Maria Callas (2 December 1923 – 16 September 1977) was the defining soprano of the postwar generation and a figure whose public life intersected with the café-society world in which many of Cartier's clients gathered. She was born in New York to Greek immigrant parents and died at her Paris apartment at 36 avenue Georges-Mandel, in the 16th arrondissement, of a heart attack at the age of fifty-three.
Career
Callas's official La Scala debut came in December 1951 in Verdi's I vespri siciliani, headlining the season opening and establishing her position at the centre of postwar Italian opera. Over the following two decades she became associated with a particular group of roles across coloratura and dramatic soprano repertoire, among them Norma, Tosca, Lucia in Lucia di Lammermoor, Violetta in La traviata, Elvira in I puritani, and the title role in Medea. Her technical range and her ability to carry dramatic intensity across both lyric and coloratura lines was the basis of her reputation.
Onassis, Paris, and the Cartier world
In 1959 Callas left her husband Giovanni Battista Meneghini for Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate, whom she had met during a summer cruise on his yacht Christina earlier that year. Their relationship lasted until 1968, when Onassis married Jacqueline Kennedy. Callas then settled permanently in Paris, where she lived reclusively through the 1970s in her apartment on avenue Georges-Mandel.
The book draws a parallel between Callas and Nellie Melba, the celebrated soprano of half a century earlier: both occupied a position where public fame intersected with the client culture of the Paris luxury houses. Callas's social world overlapped with the same Parisian milieu as Grace Kelly, the Aga Khan, and other Cartier clients of the 1950s and 1960s, though she is not independently documented as a major Cartier commission client in the way Kelly or the Duke of Windsor were.
The 2007 Cartier brooch
A documented Cartier piece from Callas's life surfaced at Sotheby's Milan in December 2007, as part of a two-part sale of her personal effects consigned from the estate of her husband Meneghini, who had purchased many of them at auction after her death. A gold and emerald Cartier brooch, estimated at €4,000, sold for €74,650, nearly nineteen times the estimate. An earlier Sotheby's Geneva sale in 2004 had raised $1.86 million for eleven pieces from the Callas collection, including an 11.7-carat marquise diamond ring that sold for $340,000.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 12 ("Drifting Apart") and ch. 13 ("A Split in Three")
- Encyclopaedia Britannica: Maria Callas
- JCK: Maria Callas jewelry fetches $1.86 million at auction (Sotheby's Geneva 2004)
- Playbill: Callas auction brings in €1.76M (Sotheby's Milan 2007)
- Wikipedia: Maria Callas
