I Can’t Sleep - Maria Callas | Gentle Bedtime Reading for Sleep

Episode Date: October 13, 2020

Unwind with this calm bedtime reading on Maria Callas, a peaceful way to ease insomnia and drift into restful sleep. Benjamin’s soothing voice shares the story of Callas, one of the most celebrated opera singers of the 20th century, exploring her artistry, career, and enduring influence on music. His gentle cadence turns biography into soft, fact-filled narration that relaxes the mind. This is not whispering or hypnosis—just calm storytelling and education designed to reduce stress, ease anxiety, and help with sleepless nights. Press play, close your eyes, and let Maria Callas’s story guide you into dreams. Want More? Request a Topic: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/request-a-topic Ad-Free Episodes: https://icantsleep.supportingcast.fm/ Shop Sleep-Friendly Products: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/sponsors Join the Discussion on Discord: https://discord.gg/myhGhVUhn7 This content is derived from the Wikipedia article on Maria Callas, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license. Read the full article: Wikipedia – Maria Callas. Happy sleeping! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to a Glassbox media podcast. What if I told you that most of the modern day self-help advice you've been hearing could actually make you worse? The key to a better life isn't about feel-good gimmicks that sound catchy. The Mentally Stronger Podcast gives you access to a licensed therapist who shares science-backed tools that will actually change your life. Hi, I'm Amy Morin, psychotherapist, mental strength trainer, and international best-selling author. In each episode, we cover research-back strategies, like how to stop relying on willpower and start creating habits for lasting change. And the five mental strength-building exercises you can do from your couch. I also speak to world-class experts like Dr. Nicole Kane, who shares how to permanently heal anxiety by addressing the root cause.

With over 200 episodes in our catalog, this podcast is for you if you're ready to crush self-doubt, conquer challenges, become stronger than ever with therapist-approved strategies that can change your life. Listen to Mentally Stronger with Therapist Amy Morin, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the I Can't Sleep podcast, where I read random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. I'm your host, Benjamin Boster. Today's episode is from a Wikipedia article titled Maria Kallas. Maria Callas, commendatory O.M.R. I. December 2nd, 1923 to September 16th, 1977, was an American-born Greek soprano. She was one of the most renowned and influential opera singers of the 20th century. Many critics praised her Belcanto technique, wide-ranging voice, and dramatic interpretations.

Her repertoire ranged from classical opera seria to the Belcanto operas of Donatzetti, Bellini, and Rossini, and further to the works of Verdi and Puccini, and in her early career to the music dramas of Wagner. Her musical and dramatic talents led to her being hailed as La Divina, the Divine One. Born in Manhattan to Greek immigrant parents, she was raised by an overbearing mother who had wanted a son. Maria received her musical education in Greece at age 13 and later established her career in Italy. Forced to deal with the exigencies of 1940s wartime poverty and with near-sightedness that left her nearly blind on stage, she endured struggles and scandal over the course of her career.

She notably underwent a mid-career weight loss, which might have contributed to her vocal decline, and the premature end of her career. The press exulted in publicizing Collas' temperamental behavior, her supposed rivalry with Renata Tabaldi, and her love affair with Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Anassas. Although her dramatic life and personal tragedy have often overshadowed Callas the artist in the popular press, her artistic achievements were such that Leonard Bernstein called her the Bible of Opera,

and her influence so enduring that in 2006, Opera News wrote of her, nearly 30 years after her death, she's still the definition of the diva as artist, and still one of classical music's best-selling vocalists. Early life. Family life, childhood, and moved to Greece. The name in Callos's New York birth certificate is Sophie Chichilia Carlos. She was born at Flower Hospital, now the Terence Cardinal Cook Health Care Center, 1249 5th Avenue, Manhattan, on December 2nd, 19, 19th,

to Greek parents, George Calogoropoulos, and Elmina Evangelia Lidze ne Demes, originally Dimitriado. Although she was christened Maria Anna Chichelia Sophia Calogaropoulos, Callas's father had shortened the surname Calogoropoulos first to Carlos and subsequently to Callos to make it more manageable. George and Lita Callas were an ill-matched couple from the beginning. George was easygoing and unambitious, with no interest in the arts, while Lita was vivacious and socially ambitious,

and had dreamed of a life in the arts, which her middle-class parents had stifled in her childhood and youth. Liza's father, Petros Dmitriades, was in failing health when Liza introduced George. to her family. Petros, distrustful of George, had warned his daughter, you will never be happy with him. If you marry that man, I will never be able to help you.

