The work devoted to Maria Callas has moved beyond documentary into research — first as an object of study, and now as a contribution in its own right. Conferences, peer-reviewed journals, reference bibliographies: what scholars make of it, and what Tom Volf publishes in turn.
A conference, an article
For the centenary of Maria Callas’s birth, the University of Turin — UniVerso convened from 17 to 20 December 2023, with the Fondazione Teatro Regio Torino and the Consulta Universitaria del Cinema, the international conference Maria Callas at 100: Opera, Celebrity, Myth.
Scientific direction: Giulia Carluccio (Università di Torino), Massimo Fusillo (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa), Stefania Rimini (Università di Catania) and Emanuele Senici (Sapienza, Rome). Four days of papers across the Teatro Regio, the Cavallerizza Reale and the Rectorate, devoted to a figure who left her mark on the history of opera and, more broadly, on the collective imagination of the 20th century.
Tom Volf gave a paper there on Norma — the role Callas called her “warhorse”, the one that opens and closes her stage career. The paper became an article, submitted to peer review and accepted for the collected volume arising from the conference, forthcoming from Il Mulino.
The article
- Title — “Maria Callas e Norma, 1948-1965: un percorso storico, visivo e musicale”.
- Method — a transdisciplinary analysis, historical, visual and musical, of how the role of Norma evolved across Callas’s career. The fruit of a decade of research in twelve countries, the study favours primary sources, and above all Callas’s own words. Most of the material comes from the archives of the Maria Callas Endowment Fund.
- Corpus — ninety-two complete stage performances, fifteen concerts and recitals including Casta Diva, two studio recordings and four masterclasses at the Juilliard School in 1971-1972 devoted to arias from Norma — more than for any other opera.
- Outline — the bel canto lineage, from Pasta to Callas; the formative years (1948-1953); the peak and the fall (1954-1958); the last Norma performances (1960-1965); devotion to Bellini and respect for the score; Maria and Norma, the convergence of two destinies.
- Review — peer-reviewed; revised version accepted in July 2026.
The article closes on transmission: the four Juilliard masterclasses devoted to Norma bear witness to a wish to pass this knowledge on to later generations — a mission the Maria Callas Endowment Fund pursues today, in the hope that the academic world will continue to explore the many facets of Maria Callas’s art and personality.
The conference had opened on 17 December with an inaugural round table — Callas Archives — chaired by Paolo Gallarati. Tom Volf sat on it on behalf of the Maria Callas Endowment Fund, alongside the heads of the major Callas collections: Simone Solinas (Teatro Regio, Turin), Andrea Vitalini and Luciana Ruggeri (Teatro alla Scala), Pierluigi Ledda (Archivio Storico Ricordi), Caterina d’Amico (Fondazione Zeffirelli and Fondo Luchino Visconti), Simona Segre-Reinach (Archivio Biki Jacques Reynaud) and Barbara Costa (Archivio Publifoto, Intesa Sanpaolo). On 19 December, the keynote was given by João Pedro Cachopo (Universidade Nova de Lisboa): The Callas Effect: Metamorphoses of Aura in the Digital Age.
Rather than discovering the truth about Maria independently of the Callas myth, the aim — at once more modest and more courageous — is to give back to Maria Callas the prerogative of speaking on both.
João Pedro Cachopo, Dramaturgias no. 22, 2023 (our translation)
In the literature
- 2023 — João Pedro Cachopo, “A Diva entre o Mito e a Verdade: Em torno de Maria by Callas de Tom Volf”, Dramaturgias no. 22, Laboratório de Dramaturgia, University of Brasília, pp. 462-482. Twenty pages devoted solely to the Maria by Callas project — exhibition, documentary and the three books. The author analyses the paradox of an undertaking that values the copy, the image and the trace in the name of the original, of authenticity and of transparency.
- 2018 — João Pedro Cachopo, “The Aura of Opera Reproduced: Fantasies and Traps in the Age of the Cinecast”, The Opera Quarterly, Oxford University Press. The article reads Maria by Callas in the light of Benjamin’s aura, alongside the live films of Andrea Andermann and the Met: Live in HD.
