The Diva
The stage, the roles, the great houses — from Norma to Tosca, from La Traviata to Medea.
Opening targeted for 16 September 2027
The Maria Callas Museum
The first reference museum in the world devoted to Maria Callas, in Paris — the city where she lived the last twelve years of her life.
Maria Callas remains one of the towering figures of twentieth-century opera and music. Yet no major museum, built on an authentic collection, is dedicated to her today. That is the museum this Paris project intends to create.
Why Paris
Paris is not only the city Maria Callas adopted: it is where she lived the last twelve years of her life, and where she died on 16 September 1977. It is also where the collection assembled since 2017 by the Endowment Fund is held.
The opening is targeted for 16 September 2027, the fiftieth anniversary of her death — a date whose symbolic weight goes well beyond the calendar.
A collection without equal
At the heart of the museum lies the collection of the Maria Callas Endowment Fund: the largest body in the world of documents and archives that belonged to the singer, built up since 2017 through research, restoration and conservation, and through gifts and bequests from those close to her.
- Over 200 hours
- of original recordings, many of them previously unreleased.
- Over 30 hours
- of original films — personal films, performances, interviews.
- Over 5,000
- original photographs, public and private.
- Over 150
- original letters, annotated documents and correspondence.
- Over 20
- photograph albums, programmes and personal objects.
- Two stage costumes
- including the one worn for her last Tosca at the Opéra de Paris, in 1965.
A proven scenography
The project does not start from a blank page.
The museum builds on the scenography of the Maria by Callas exhibition: 30,000 paying visitors in three months at La Seine Musicale, from 16 September to 14 December 2017, in partnership with the Conseil départemental des Hauts-de-Seine; then a second run at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco in April 2018, inaugurated by H.S.H. Prince Albert II.
That double presentation is proof of concept, both museographically and with the public: the route works, and it travels.
The Woman
The intimate: letters, personal films, objects and costumes shown under conservation glass.
The Legend
The voice that remains — large-format projection and a 360° immersive room.
The route unfolds across some 800 m², in eight thematic rooms and one immersive projection room. A dedicated room recreates Maria Callas's private world at 36 avenue Georges-Mandel, her last Paris home. Alongside the permanent route, the museum will offer an educational and cultural programme — talks, masterclasses, guided tours — and a bookshop.
An established institution
Founded in 2017 under the honorary presidency of the conductor Georges Prêtre — one of the singer's favourite conductors — the Maria Callas Endowment Fund was created by Tom Volf, who brought together those who mattered in the artist's life: her pianist and accompanist Robert Sutherland, and her faithful friends Ferruccio Mezzadri and Bruna Lupoli.
The support committee gathered at its creation included Franco Zeffirelli, Alain Delon, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and Pierre Bergé. The advisory board has since widened, notably to Georgia Kouvela and the actress and director Mimi Denissi.
The project rests on recognised expertise. Tom Volf, founding president, has spent more than ten years studying and promoting the singer's legacy: curator of the Maria by Callas exhibitions in 2017 and 2018, director of the eponymous documentary shown in more than forty countries, and author of books devoted to Callas.
An international profile already in place
Beyond the exhibition, the project rests on an audience already gathered: the documentary Maria by Callas, shown in more than forty countries; the film Callas, Paris 1958, released in Pathé cinemas across France in 2023 for the centenary of the singer's birth; the book Maria by Callas, published worldwide by Éditions Assouline; and the theatrical reading Letters & Memoirs, touring internationally with Monica Bellucci.
Supporting the project
Becoming a patron of the Museum
The Maria Callas Endowment Fund welcomes patrons and partners at every level of commitment, ahead of the museum's opening. Donations qualify for the French patronage tax regime — 60% for companies, 66% for individuals.
- Founding patronage — a contribution to the initial investment: museography, fit-out and scenography.
- Cercle des Amis du Musée Maria Callas — for individual patrons and collectors.
- In-kind and skills-based patronage — scenography, audiovisual and digital production, insurance, transport and conservation of works.
- Institutional and cultural partnerships — opera houses, festivals, music and heritage foundations.