No passport for Calleja

Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja, who will sing in Mdina this summer, explains to Steve Mallia of the Times why he feels let down and 'incredibly humiliated' by the Maltese authorities. From today's Times:

Though he loves Malta, and wears its heart on his sleeve, he feels let down that his wife was denied Maltese nationality (because they have not yet been married for five years). "We had incredibly humiliating and many times devastating problems because we couldn't solve the issue of her passport. My wish was never to create a controversy, but simply to enable my wife to exercise her right to do her job without hindrance. The fact is she lost contracts because of this situation and was often forced to spend time waiting for visas to be issued instead of spending time with the rest of the family, not to mention the time we were denied entry to the UK at Heathrow airport."

Mr Calleja believes the law should be changed to make allowances for honest and genuine cases: "I didn't expect this to happen because she was Joseph Calleja's wife, but out of common sense and reason. This is possible practically everywhere else in Europe; for example, the Austrians did it with Russian soprano Anna Netrebko and she wasn't even married to an Austrian! And any argument that this would have set a precedent are nullified because ours is one of the only professions in the world that requires a person to be employed by 14 to 15 employers per year in several different countries. Thankfully, the Romanian authorities have now granted Tatiana citizenship and she should finally have an EU passport by the middle of 2007." It has also meant that Malta lost out on having another top opera singer...