Maria Callas never sang a role in French on stage, though she had studied French repertoire as a student and one of her most famous roles, Cherubini’s Medea, had originally been written in French as Médée.

From the early 1960s she made her home in Paris, where in 1961 she recorded this recital of French-language arias for both soprano and mezzo-soprano, composed in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

‘The recital … is a tour de force of sympathetic interpretation’, wrote Gramophone after her death. ‘The range is astounding, so much so that hearing the record is both an inspiring and upsetting experience; not merely because of the sense of the early loss of so great an artist [as Callas], but because the plights of these great human archetypes – Orpheus, Alceste, Carmen, Dalila, Chimène and Juliet – are themselves so uplifting and disturbing as Callas presents them to us … Records like this change people’s lives.’