Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic If ever a star cried out to be immortalised on screen, surely it was the glamorous and tempestuous Maria Callas. The centenary of the most feted operatic soprano of the 20th century fell in 2023, but it has taken until now for two films to turn up. One is a cinema biopic with Angelina Jolie in the lead role. The other is an old-fashioned TV documentary.It is puzzling that they are late to the party. Last year\u2019s centenary sparked a worldwide outpouring of mementos of Callas\u2019s short but dazzling career \u2014 biographies, boxed sets of recordings, even a staged event in which performance artist Marina Abramovi\u0107 took on Callas\u2019s persona.Callas\u2019s story offers not just inspiring artistry, but a rise from humble beginnings in an immigrant Greek family in New York, a cast list boasting some of the most famed celebrities of her era, including John F Kennedy and Winston Churchill, and a high-profile love triangle involving Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis and former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy. Here was the Marilyn Monroe or Diana, Princess of Wales of the opera stage, a media icon to her fingertips.The biopic is Maria, a $20mn-plus production with Oscar ambitions. It is the third in a series of similar films directed by Pablo Larra\u00edn, following his earlier successes with Jackie, a post-assassination profile of Kennedy, and Spencer, which imagined Diana, Princess of Wales\u2019s first Christmas with the Windsors.The documentary is Maria Callas: The Final Act, directed by Clare Beavan for the BBC. It follows in a long line of Callas documentaries, though this one promises a fresh viewpoint, claiming that Callas\u2019s life may have been a tragedy, but not for the reasons usually given.\u00a0It is now almost 50 years since Callas\u2019s death, and although there is not much that is new in terms of documentary material, each film presents its own take on the life of \u201cLa Divina\u201d, as she was known by fans. For a singer whose career was disappointingly short, with a peak of only a decade or so, her enduring reputation is extraordinary.\u00a0As soprano Beverly Sills once said, \u201cI would rather have 10 sensational years like Callas than 20 years like another.\u201dThrough a combination of training, operatic instinct and an unmistakable voice smouldering with emotional heat, Callas set new standards in expressing drama through music. She was fortunate in her timing, as her career coincided with the rise of the LP era in the 1950s, allowing singers to record operas complete, not just individual arias. That played to her strengths and her recordings sold in vast quantities.\u00a0The lost opportunity is that so little was filmed of her in the opera house \u2014 only one, official, 45-minute live television relay of act two of Tosca at the Royal Opera House in 1964. How we would love to see more of this famed operatic actress, who worked tirelessly with some of the most celebrated film and stage directors of her day, such as Luchino Visconti and Franco Zeffirelli.\u00a0Most reviews of Maria, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August, have focused on Jolie\u2019s portrayal of the prima donna, which is probably fair. She captures the glamour and the dignity of her subject without turning the biopic into operatic melodrama. What is missing is the feisty spirit that fired up Callas on stage and off. Just look at the scalding fury in the photos of her as Cherubini\u2019s Medea. \u201cImagine me on stage if I was not temperamental,\u201d she once told an interviewer.\u00a0That may be due to the way Larra\u00edn frames the story. The film homes in on the last week of Callas\u2019s life, spent roaming through her lavish Paris flat on Avenue Georges Mandel. Outside the door, the legend is still giving a performance as fans in the street stop to pay their respects (\u201cBook me a table at a restaurant where the waiters know who I am,\u201d she tells her staff). Inside, she is reduced to ordering her trusty servant in daily moves of the grand piano and secretly raiding her supplies of sedatives. Behind her eyes, the curtain has already come down.\u00a0To leaven the impending gloom, highlights from Callas\u2019s life are interspersed as flashbacks, a technique familiar in biopics (think Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady). The footlights dazzle in these skilful recreations, but however well Jolie reincarnates these scenes, it is hard not to miss Callas herself \u2014 that unique voice, the stage charisma, the smouldering passion.\u00a0As Zeffirelli said, \u201cThe magic of a Callas is a quality few artists have\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009It is something which lifts them from the ground; they become like semigods.\u201dAll of that is vividly present in the short archive clips chosen to illustrate Maria Callas: The Final Act. Most of them are familiar, though we do get to see some photos and handwritten notes from Callas\u2019s private collection.The story of Callas\u2019s life and career is told in a straightforward manner, but the real purpose of this documentary is to put forward a theory as to why she cut down her appearances so dramatically from 1959. Talking heads are threaded throughout, led by expert witness Will Crutchfield, American conductor and musicologist.\u00a0Many hypotheses have been put forward in the past, most of them plausible. A dramatic loss of weight so as to look slimmer on stage caused her voice to decline (similar cases could be cited). Or, she attempted too wide a variety of roles (there are again similar cases). Or, she fell in love with Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, joined high society and lost interest in performing (less likely, given her dedication to her art).\u00a0Crutchfield proposes that the vocal weaknesses so noticeable in Callas\u2019s later performances had been simmering since the start, and she effectively lost her voice. The point is well made and exhaustively examined, right down to comparisons of wavelengths, but the most likely reason is surely a combination of all the above. Callas had become so famous that the pressures on her from every side had become intense.\u00a0There has been nobody to equal her in opera since, and these films help add to the legend. If the subject appeals, you may wish to seek out more of Callas as she would want to be remembered \u2014 as an all-round operatic artist of exceptional gifts.\u00a0That solitary live film of Tosca remains a treasure. Try also some of the live concerts, such as Paris in 1958 or Hamburg in 1959 or 1962 (just read her face in Eboli\u2019s \u201cO don fatale\u201d), easy to find on YouTube. The 2017 documentary Maria by Callas, directed by Tom Volf, is a mine of previously unseen footage, both public and private, and a must-see, currently available on streaming services. At this rate, the legend will never die.\u00a0\u2018Maria Callas: The Final Act\u2019, BBC2, December 29, 9pm and BBC iPlayer; \u2018Maria\u2019 is on Netflix in the US now and in UK cinemas from January 10<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic If ever a star cried out to be immortalised on screen, surely it was the glamorous and tempestuous Maria Callas. The centenary of the most feted operatic soprano of the 20th century fell in 2023, but it has taken until now for two films<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":150103,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-150102","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150102"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":150104,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150102\/revisions\/150104"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}