The stage costumes: what a legend wore

2026-09-28

A voice can be recorded; a presence cannot. That is why stage costumes matter so much: they are the closest surviving trace of the artist's body on stage — the material remains of an incarnation.

The last Tosca

The most moving piece in the Foundation's collection is arguably the costume worn by Maria Callas for her last Tosca at the Paris Opera, in 1965 — the very year of her farewell to the operatic stage, a few months before the final Covent Garden performance on 5 July. Tosca frames her entire stage life: it was the role of her teenage debut in Athens, in 1942, and the role of her farewell. This costume is the garment of the end of an era.

The crown of Turandot

The collection also preserves the crown of Turandot — Puccini's ice princess, one of the roles of Callas's early Italian years, which she sang at the end of the 1940s before entrusting it to the recording studio. A stage prop is not a jewel: it is an instrument of theatre, designed to be seen from the last row — and, up close, it tells the story of the workshops that made it.

Preserving fabric, a discipline of its own

Textiles are among the most fragile pieces in any collection: light fades them, dust corrodes them, a fold breaks the fibre. Each costume requires specific housing, monitoring and display conditions — in a conservation case, as at the December 2025 presentation at the Town Hall of the 8th arrondissement, and tomorrow in the "The Woman" section of the Maria Callas Museum in Paris.

Until then, these fabrics wait, protected, with the rest of the collection — and every donation very concretely helps preserve them: support the Foundation.

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