Her fans called her La Divina, the divine, and Maria Callas seemed to think so, too.
‘I have been touched by the hand of God’, said the singer hailed by her devotees as the greatest ever soprano.
A new biography, drawing on her previously unpublished letters, makes exactly the opposite claim, however: Callas might have been cursed for all the suffering and betrayal she endured in her glittering but turbulent life.
She was regularly drugged by her violent lover, Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, so he could sexually abuse her; swindled by her husband and father, and blackmailed by a mother who tried to force her into prostitution.