

Transmission

To gather, to conserve, to document: the third of these obligations is the least spectacular and the longest. It is under way.

What I wish for what comes next fits in a single sentence: that these documents serve others besides myself. That is the purpose of the Maria Callas Museum, and the reason the Foundation opens its collection to exhibitions, publications and productions.

Help preserve this collection — make a donation or join the Friends of Maria Callas.