Leitza had ignored his warning, but soon realized that her father was right. The situation was aggravated by George's philandering and was improved neither by the birth of a daughter named Yucinza, later called Jackie, in 1917, nor the birth of a son named Vassilis in 1920. Vassilis's death from meningitis in the summer of 1992 dealt another blow to the marriage. In 1923, after realizing that Litsa was pregnant again, George made the decision to move his family to the United States, a decision which Yakintha recalled

was greeted with Liza shouting hysterically, followed by George. slaming doors. The family left for New York in July 1923, moving first into an apartment in the heavily ethnic Greek neighborhood of Astoria, Queens. Lice was convinced that her third child would be a boy. Her disappointment at the birth of another daughter was so great that she refused to even look at her new baby for four days. Maria was christened three years later at the Archdiocesan Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in 1926. When Maria was four, George Collis opened his own pharmacy, settling the family in Manhattan on 192nd Street in Washington Heights, where Collis grew up. Around the age of three, Maria's musical talent began to manifest itself, and after Leica had

discovered that her youngest daughter also had a voice, she began pressing Mary to sing. Callas later recalled, I was made to sing when I was only five, and I hated it. George was unhappy with his wife, favoring their elder daughter, as well as the pressure put upon young Mary to sing and perform, while Leica was in turn increasingly embittered with George, and his absence and infidelity, and often violently reviled him in front of their children.

The marriage continued to deteriorate in a 1937, Lisa decided to return to Athens with her two daughters. Relationship with mother. Callas' relationship with her mother continued to erode during the years in Greece, and in the prime of her career, it became a matter of great public interest, especially after a 1956 cover story in Time magazine, which focused on this relationship and later by Leitz's book, My Daughter Maria Callas, 1960.

In public, Pallas blamed the strained relationship with Liza on her unhappy childhood spent singing and working at her mother's insistence, saying, My sister was slim and beautiful and friendly, and my mother always preferred her. I was the ugly duckling, fat and clumsy and unpopular. It is a cruel thing to make a child feel ugly and unwanted. I'll never forgive her for taking my childhood away. During all the years I should have been playing and growing up, I was singing or making money.

Everything I did for them was mostly good, and everything they did to me was mostly bad. In 1957, she told Chicago radio host Norman Ross Jr. There must be a law against forcing children to perform at an early age. Children should have a wonderful childhood. It should not be given to. too much responsibility. Biographer Nicolas Petzalis Diomades asserts that Leitz's hateful treatment of George in front of their young children led to resentment and dislike on Callas' part.

According to both Collis' husband and her close friend Julette Simonato, Colas related to them that her mother, who did not work, pressed her to go out with various men, mainly Italian and German soldiers to bring home money and feud during the Axis occupation of Greece during World War II. Simeonato was convinced that Callas managed to remain untouched, but Callus never forgave her mother for what she perceived as a kind of prostitution forced by her mother. Liza herself, beginning in New York and continuing in Athens, had adopted a questionable lifestyle that included not only pushing her daughters into degrading situations to support her financially, but also entertaining Italian and German soldiers herself during the Axis occupation. In an attempt to patch things up with her mother,

