The bronze statue of legendary opera singer Maria Callas was uncovered in the Roberto Galli park in central Athens on Friday evening.
The statue was unveiled by Athens Mayor Kostas Bakoyannis with the presence of the Maria Callas Greek Society that commissioned the artwork by Sculptor Aphrodite Liti.
Aphrodite said, “It includes many references to the life of the great singer, but also to the history of art itself.”
Aphrodite Liti was born in Athens. She studied sculpture, mosaic and icon painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASKT, 1972-1978), with professors G. Pappas, G. Kolefa and K. Xinopoulos. She attended Universita Degli Studi Studi in Milan in 1978. She completed her postgraduate studies at London University (1983- 1986) with a scholarship of the National Scholarships Foundation (IKY). In 1985, she received the sculpture award from the Chamber of Fine Arts of Greece. From 1978 until 2000, she worked as a museum sculptor at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Since 2000, she is a Professor of Sculpture at the Athens School of Fine Arts. Since 1981, she has exhibited her artwork in solo and group exhibitions, in Greece and abroad. Her artwork is in both private and public collections
Greek American opera phenomenon Maria Callas was born in New York City in December 1923. Her parents, George and Evangelia, were Greek immigrants who eventually shortened their last name to Callas by the time of Maria’s christening.
Born and raised in New York until she was 14, Maria Anna Sofia Cecilia Kalogeropoulou returned with her mother and siblings to Athens in 1937, where she spent the war years studying music and performing professionally to support her family.
Callas began taking classical piano lessons when she was 7 years old. Though overshadowed by her older sister Jackie, who was viewed as beautiful and charismatic, Callas had an amazing talent at singing music with dramatic flair, with her mother pushing her to pursue a vocal career. In 1937, when Callas was a teenager, her parents separated and that is when she, her mother and sister moved back to Greece.
Though she was a sensation in Europe by the time the war ended, Callas did not find immediate success after making her way back to America in the late 1940s. Significantly overweight since childhood, Callas effected a dramatic physical transformation in her early 30s that fundamentally altered the trajectory of her career. She dropped more than 70 pounds (35 kilos) over three years in the mid-1950s, becoming, in the words of Time magazine, “Svelte, successful…a diva more widely hated by her colleagues and more wildly acclaimed by her public than any other living singer.”
During World War II, Callas struggled to find roles. In the mid-1940s, she moved back to New York to spend time with her father and look for work, but experienced a number of rejections. She eventually moved to Verona, where she met rich industrialist Giovanni Meneghini. The couple married in 1949.
Callas’s Italian opera debut took place at the Verona Arena in August 1947, in a performance of La Gioconda. Over the next few years, under the management of her husband, Callas continued to perform in Florence and Verona to critical acclaim.
Her reputation as a “Diva” which Time referred was earned through years of backstage battles with costars and Callas’ habit of grabbing solo curtain calls at every opportunity. A public spat with a rival soprano at La Scala in Milan turned parts of the Italian audience against her.
Fiercely resilient, Callas said of audience members’ jeers, “Hissing from the gallery is part of the scene. It is a hazard of the battlefield. Opera is a battlefield, and it must be accepted.”
Callas finally conquered America in the late 1950s, becoming not only opera’s biggest live draw but also its most successful recording artist since Enrico Caruso.
In 1956, had the opportunity to sing with the Metropolitan Opera in her home city of New York, but in 1958 was fired by director Rudolf Bing. Callas’s marriage had also begun to unravel. Callas and Meneghini split at the end of the decade, during which time she was said to be having an affair with shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, who later wed former U.S. first lady Jackie Kennedy causing much grief for Callas.
On September 16, 1977, Callas died in Paris of a heart attack.