We knew it was tragic, we find it pathetic.
The fate of Maria Callas was marked by an unhappy love, the one she felt for Aristide Onassis.
The reality is more cruel, we discover thanks to the private correspondence of the immense singer and in unpublished documents that belonged to her relatives.
Author Lyndsy Spence had access to it, reports
The Guardian
, to prepare a biography, to be published on the other side of the Channel in June 2021.
Read also: Center-Val de Loire: musicians aged 6 to 17 called to audition to create an orchestra
“There is disturbing information
, begins this one,
taken from the diary of one of her great friends detailing how Onassis drugged her, in particular for sexual reasons.
Today, we would call it a rape committed by a relative. "
La Callas, married for twelve years to Giovanni Battista Meneghin, met the Greek shipowner in 1958. They crossed paths and crossed paths again.
And the following year, during a cruise in Istanbul, the young woman leaves her cabin at night: their love is born.
She is 36 years old, he is 53. In 1960, died Omerio Langrini, the child she would have had with him, probably from a premature birth.
In 1968, the magnate abandoned him for Jackie Kennedy.
The former lovers will never stop seeing each other according to the former secretary of Onassis, until the death of his boss in 1975.
Her mother wants to prostitute her
Maria Callas' life with her first husband Meneghini, 28 years her senior, has not been much happier.
In a letter to her secretary, which the
Guardian
quotes
, she plagues:
"My husband continues to harass me after having me more than half of my fortune (...) I was stupid to trust him."
The other part of the revelations concerns the family life of Maria Callas.
In particular his mother Evangelia Dimitriadou.
"No, I did not reduce my father and my mother to begging!"
, she already testified in the columns of
Figaro
in 1965 to put an end to rumors.
Their relationship was not peaceful.
Thus wrote the mother to her daughter:
“Do you know what film artists with humble origins do as soon as they get rich?
They spend their first pennies on building a house for their parents and spoiling them with luxury goods… What do you have to say about that, Maria? ”
Maria Callas for her part, recorded her bitterness:
“I have had enough of my parents' selfishness and indifference towards me… I no longer want to have a relationship with them.
I hope the papers don't find out.
Otherwise I'm really going to curse the moment I had parents. ”
She adds elsewhere:
"If she had been a real mother to me for a long time, I would have loved her."
The eternal performer of
Norma
was said to have been forced by her mother not only to sing during WWII in Greece, their country of origin, in front of Nazis and fascist Italians.
But according to Lyndsy Spence, La Callas "
resented her mother, who was a prostitute during the war, for trying to sell her to Nazi soldiers."
