This portrait of the legendary Maria Callas presents excerpts from several of her greatest operatic recordings, including some of her earliest, made for the Italian label CETRA. The 1949 Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristano e Isotta and the excerpts from the 1952 La Gioconda are among the best examples of Callas’s voice in its youthful vocal prime. In the classic, irreplaceable recordings of Tosca, described by its original producer as ‘the supreme Callas recording’, Norma and I Puritani, the great soprano is clearly at the peak of both her vocal and dramatic powers. As her colleague and friend Tito Gobbi later said of Callas in his 1979 autobiography: “She shone for all too brief a while in the world of opera, like a vivid flame attracting the attention of the whole world, and she had a strange magic which was all her own”.