| Three years after her last major role, the actress Angelina Jolie has returned to movie theatres as one of history’s greatest prima donnas. In “Maria,” Jolie portrays the legendary opera star Maria Callas, whose rocky personal life and professional downfall have become almost as central to her legacy as the sublime singing that launched her to fame. In 1995, the conductor and musicologist Will Crutchfield revisited Callas’s career and reputation in The New Yorker. The daughter of immigrants to New York, Callas spent her working-class childhood in upper Manhattan before returning, with her mother, to her parents’ native Greece. Although her voice was “unusual and in some ways unbeautiful,” Crutchfield writes, Callas projected “an uncanny sense of intimacy” and showcased a mix of talents that “had not been completely present in one soprano in generations.” The profile makes the singer’s singular abilities comprehensible even to non-opera aficionados, zeroing in on individual performances, and even specific notes—now easy to listen to online—that reveal Callas’s epochal talent and wrenching decline. Crutchfield takes in the tabloid aspects of Callas’s image—her affair, while she was married, with Aristotle Onassis, and her subsequent romantic rivalry with Jackie Kennedy—but does so partly to debunk false claims about their role in her collapse. The true reason for Callas’s diminishment, which she labored for years to conceal, was less dramatic and therefore all the more tragic. “In the intensity of her will to make the music she loved sound the way she imagined it,” Crutchfield observes, “lay the defect that had to ruin her.” | 
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