SONORA VAICE Marijas Kallasas lomā | Terensa Maknelija lugā “Meistarklase”

What remains when you have given everything to art?

The play Master Class by American playwright Terrence McNally takes us into the world of the legendary opera diva Maria Callas. The play is based on the master classes that Callas held at Juilliard School in New York in the early 1970s. Young singers come to learn from her, but instead encounter a personality who demands far more from an artist than a beautiful voice and correctly sung notes.

Callas is sharp, ironic, and uncompromising. She challenges, provokes, and pushes the young artists to seek truth in music and within themselves. As the master class unfolds, the present intertwines with Callas's own memories of triumphs on the stages of the world's opera houses, losses, loneliness, and her relationship with Aristotle Onassis. Behind La Divina, the divine Callas, emerges a woman who paid a high price for her place in art and in life.

Master Class is a dramatic production in which Callas's wit and stern temperament meet a deeply personal story about talent, ambition, love, and sacrifice.

In the role of Maria Callas is Sonora Vaice, one of Latvia's most outstanding opera singers and a multiple laureate of the Great Music Award. The role of Callas is her first role in drama theater, while the production was created as Sonora Vaice's diploma project in theater directing at the Latvian Academy of Culture.

Sonora Vaice's long-standing experience on the opera stage gives this role a special personal dimension - she knows the world McNally's play speaks about: its discipline, demands, competition, and the price the stage exacts from an artist.

At the VIII International Operetta Festival in Ikšķile, Master Class was met with prolonged standing ovations.