Assouline to publish 'Maria by Callas' by Tom Volf in May

LONDON.- In 2013, decades after the legendary prima donna left the scene forever, filmmaker Tom Volf fell in love with Maria Callas. Since then, he has traveled the globe to uncover lost archives on Callas’s life and work, meeting and interviewing many of the renowned soprano’s closest friends and colleagues, who opened their collections to him, unveiling a trove of previously unknown photos, many of which originally came from Maria’s own albums.

Composed with the support of many of Maria’s loved ones, including Nadia Stancioff, her longtime best friend, and Georges Prêtre, her favorite conductor, who for the first time in forty years agreed to collaborate on a book about her, Maria by Callas is the definitive, unique product of countless hours of research, offering a new perspective—a personal album as Maria herself would have presented, invoking the diva’s own voice. This material is now at the center of the project Maria by Callas: In Her Own Words, including a film, an exhibition, and a collection of original live recordings.

Tom Volf is a director and photographer whose work ranges from theater and fashion to corporate communications. At Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, Volf was in charge of digital and audiovisual communication, producing programs for broadcast and directing numerous interviews with international artists, including Placido Domingo, David Cronenberg, and Sting. He has produced programs for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris, including its fiftieth- anniversary film, and he has directed image and advertising for several fashion campaigns.

Nadia Stancioff first met Maria Callas in 1969 as a publicist for the Pier Paolo Pasolini film Medea, and she remained Callas’s close friend during the diva’s final years. Stancioff previously wrote Maria Callas Remembered: An Intimate Portrait of the Private Callas (1987).

Georges Prêtre, who passed away in January 2017, was an internationally acclaimed opera and orchestra conductor. Among his many accomplishments, he conducted the premiere of Francis Poulenc’s opera La voix humaine at the Opéra-Comique in 1959. Throughout his long and celebrated career, Prêtre was the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art, and Grand Officer of the French Légion d’Honneur.

"Everything I have to say is in the music. It is all there in my records"--Callas at Juilliard: The Master Classes.