On Yom Kippur, we release illusions of who we are. We relinquish the hold of the yetzer hara (evil inclination) that has so cleverly masqueraded as ourselves… We need to know that it is the yetzer hara that makes us feel like we are not enough, that makes us feel that we have to be perfect to be loved. It is the yetzer hara that makes us feel jealous, spiteful, angry, defeated, bitter, etc. It is not who we really are.
—Melinda Ribner
To all, an easy fast, and may we all be sealed for a good and blessèd year! See you next week.
The densely encrusted tiaras and parures threw off icy flashes of color—acid yellow, violet, snowy white. Spectral women hovered silently in front of the jewels. There was a will-o’-the-wisp ballerina wearing a crown of dainty white flowers; a somber queen whose huge eyes were dark with encroaching madness; a pagan priestess lost in thought, swept up in the riptide of her doom.
The gems were fakes: Swarovski crystals, the same kind that sparkle on the Metropolitan Opera’s chandeliers. And the ghostly ladies were holograms of soprano Maria Callas, on display earlier this year along with her stage jewelry and other memorabilia in the Met’s Founders Hall.
The installation of Callas relics blotted out the portraits of Met stalwarts that line the space. That was not the least of the exhibit’s ironies, given that the Washington Heights-born soprano’s appearances with her hometown company were infrequent (twenty-one in all), mediocre (Callas groused of “lousy” productions and mix-and-match casts), and abruptly interrupted when Met intendant Rudolf Bing dismissed her in 1958. Callas lived in New York from her birth in 1923 until 1937, and again from 1945 to 1947. All her life, when she let slip her grand airs, she spoke English with a decided New York snap.
The world’s most celebrated soprano died in Paris, rich, silent, and young, thirty years ago, on September 16, 1977. A frenzy of memorializing is now under way. By the company’s estimate, more than three million people have viewed the Swarovski-sponsored jewels show, most recently seen in Japan—where, as it happens, Callas last sang in public: November 1974, Sapporo, the terminus of her 
As the decades separating us from Callas begin to stack up, the obsession with the most intimate aspects of her life, material and artistic, grows more intense. In Greek Fire, his account of the soprano’s affair with shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, Nicholas Gage alleged that, in 1960, Callas insisted that a “secret son” she was carrying be delivered by an early caesarean, so that Onassis would not see her “swollen and nine months pregnant.” As Gage tells it, the premature infant died as a result of Callas’s vanity. Whether or not his claims hold up (and there is 
Of all the Callas treasures from which one can choose—the La Scala Traviata from 1955, the Dallas rehearsal and Cologne Sonnambula from 1957, the EMI Verdi and mad scenes recitals, and the studio sets of Norma—I think that those 1953 test recordings from Don Giovanni may best represent what she was about. Callas sight-read the music (she had not prepared it in advance), so the interpretations lack her customary fire. But listen to the wonders that she was able to summon on the fly: poised, exquisitely tapered phrases, whistle-clean passagework, pinpoint-perfect staccatos, and a trill of instrumental neatness. They were fruits less of “genius” than of self-abnegating devotion to craft.
The performances remind us that, behind the glitter and the ever-shifting guises, there was a woman who served art with humility and love. The awe that Callas inspires today, thirty years after her death, is an echo of the awe that she herself brought to music.
Update: Heartfelt thanks to 
I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
May it be Your will, our G-d and G-d of our ancestors, to renew us for a good, sweet year.
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