Callas took Leica along on her first visit to Mexico in 1950, but this only reawakened the old frictions and resentments. And after leaving Mexico, the two never met again, after a series of angry and accusatory letters from Leitzah, lambasting Collis's father and husband. Callas ceased communication with her mother altogether. Education. Callis received her musical education in Athens. Initially, her mother tried to enroll her at the prestigious Athens Conservatoire without success. At the audition, her voice still untrained, failed to impress, while the conservative

director Philoctitis Soekuinamites refused to accept her without her satisfying the theoretic prerequisites. In the summer of 1937, her mother visited Maria Trevella at the younger Greek National Conservatoire, asking her to take Mary, as she was then called, as a student for a modest fee. In 1957, Trevella recalled her impression of Mary, a very plump young girl. girl, wearing big glasses for her myopia. The tone of the voice was warm, lyrical, intense. It swirled and flared like a flame and filled the air with melodious reverberations like a carillon. It was by any standards, an amazing phenomenon, or rather it was a great talent that needed control,

technical training, and strict discipline in order to shine with all its brilliance. Trevella agreed to tutor Callas, completely waiving her tuition fees. But no sooner had Collis started her formal lessons and vocal exercises, and Trevella began to feel that Callas was not a contralto, as she had been told, but a dramatic soprano. Subsequently, they began working on raising the tessatura of her voice and to lighten its timbre. Trevella recalled Collis as, a model student, fanatical and compromising, dedicated to her studies heart and soul.

Her progress was phenomenal. She studied five or six hours a day. Within six months, she was singing the most difficult arias in the international opera repertoire with the utmost musicality. On April 11, 1938, in her public debut, Kallis ended the recital of Trevellis' class at the Parnassos Music Hall with a duet from Tosca. Kalas recalled that Travella had a French method,

which was placing the voice in the nose, rather nasal, and I had the problem of not having low chest tones, which is essential in Belcanto, and that's where I learned my chest tones. However, when interviewed by Pierre de Grope on the French La Vitte de Montch, Callas attributed the development of her chest voice,

not to Trevella, but to her next teacher, the Spanish coloratura soprano Elvira de Hidalgo. Kala studied with Trevella for two years before her mother secured another audition at the Athens Conservatoire with De Hidalgo. Kallas auditioned with Ocean, The Almighty Monster, from Weber's Oberon. De Hidalgo recalled hearing tempestuous,

extravagant cascades of sounds, as yet uncontrolled but full of drama and emotion. She agreed to take her as a pupil immediately. But Callas's mother asked De Hidalgo to wait for a year, as Collas would be graduating from the National Conservatoire and could begin working. On April 2, 1939, Carlos undertook the part of Santuzza

in a student production of Muscany's Cavaleria Rusticana at the Greek National Opera at the Olympia Theatre. And in the fall of the same year, she enrolled at the Athens Conservatoire in Elvira de Hidalgo's class. In 1968, Kallas told Lord Harewood, De Hidalgo had the real great training,

maybe even the last real training of the real Belcanto. As a young girl, 13 years old, I was immediately thrown into her arms, meaning that I learned the secrets the ways of this belcanto, which of course, as you well know, is not just beautiful saying. It is a very hard training. It is a sort of straight jacket that you're supposed to put on, whether you like it or not. You have to learn to read, to write, to form your sentences, how far you can go, fall, hurt yourself, put yourself back on your feet continuously.

De Hidalgo had one method, which was the real Belcanto way, where no matter how heavy a voice, it should always be kept light, should always be worked on in a flexible way, never to weigh it down. It is a method of keeping the voice light and flexible and pushing the instrument into a certain zone,

where it might not be too large in sound, but penetrating, and teaching the scales, trills, all the Belcanto embellishments, which is a whole vast language of its own. De Hidalgo later recalled Callas as a phenomenon. She would listen to all my students, sopranos, mezzos, tenors. She could do it all.

Callas herself said that she would go to the conservatoire at 10 in the morning and leave with the last pupil devouring music for 10 hours a day. When asked by her teacher why she did this, her answer was that even with the latest talented pupil, he can teach you something that you, the most talented, might not be able to do. Early operatic career in Greece. After several appearances as a student, Culles began appearing in secondary roles at the Greek National Opera.

