Opera takes special delight in killing off its female protagonists. Maria Callas’s relatively short opera house career lasted from 1947 to 1965 but in that time she must have “died” onstage dozens of times. Eventually she seemed to become in real life the kind of doomed woman that she portrayed. After her very public affair with millionaire Aristotle Onassis ended with his 1968 marriage to Jackie Kennedy, Callas became a recluse, dying alone in her Paris flat in 1977.
The performance artist Marina AbramoviÄ was 16 when, in the early 1960s, she first heard Callas on the radio. She became obsessed; as she said in an interview with the New York Times, “I read eight biographies… and there was so much similarity that I see in myself. We are Sagittarius, the same; we had bad mothers.”
