Free Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend by Arianna Huffington

Evangelia instantly withdrew Maria from the company; the Italians succumbed and mother and daughter were feted in Salonika, forgetting for the four days they were there that Greece was occupied and there was a war on.
    Even before the success of Tosca and the concert in Salonica, Maria was ready to tackle anything; no role and no difficulties could intimidate her. She was fearless in the face of challenge and felt convinced that she had the ability to sing any role she could get. In the summer season of 1943, Tosca was followed by the Greek premiere of Eugen d’Albert’s Tiefland . “When you are very young and on the threshold of a career you have all the confidence in the world,” she said in 1961. “There is nothing you feel you couldn’t tackle and do splendidly.”
    In this frame of mind Maria turned Marta in Tiefland into a challenge and an opportunity to create for the first time for Greek audiences the tormented martyr, the archetypal Romantic heroine. Marta is the oppressed mistress of a rich landowner; she falls in love with a shepherd and at the end of the opera flees with him to the hills. Maria was determined that her performance would be a revelation. She pursued Leonidas Zoras, the conductor, everywhere, demanding extra rehearsals. He remembers how they spent many nights not just going through the score note by note but with Maria testing her interpretation of each musical phrase. Every ten minutes, the oil lamp, filled with wartime watered kerosene, started exuding black smoke. Maria would get up, blow it out, clean it, light it again and go on singing. Ten minutes later, she would get up and repeat the same ritual. And so on through the night. Leonidas Zoras had never before come across such patience, persistence and endurance.
    The opening night of Tiefland on April 22, 1944, brought Maria her first standing ovation and her first international publicity. An opera written by a Glaswegian of French descent who identified himself entirely with Germany, it was originally put on to placate the Germans who were making threatening noises about the partiality of the Greeks for Italian opera. As a result the premiere of Tiefland was widely covered in all German-language papers and “Maria Kalogeropoulos, Greece’s foremost and most beloved opera singer,” was at the center of the coverage.
    After the Allies had landed in Normandy on June 6, the end of the war was at last clearly in sight. In that fateful summer of 1944, Maria had a small part in the only modern opera she ever sang, O Protomastoras ( The Master Builder ) by Manolis Kalomiris, and on August 14 she sang Leonora in the Greek premiere of Beethoven’s Fidelio in the amphitheater of Herodes Atticus. With the end of the war imminent, Maria sang and portrayed the ultimate victory of love over everything, including fear, tyranny and death. Leonora unlocks Florestan’s fetters, and as the heavenly tune in the oboe begins, she can only utter half phrases in the background, overwhelmed by joy and love. The audience was just as overwhelmed. Maria’s performances, even the most elaborate and perfected, had and would always have an element of something brewing, a mysterious anticipation of something still to come. At that particular moment, with Athens on edge, expecting some decisive war news, that quality in her performances struck a chord in the audience that drove them wild. Under the cloudless Athenian summer night they cheered, they yelled, they threw their hats in the air. No one could tell whether it was the Greeks or their enemies who cheered the loudest. She never sang Leonora again.
    In October the Germans marched out of Athens and the Greek soldiers who had been in Italy with the Free Greek Army came back to a liberated Greece. For nearly a week Athens was delirious, and the Athenians, intoxicated, without any help even from ouzo or retsina, sang, danced and threw flowers at each other in the streets. Maria and Jackie climbed up to the roof of