Marina Abramović turns to opera: her first opera is an ode to Maria Callas

For the first time, artist Marina Abramović (Belgrade, 1946) is tackling opera, and on Sept. 5 she will present worldwide her first opera, entitled 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, premiered this evening, Sept. 2, at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, and then broadcast online everywhere on Saturday, on various platforms. The opera was scheduled to be presented in April, but the premiere was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic: moreover, it was originally planned for a full hall, but again due to current restrictions, the premiere will be performed in front of only 200 guests. The orchestra also had to be rethought due to current spacing regulations.

However, despite the many difficulties, the premiere will be there. The opera is a tribute to soprano Maria Callas (New York, 1923 - Paris, 1977), and tells her story and career, particularly the last two years of her life, which the great opera singer spent as a semi-recluse in her Paris apartment after the death in 1975 of her husband Aristotle Onassis. It will be a story, the artist anticipated, about love, life, female emancipation, but also about hope through art. Of course, the play includes several elements typical of Marina Abramović’s art (knives, snakes, fire), for a kind of identification and recognition between the two figures, that of the artist and that of the soprano.

The hour-and-a-half-long opera is divided into seven parts, as the title suggests, and each is represented by a different aria (including theFarewell of the Past from Verdi’s La Traviata, but also contemporary pieces written by Serbian composer Marko Nikodijević), at the end of which a short film is shown on stage in which Marina Abramović is shot by actor Willem Dafoe, known to art audiences for his masterful portrayal of Vincent van Gogh in Julian Schnabel’s film On the Threshold of Eternity: the footage was shot in November, in Los Angeles, directed by Nabil Elderkin, formerly the creator of music clips for artists such as Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar. Then there is a part that reconstructs Callas’s Parisian apartment: here, Marina Abramović designed a choreography to the notes of arias sung by Callas herself.

So the appointment is tonight for guests who will see the premiere live, and on Saturday, September 5, for everyone: to see the opera simply log on to the Staatsoper website, or on BR-Klassik Concert, or even on Arte Concert.

Marina Abramović turns to opera: her first opera is an ode to Maria Callas

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