The Callas Imprint

Coating opera's roles in opulence, Maria Callas (1923-1977) is a lyrical enigma.

Seductress, villainess, and victor, queen and crouching slave, she is a gallery of guises instrumentalists would kill to engineer… made by a single voice.

But while her craftsmanship has stood the test of time, Callas’ image has contested defamation at the hands of dirt-diggers and opportunists: saboteurs of beauty.

Twelve years in the making, this voluminous labor of love explores the singer with the reverence she dealt her heroines. The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography reaps never-before-seen correspondence and archival documents worldwide to illustrate the complex of their multi-faceted creator - closing in on her self-contradictions, self-descriptions, attitudes and habits with empathic scrutiny. It swivels readers through the singer's on- and offstage scenes and flux of fears and dreams... the double life of all performers.

In unveiling of the everyday it rolls a vivid film reel starring friends and foes and nobodies: vignettes that make up life.

It's verity. It's meritable storytelling.

Not unlike the Callas art.

Sophia Lambton became a professional classical music critic at the age of 17 when she began writing for Musical Opinion, Britain’s oldest music magazine. Since then she has contributed to The Guardian, Bachtrack, musicOMH, BroadwayWorld, BBC Music Magazine and OperaWire. She spent twelve years conducting research to create The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography.
Elsewhere she is a novelist. The first three volumes of her debut saga The Crooked Little Pieces were released by The Crepuscular Press in 2022 and 2023.
She is currently at work on part 3 of her second.
Crepuscular Musings – Lambton’s cultural Substack - provides vivid explorations of tv and cinema together with reviews of operas, concerts and recitals at sophialambton.substack.com.