- 2019 — João Pedro Cachopo, “A aura da ópera na época da sua queda anunciada”, Revista Dramaturgias no. 10, “Ópera, Tecnologia e Novos Media”, University of Brasília. An expanded Portuguese version of the same essay.
- 2022 — João Pedro Cachopo, “Callas and the Hologram: A Live Concert with a Dead Diva”. The author surveys the whole cycle: the film, the exhibition at La Seine Musicale, Maria by Callas: In Her Own Words (Assouline), Callas Confidential (La Martinière) and Letters & Memoirs (Albin Michel).
- 2021 — Clara Bleuzen, “La colorisation de films d’archives, l’exemple de la société de production Composite Films”, Épistémocritique. An interview on archive-colourisation methods in which Maria by Callas serves as a case study, alongside I Am Not Your Negro by Raoul Peck.
- 2021 and 2022 — George Constantzos and Thomas Tamvakos, Maria Callas Bibliography and Maria Callas New Bibliography, Athens. The reference Callas bibliography — nearly 80 pages — lists Maria by Callas (Assouline), Callas Confidential (La Martinière), Letters & Memoirs (Albin Michel) and the Italian edition Io, Maria. Lettere e memorie inedite (Rizzoli), as well as Maria Callas : l’ultime tournée by Robert Sutherland.
- 2020 and 2023 — Gabriele Scaramuzza, a Milanese aesthetician who saw Callas at La Scala in 1956, cites the Italian edition of Letters & Memoirs in Maria Callas viva, « Poesia senza poesia: Franz Kafka, Maria Callas » and Maria Callas interprete di Wagner (Materiali di Estetica).
- 2019 — Fabio Dal Corobbo, « Ebben? Ne andrò lontana ». La voce, la scena, il repertorio : l’eredità di Maria Callas tra passato e futuro, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. A thesis drawing in particular on the unpublished interview with Elvira de Hidalgo recovered for Maria by Callas.
- 2020 — Enza Biagini (Università degli Studi di Firenze), “Lettura, letteratura, fumetto. Maria Callas in graphic novel”, in Elisabetta Bacchereti, Federico Fastelli and Diego Salvadori (eds), Il graphic novel. Un crossover per la modernità, Firenze University Press, “Biblioteca di Studi di Filologia Moderna” series no. 56. A full chapter on Callas in the graphic novel — Io sono Maria Callas by Vanna Vinci and Sempre libera by Lorenza Natarella — which cites Maria by Callas in its bibliography.
- 2022 — Sebastià Alzamora Martín and M. Magdalena Brotons Capó, “Blai Bonet i Pier Paolo Pasolini: imatges del trascendent”, Oceánide. Maria by Callas enters the bibliography of Catalan Pasolini studies.
- 2019 — Flaviano Pisanelli (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3), French translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poem “La prévoyance”, published in Maria Callas. Lettres & Mémoires. Deposited in the open archive HAL — the book thus appears as a reference in French research.
- 2024 — Hernan Carrillo, “Guiding neural networks for image colorization through user interactions”. The film serves as an applied case study in neural colourisation research.
- 2020 — Destine Literare, journal of the Association of Romanian Writers of North America. A first-person account of discovering the film on a Beijing–Montreal flight.
- 2024 — Alexander Fedorov, Leaders and Outsiders of the French Box Office, 1945-2023, Moscow, 858 pages. Maria by Callas features in this statistical history of French cinema.
The works referenced
Seven works from the Callas cycle are now cited in the academic literature: the film Maria by Callas (2017), the exhibition at La Seine Musicale, Maria by Callas: In Her Own Words (Assouline, 2017), Callas Confidential (La Martinière, 2017), Maria Callas: Letters & Memoirs (Albin Michel, 2019), its Italian edition Io, Maria. Lettere e memorie inedite (Rizzoli, 2019) and Maria Callas : l’ultime tournée by Robert Sutherland (L’Archipel, 2017).
These works appear in nine languages — English, Italian, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Catalan, Romanian, Greek and Russian.