De Hidalgo was instrumental in securing roles for her, allowing Cullos to earn a small salary, which helped her and her family get through the difficult war years. Callas made her professional debut in February 1941 in the small role of Beatrice in Franz von Suppes, Pocacho, soprano Galatia Amaxopolo, who sang in the chorus later recalled. Even in rehearsal, Maria's fantastic performing ability had been obvious, and from then on, the other started trying ways of preventing her from appearing.

fellow singer Maria Alcoe similarly to recall that the established soprano's Navsika Galano and Anna Zoso Ramanundo used to stand the wings while Carlos was singing and make remarks about her, muttering, laughing, and point their fingers at her. Despite these hostilities, Callas managed to continue and made her debut in a leading role in August, 1942 as Toska. going on to sing the role of Marta and Eugene Delbert's Teflind at the Olympia Theatre. Collis's performance, as Marta received glowing reviews. Critics Bonudi declared Collis, an extremely dynamic artist, possessing the rarest, dramatic, and musical gifts,

and Vangelis Mangroveras evaluated Callas's performance for the weekly to Radiophon, the singer who took the part of Marta, the new star in the Greek firmament, with a matchless depth of feeling, gave a theatrical interpretation well up to the standard of a tragic actress. About her exceptional voice with its astonishing natural fluency,

I do not wish to add anything to the words of Alexandra La La Launy. Kalo Gorapolo is one of those God-given talents that one can only marvel at. Following these performances, even Collas' detractors began to refer to her as the God-given. Sometime later, watching Collis rehearsed Beethoven's Fidelio,

Erzweil rival soprano Anna Ramonda asked a colleague, Could it be that there is something divine? And we haven't realized it. Following Teflin, Kallas sang the role of Sondon. and Tutsa in Cavaleria Rusticana again, and followed it with O. Protamastoras El Manolas Calamoris at the ancient Odian of Herodias Atticus Theatre at the foot of the Cropolis. During August and September 1944, Callas performed the role of Leonore in a Greek-language production

of Fidelio, again at the Odion of Herodias Atticus. German critic Frederick Herzog, who witnessed the performances, declared Leonora Callas' greatest triumph. When Maria Kalloyoropoulos, Lenore, let her soprano soar out radiantly in the untrampled jubilation of the duet, she rose to the most sublime heights. Here she gave bud, blossom, and fruit to that harmony of sound that also ennobled the art of the prima donna.

After the liberation of Greece, De Hidalgo advised Kallos to establish herself in Italy. Kallos proceeded to give a series of concerts around Greece and then against her teacher's advice. She returned to America to see her father and to further pursue her career. When she left Greece on September 14, 1945, two months short of her 22nd birthday, callus had given 56 performances in seven operas and had appeared in around 20 recitals callus considered her greek career as the foundation of her musical and dramatic upbringing saying when i got to the big career there were no surprises for me main operatic career after returning to the united states and reuniting with her father in september nineteen forty five callus made the round of auditions in december of that year she auditioned for Edward Johnson, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, and was favorably received. Exceptional voice ought to be heard very soon on stage. Collas maintained that the Met offered her Madame Butterfly and Fidelio to be performed in Philadelphia

and sung in English, both of which she declined, feeling she was too fat for Butterfly, and did not like the idea of opera in English. Although no written evidence of this offer exists in the Mets Records. In a 1958 interview with the New York Post, Johnson corroborated Collis' story. We offered her a contract, but she didn't like it. Because of the contract, not because of the roles. She was right in turning it down. It was frankly a beginner's contract. Italy, Menegini, and Serafin. In 1946, Collis was engaged to reopen the opera house in Chicago as Turandot. But the company folded before opening. Basso Niccolo Rosi Lemini was also to star in this opera, was aware that Tullio Serfin was looking for a dramatic soprano to cast as La Joconda at the Arena de Verona.

