MOTHER, DEMENTIA AND GENIUS

The apartment house in Athens where Callas lived from 1937 to 1945

I was born Sophia Cecelia Kalos at Flower Hospital in Manhattan, on December 2, 1923.My parents George and Evangelia Kalogeropoulos  immigrated from Greece that same year,they were  unhappy living togrther, had nothing in common.He had no ambition or dream,took life and things as they came,had no interest in the arts. Mother was a go-getter,ambitious, had  dreams of stardom.for herself, to be an actress,unfortunately  had no talent,was an actrice manquee.To make things worse Father was a  philanderer,their married life was an unhappy one from day one,things.came worse when my brother Vassilis  born in 1920 died  two years later from meningitis. Father decided to immigrate to America, to New York City  to start a new life, a decision which Mother greeted with hysterical shoutings,an early stage of  her dementia .We sailed to New York in July 1923, moving first into an apartment in Astoria, Queens.My parents were desperate to have a son, when I was born Mother's despair  was so great that she refused to look at me for four days.My birth was the final blow to their marriage.When I  was 4, Father opened his own little pharmacy, and we moved to our new home on 192nd Street in Washington Heights.,I  grew up was lonely,unhappy  so spent time  playing the pianola and singing, One day Mother when listening  to me ,with her maternal instincts, had a stroke of genius, sensed my musical gifts,so began pushing and pulling.I became her second victim,made me to sing to everyone, everywhere. Father and Mother fought ,argued day and night, it was hell at home for the four of us, in retrospect  I believe Mother  was sexually frustrated,has an excess of sexual hormones that were not satisfied, Father refusing to come near,talk to her.In 1937 Mother decided to move back to Greece so her family could finance my musical training, and to get away from a husband that she hated and despised,.Another stroke of genius from a madwoman,History will say that my mother was the first person behind the genius.

My relationship with Mother got worse during the years in Greece,Jackie was outgoing and  pretty,Mother and everyone  loved and preferred her. I was the ugly duckling, fat and clumsy,unpopular. It was cruel  to make me feel ugly and unwanted when I was a child, and I'll never forgive nor forget her for taking my childhood away. 

During  Word War II Mother pushed me to go out and sing for Italian and German soldiers,I never slept with them,never slept for money or food during the Axis occupation of Greece. I have not  forgotten nor forgiven her for using me for that kind of prostitution.After I met Titta who loved and respected his own Mom, for him she was a Madonna, to please him I took Mother with me  on my first visit to Mexico in 1950, but things got worse between us, we had nothing in common and there was no love lost between us,living together only  brought back  unhappy memories,reawakened the old angers and resentments,so after leaving Mexico, the two of us never met again.E Finita La Commedia.

In Athens I received my musical training, the best in the world as far as I was concerned. In the summer of 1937, Mother took me to audition for Maria Trivella at the  Greek National Conservatoire,At first sight Madame Trivella was not impressed , I was fat,wearing thick glasses and shabbily dressed..

Whatever I sang she liked it , years later after I became La Callas she said  :

  ----" The tone of her 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".

Maria Callas with her teacher Elvira de Hidalgo in 1954

Madame Trivella agreed to tutor me for free, waiving her tuition fees, but no sooner had I started my lessons and vocal exercises than Madame Trivella felt  I was not a contralto, as she had been told, but a dramatic soprano. So she  began working on raising the tessitura of my voice and to lighten its timbre. 

---" Mary was a model student,fanatical, uncompromising, dedicated to her studies heart and soul. Her progress was phenomenal,she studied five, six hours a day,every day.After six months, she was good enough to sing the most difficult arias in the international opera repertoire with the utmost musicality".

On April 11, 1938, for my public debut, I ended the recital of  Madame Trivella's class at the Parnassos music hall with a duet fromTosca.

I studied with Madame Trivella for two years before Mother decided to move me to the Athens Conservatory,so I auditioned for Elvira de Hidalgo. I sang  "Ocean, Thou Mighty Monster" from Weber's Oberon.
Elvira recalled hearing "tempestuous, extravagant cascades of sounds, as yet uncontrolled but full of drama and emotion".
She agreed to take me as a pupil immediately, but Mother asked de Hidalgo to wait for a year, as I would be graduating from the National Conservatoire and could begin working, bringing home some  much needed income.. On April 2, 1939, I sang  the part of Santuzza in a student production of Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana at the Olympia Theatre, and in the fall of the same year Mother enrolled  me at the Athens Conservatoire in Elvira de Hidalgo's class.

--- De Hildalgo had the real great training, maybe even the last real training of the real bel canto. As a young girl—thirteen years old—I was immediately thrown into her arms, meaning that I learned the secrets, the ways of this bel canto, which of course as you well know, is not just beautiful singing. It is a very hard training; it is a sort of a strait-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 bel canto way, where no matter how heavy a voice, it should always be kept light, it 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 bel canto embellishments, which is a whole vast language of its own.^[11]

De Hidalgo later recalled Callas as "a phenomenon... She would listen to all my students, sopranos, mezzos, tenors... She could do it all."^[13] 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 least talented pupil, he can teach you something that you, the most talented, might not