Review Colloquy: 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, Live stream from the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich, September 2020

Film Actor and Live performance: Marina AbramovićFilm Actor: Willem DafoeVioletta Valéry: Emily PogorelcFloria Tosca: Selene ZanettiDesdemona: Leah HawkinsCio-Cio-San: Kiandra HowarthCarmen: Nadezhda KaryazinaLucia Ashton: Adela ZahariaNorma: Lauren FaganDirector and sets: Marina AbramovićCo-Director: Lynsey PeisingerConductor of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester: Yoel GamzouMusic: Marko NikodijevićWritten by Marina Abramović and Petter SkavlanFilm Director: Nabil ElderkinVisual Intermezzos: Marco BrambillaSound Design: Luka KozlovackiCostumes: Riccardo Tisci for BurberryConception of the Stage Design: Anna SchöttlLighting: Urs SchönebaumDramaturgy: Benedikt StampfliConductor of the Bayerische Staatsoper Choruses: Stellario Fagone

Introduction

In December 2019, Vulture reported that "our modern-day Puccini" was "singlehandedly trying to bring back a beloved trend of the 19th century: the opera."¹ Performers and fans fumed over this framing in online responses, objecting to a familiar depiction of opera as something dormant, absent from contemporary life, the music-theatrical equivalent of omnibuses trundling over gaslit cobbles. Its comparison of the composer at hand to Mozart as well as Puccini also raised hackles, for said musician was the perennially controversial rapper and producer Kanye West. Reviewing West's Nebuchadnezzar (2019) and Mary (2019), critics noted resemblances to the Handelian oratorio, with tableaux vivants by multidisciplinary artist Vanessa Beecroft likewise recalling the eighteenth century more than the nineteenth.² As Mary made its debut on a beach at Art Basel in Miami, the mystery around West and Beecroft's embrace of "opera" lingered. How did the term serve their mergers of haute couture runway shows, celebrity, performance art, and quasisacred ritual? Was opera so dead to the creators and public, as well as this journalist, that it connoted little more than grandiose archaism? The authors who review the Bayerische Staatsoper premiere of Marina Abramović's 7 Deaths of Maria Callas in this colloquy arrive at similar questions.

Indeed, such questions are familiar to readers of Opera Quarterly. In review colloquia devoted to DVDs, writers have followed the development of opera filmed for the home viewer; another 2018 colloquy acknowledged the rise of the cinecast through the Metropolitan Opera's transmission of Thomas Adès's The Exterminating Angel.³ This journal has from its early issues attended to masscultural views and (re)mediations of opera; for example, in 2009, guest-editor Heather Wiebe and other contributors contemplated the genre's obsolescence.⁴ More recent issues have examined live-transmission technologies, relationships between opera and film, scissions of voice from performing body, and the eternal problem of the work concept.

These concerns all bear on 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, an "opera-project" by Marina Abramović with arias by Bellini, Bizet, Donizetti, Puccini, and Verdi, as well as original music by composer Marko Nikodijević. As the writers in this colloquy concur, the "project" has less to do with opera per se than with one of its greatest stars, another recurring figure in this journal: Maria Callas. Yet as many observe, even Callas seems a mere shadow cast over the proceedings relative to Abramović, the performance-art doyenne who lays prone, gestures, and acts onstage, and who also stars in interstitial films. Contributor Michal Grover-Friedlander notes the event's resemblance to a funeral, and indeed, as Abramović drops the needle on Callas's "Casta diva" in the final scene, death feels all-consuming, claiming the artist, the opera singer, the recording (abruptly halted), and opera itself—along with thousands outside.

West and Beecroft's works, perhaps best understood as images of opera refracted by the glitz of contemporary art's festival and gallery scenes, took place as COVID-19 made its leap to human bodies in 2019. 7 Deaths of Maria Callas is likewise a multidisciplinary artist's personal filtering and remediation of her idea of opera, though the question of whether the piece counts as an opera divides the reviewers; only two consider it so. It made its debut in September...