Callas: Her Life, Her Loves, Her Music - Softcover

Without doubt the twentieth century's most celebrated operatic diva, Maria Callas blazed new paths, set new standards and changed the face of opera for ever. With her incandescent fame,extraordinary voice and dramatic talent, she should have led a sublimely happy life, yet betrayal and tragedy were her constant companions. Callas is both icon and myth, her private life indelibly coloured by passion, vulnerability, rejection, the madness of a voracious press and personal tragedy. The mystery of Callas's last days, the charlatan who preyed upon her, her private angst over Onassis, her thwarted affair with the homosexual Italian director Visconti and her traumatic New York childhood and youthful struggle to survive in war-torn Greece are told in this vivid account. Anne Edwards shows us the real Maria Callas, whose craving for affection and complex neurosis affected not only her life but her music.

Anne Edwards is an American biographer who specialises in theatre, film and opera (including acclaimed lives of Judy Garland, Vivien Leigh, Katharine Hepburn) She lives with her songwriter-husband, Stephen Citron, in Los Angeles, but was resident in the UK and Europe in the 1970s.