There's not much to recommend this book. Some of the photographs look as if they've been smeared across the pages. Others are clearly NOT Callas at all, and one has been so badly cropped as to make Callas appear to be juggling balls whilst singing Iphigenie. The text reads as if it was written for Woman's Weekly in Athens and would have benefitted from a very strong editorial hand. The author claims to have been a friend of Callas. Really - One's friends!

Throw a stick at the Met or Covent Garden [when it re-opens] or the Paris Opera and you will hit six people who could put together a better biography than this, and without the many somewhat spurious 'Callas told me's' with which this book is littered.

To date this is the author's fourth attempt at Callas biography, [and should get some sort of an award for so gallantly persisting in a task for which he so clearly unsuited] and whilst the information has changed from one edition to another, and the grammar and prose has improved [and, believe me, that's not saying much at all] I do hope this is his last book on his 'friend' until he does a little more research and just some plain old fashioned observation of photographs. I had the feeling that the author feels he 'owns' Callas, with all the obsessiveness and lack of insight of a stalking fan.

Search out the magical Thames & Hudson Callas by Fitzgerald and Ardoin, or Ardoin's Callas Legacy, and Michael Scott's Maria Meneghini Callas is a must.

I found this book deplorable. Badly written, it could have used a strong editorial hand both in the prose and the picture captions. Especially disapointing is the re-hashing of incidents that have long since been disproved or properly researched, i.e. Callas's first audition at the Metroplitan Opera, which resulted in no offer of work from that house. Likewise, the famous incident in Rome when Callas abandoned a performance of Norma. Galatopoulos claims there was uproar in the audience whilst she was singing, but a tape exists of this performance and there is no disturbance at all at that point. These are just two of a number of incidents in the book where the author does not seem to be able to relate information long and freely available to his own conception of what happened. It is a long established fact that Callas made her Italian debut on the 2nd August 1947, but Galatopoulos sticks to the innacurate date of 3rd August which was current well into the 1970's. [The Arena di Verona celebrated the 50th anniversary of Callas's debut on 2nd August 1997] This gave me the distinct impression the author felt that he and he alone was/is THE authority on Callas and there isn't any need for him to read anyone else's scholarship on the subject. Fortunately he isn't and I had the feeling, shored up by all those verbatim conversations, this tome was simply an attempt to present the author's version of "My own private Callas." Another area of the book I found disturbing is the photographic content. I found it impossible to identify Callas in her first stage role, the picture is simply not clear enough. Whereas Callas is easily identified as Brunnhilde are those pictures of Isolde really Callas? There is one photograph supposedly of Callas in I Puritani but there is a small child in the picture with her, and the lady in the picture, wearing an off the shoulder dress, does not look like Callas. I leave readers to form their own opinions.

Maria Callas is an on-going phenomena, her voice is as inspiring and awesomely thought provoking now as it ever was. There are now generations of people who never heard or saw her live, there are only recordings and old films. A few authors; John Ardoin, Gerald Fitzgerald, Henry Wisneski and Michael Scott have shed new light on Callas the singer and Callas the woman with serious scholarship for future generations. Stelios Galatopoulos's work is not in this league.

The spectacular photographs of all of Callas's performances are in themselves worth the price of the book. In addition, the discography and quotes from reviews of the performances give this book much value as a reference source. Even if one doesn't always agree with the author's interpretation of events in Callas's personal life, the reader comes away with a profound sense of her artistry.