Giovanni battista meneghini biography of abraham

While the bulk of the new film Maria focuses on the very end of the iconic soprano's life, glimpses of Maria Callas's earlier life and career are shown—including scenes with her first husband, Giovanni Battista Meneghini.

But who was Giovanni Battista Meneghini?

Meneghini, born in October , was an Italian entrepreneur and brick manufacturer.

He met Callas in , at the very start of her career, when she was performing “La Giocanda” at the Verona Aerena in Verona. She was 23; he was

“They made a distinctly odd couple, but their attraction was mutual and instantaneous. From that moment, and through the following 12 years, 10 of them as husband and wife, Callas and Meneghini remained virtually inseparable,” Peter G.

Davis notes in the New York Times.

Callas and Meneghini married in , and after they married, Meneghini sold the shares in his company, and focused on Callas's career as her manager.

After Callas began a relationship with Aristotle Onassis, she filed for divorce from Meneghini.

He later wrote that she criticized him constantly: “You act like my jailer… You never leave me alone… I'm suffocating… You're not adventuresome, you don't know languages, your hair is always uncombed, you can't manage to dress smartly.”

In letters that were published years after her death, Callas wrote of her marriage. “My husband is still pestering me after having robbed me of more than half my money by putting everything in his name since we were married … I was a fool … to trust him.” She referred to him as a “louse” and said he “passes for a millionaire when he hasn’t got a dime.”

After Callas passed away in Paris in , her $8 million assets were divided between her estranged mother, Evangelina, and Meneghini.

In , his memoir, My Wife Maria Callas, was published posthumously.

Giovanni battista meneghini biography of abraham Watch Next. She gave occasional masterclasses and recordings, but her once-glorious career was effectively over. He even paid for her apartment in Paris. She led a series of master classes at The Juilliard School, the renowned performing arts conservatory in New York City, from October through March

(it was completed by Renzo Allegri following Meneghini’s passing in ). “I do not believe I am guilty of presumption if I say that I am the only person in the world who truly knew her,” he writes.

“Meneghini had, in other words, a strong supporting role in one of the most spectacular life stories of our time,” reads a Washington Post review of the memoir.

“His account of that role should be fascinating and on more than one of these pages it is -- but this happens fitfully, almost in spite of the writer. Meneghini's story, as told to the music critic of Gente, an Italian weekly that corresponds in name at least to our People magazine, is that of a man who seldom understood exactly what was happening to him.

Biography of isaac Despite their year-age difference, she married the much older Italian industrialist and entrepreneur in , and Meneghini became her manager. She revitalized interest in the bel canto repertoire and brought a new level of dramatic intensity to her performances. Osborne says it cost her dearly. According to one diary entry , a friend of Callas alleged that Onassis drugged the singer for sexual purposes.

He uses the expression repeatedly, with an air of honest puzzlement, whenever his story comes to a point that contradicts his basic theses: that Maria Callas was essentially a simple, warmhearted woman, Italian in spirit despite her unfortunate Greek-American background, and intensely in love with her husband right up to the day she ran off with another man.”