On this day in New York · December 2, 1923
Maria Callas Is Born in Manhattan
Five months after her parents got off the boat from Greece, the woman who would remake opera arrived at a hospital on Fifth Avenue, and nobody in the delivery room had any idea what they had.
The facts
- Born
- December 2, 1923, at Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital, Manhattan
- Birth certificate name
- Sophie Cecilia Kalos
- Parents
- George Kalogeropoulos and Evangelia "Litsa" Kalogeropoulos, Greek immigrants who arrived in New York in July 1923
- Childhood home
- 192nd Street, Washington Heights, Manhattan
Maria Callas was born on December 2, 1923, at Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital in Manhattan, the child of Greek immigrants George Kalogeropoulos and Evangelia "Litsa" Kalogeropoulos, who had arrived in New York only about five months earlier after Litsa discovered she was pregnant again. Her birth certificate listed her as Sophie Cecilia Kalos; she was christened Maria Anna Cecilia Sophia Kalogeropoulos. The family settled first in Astoria, Queens, then moved to 192nd Street in Washington Heights, where George eventually opened his own pharmacy and Maria grew up. Litsa, who had wanted a son, was slow to warm to her new daughter, and she pushed the girl toward music almost as soon as she could talk. That pressure, applied on the streets of a city Callas barely remembered by the time she left it for Greece as a teenager, shaped the singer the world would later call La Divina.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
-
I was the ugly duckling, fat and clumsy and unpopular.
Maria Callas, recalling her mother's favoritism toward her sister and the pressure to perform as a child
Source: Wikipedia -
I was made to sing when I was only five, and I hated it.
Maria Callas, on her mother's insistence that she perform from early childhood
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Every biography calls her a Greek soprano, and she was raised and trained in Athens, but the most consequential voice in twentieff-century opera was a New York birth certificate before it was anything else, born to parents who had just gotten off the boat and a mother already deciding what her daughter's life would be for.
Sources
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