Maria Callas - Life and Art
Long before the media's obsession with celebrity scaled its current heights,Maria  Callascommanded headlines and column inches equal to any of the jet-setting  elite of her time. In those terms alone, and much as opera purists might flinch  at the idea, she was the Madonna of her day. But that is only one reason why her  legend extends well beyond her place in the pantheon of great sopranos and so  long after her death in 1977.An excellent companion to Tony Palmer's 1987 documentaryLa Divina,Maria Callas:  Life and Artprovides a well-rounded picture of an extraordinary talent who  defended her art with the courage of a tigress, but whose turbulent private life  gave her little except restless grief. It is crammed with concert footage and  archive interviews. She was, as contributor Franco Zeffirelli says, a genius of  hair-raising stature and one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. But  she was also a rather fragile human being. The tension between the two makes the  telling of her story utterly compelling. The DVD includes chronologies of  Callas's life and the many roles she played during her career.--Piers Ford