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 Callas taught at Juilliard School in New York in the early 1970s. Young singers come to learn from her, but instead they encounter a personality who demands much more from an artist than a beautiful voice and correctly sung notes.

Callas is sharp, ironic, and uncompromising. She challenges, provokes, and pushes young artists to seek the truth in music and in 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, a woman emerges who paid a high price for her place in art and in life.

Master Class is a dramatic performance in which Callas’s wit and harsh temperament meet a deeply personal story of talent, ambition, love, and sacrifice.

Maria Callas is played by Sonora Vaice, one of Latvia’s most outstanding opera singers and a multiple recipient of the Grand Music Award. The role of Callas is her first role in dramatic 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 Terrence McNally’s play speaks about: its discipline, its demands, its competition, and the price the stage asks of an artist.

At the 8th International Operetta Festival in Ikšķile, audiences greeted Master Class with long standing ovations.