The first official Maria Callas website is launched by Warner Classics
on December 2nd, the legendary soprano’s 94th birthday
It is 40 years since Maria Callas died, aged just 53, in September 1977, but she remains an icon: as a supreme singing-actress and as a stylish and glamorous celebrity. Known as La Divina, the American-born Greek soprano is still the epitome of the operatic diva for aficionados and for a wider public.
Callas changed the face of her chosen art form, helping to shape its history. She has been the subject of plays and films, she generates many millions of views on YouTube, and today’s opera singers acknowledge her time and again as both an inspiration and an influence.
For decades, she has retained her place among the world’s top-selling classical artists and Warner Classics has recently released Callas: Live, a 42-CD box of her live recordings, all remastered with the latest technology. It has been hailed as revelatory.
Maria-Callas.com has been conceived both to reflect Callas’ status as a figure of major cultural importance and to encourage discovery of her life and her art. The soprano’s estate executors have given their blessing to the project. Designed and built by Milan-based agency Uprising™, the site is timeless and elegant in design and its unique interactive offering can be experienced to full effect on Mac, PC, smartphone and tablet. The launch version is in English, with French, Italian and German to follow over the next two months.
The site is divided into four main sections: Life, Look, Voice and Today – in other words, biographical elements (including animated illustrations and audio narration exploring her life on and off stage), archival photos and live performance videos, her complete, detailed Warner Classics discography and the latest Callas-related news and events from around the world. The voice of Callas is the heart of the website, and can be experienced in a new way thanks to an audio-reactive music visualizer which has been specially developed to produce a visual analogue for Callas’ utterly distinctive voice – the essence of her being, and of maria-callas.com.
