Maria Callas: The Final Act, BBC Two review: beginner's guide to ...

In 1964 Simon Schama spent a night at the opera. Maria Callas was singing Tosca at Covent Garden. It was, he recalls having listened back to a snatch of it 60 years on, life-changing. Only one problem, sniffs a musicologist in an ivory tower. “The voice is a wreck.” We’ve all been there. Enjoyed a tasty wine, a lovely painting, a great performance – and then a super-qualified expert swans in to tell us that we are sadly mistaken, that it was s---. Makes you feel two-feet tall. 

Maria Callas: the Final Act (BBC Two), a beginner’s guide to the diva’s decline, was told with the help of a couple of such hard-to-please grinches. Grinch-in-chief is Will Crutchfield, credited as consultant. His devotion to Callas’s voice is clear, while below the surface is an untherapised rage that she went and lost it. “It’s just bad,” he sighs at a recording made in 1958, and speaks of a flaw “that deprives us of the pleasure of hearing the blossoming voice at the climax.” 

This feels like the entitled talk of the snubbed superfan. Callas coped splendidly with rudeness. It’s one measure of her greatness, and of yesteryear’s higher cultural attainment, that the media thrust so many lenses in her face. Nowadays it’s any lip-filled WAG. 

Thanks to the archives, Clare Beavan’s film has the lot: high fashion, celebrity chit-chat, a luscious soundtrack, even a look at Callas’s handwritten recipes. At the nub of the film is a mystery. The voice was a bel canto miracle. Why did it collapse after barely a decade? It had nothing to do with Callas’s affair with Aristotle Onassis, snort the experts. It was perhaps a bit to do with the dramatic loss of six stone in which even her larynx lost weight. 

In the end it comes down to wavelengths. Like a dispassionate cardiologist, Crutchfield showed on his computer how Callas never learned correct vibrato at the highest pitch. “What she had to communicate was the most moving and important statement we had ever heard from an operatic singer. She had that and she lost it. That is the tragedy.” 

The tragedy is also that this well-made tribute (and the biopic with Angelina Jolie) lingered on the fall, not the rise.