He later recalled the young callas as being amazing, so strong physically and spiritually, so certain of her future. I knew in a big outdoor theater like Verona's, this girl, with her courage and huge voice, would make a tremendous impact. Subsequently, he recommended Kallas to retired tenor and impresario Giovanni Zanatello. During her audition,

Senatello became so excited that he jumped up and joined Kallos in the Act 4 duet. It was in this role that Kallas made her Italian debut. Upon her arrival in Verona, Carlos met Giovanni Battista Menegini, an older, wealthier industrialist, who began courting her. They married in 1949, and he assumed control of her career until 1959, when the marriage dissolved. It was Menegini's love and support that gave Carlos the time needed to establish herself in Italy, and throughout the prime of her career, she went by the name of Maria Menegini. callas. After La Jaconda, Callas had no further offers, and when Seraphine, looking for someone to sing

Isilda, called on her, she told him that she already knew the score, even though she had looked at only the first act out of curiosity while at the conservatory. She sighted the opera's second act for Seraphene, who praised her for knowing the role so well, whereupon she admitted to having bluffed and having Cyra the music. Even more impressed, Seraphine immediately cast her in the role. Seraphine thereafter served as Callas's mentor and supporter. According to Lord Harewood, very few Italian conductors have had a more distinguished career than Tullio Seraphene, and perhaps none apart from Toscanini, more influence.

In 1968, Callas recalled that working with Seraphine was the really lucky opportunity of her career, because he taught me that there must be an expression, that there must be a justification. He taught me the depth of music, the justification of music. That's where I really drank all I could from this man. He put itani and passed to Belcanto. The great turning point in Collis' career occurred in Venice in 1949. She was engaged to sing the role of Brunhilde in Divalcuri at the Teatro La Fenneichi. when Margarita Carossio, who was engaged to sing Elvira in I Puritani in the same theater, fell ill.

Unable to find a replacement for Carossio, Serafine told Callas that she would be singing Elvira in six days. When Collis protested that she not only did not know the role, but also had three more Brunhildas to sing, he told her, I guarantee that you can. Michael Scott's words, the notion of any one singer embracing music as divergent in its vocal demands as Wagner's Brinhilde and Bellini's Elvira in the same career would have been caused enough for surprise.

But to attempt to assay them both in the same season seemed like Folli de Grandeur. Before the performance actually took place, when incredulous critics snorted, we hear that Serafine has agreed to conduct I Puritani with a dramatic soprano. When can we expect a new addition of the original? La Traviata was baritone Gino Becci's Violetta. After the performance, one critic wrote even the most skeptical

had to acknowledge the miracle that Maria Callas accomplished, the flexibility of her limpid, beautifully poised voice and her splendid high notes. Her interpretation also has a humanity, warmth, and expressiveness that one would surge for in vain

in the fragile, pellucid coldness of other Elvira's. Franco Zeparelli recalled what she did in Venice was really incredible. You need to be familiar with opera to realize the size of her achievement. It was as if someone asked Birgit Nelson, who was famous for her great Wagnerian voice, to substitute overnight for Beverly Sills,

who is one of the great coloratura sopranos of our time. Scott asserts that, of all the many roles Carlos undertook, it is doubtful if any, had a more far-reaching effect. This initial foray into the Belcante repertoire changed the course of Colise's career and set her on a path leading to Lucille de Lamamor, La Traviata, Armida, La Sonambola, Il Pirata, Il Turco in Italia, Medea, and Anambolena, and reawakened interest in the long-neglected operas of Kerubini, Bellini, Donazetti, and Rossini. In the words of the soprano Montserac caballier,

she opened a new door for us, for all the singers in the world, a door that had been closed. Behind it was sleeping not only great music, but great idea of interpretation. She has given us the chance, those who follow her, to do things that were hardly possible before her.

That I am compared with callus as something I never dared to dream. It is not right. I am much smaller than Kallas. As with Ipuritani, Kallas learned and performed Kedubini's Madea, Giordano's Andrea Cheneer, and Rosini's Armida

on a few days' notice. Throughout her career, Kallas displayed her vocal versatility and recitals that pitched dramatic soprano arias alongside coloratory pieces, including in a 1952 R-A-I recital in which she opened with Lady Macbeth's

letter scene. followed by the mad scene from lucia di lamomore then abigail's treacherous reticative an aria from nabuco finishing with the bell song from lakme capped by a ringing high e in old e six