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

Abstract

Film Actor and Live performance: Marina Abramović Film Actor: Willem Dafoe Violetta Valéry: Emily Pogorelc Floria Tosca: Selene Zanetti Desdemona: Leah Hawkins Cio-Cio-San: Kiandra Howarth Carmen: Nadezhda Karyazina Lucia Ashton: Adela Zaharia Norma: Lauren Fagan Director and sets: Marina Abramović Co-Director: Lynsey Peisinger Conductor of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester: Yoel Gamzou Music: Marko Nikodijević Written by Marina Abramović and Petter Skavlan Film Director: Nabil Elderkin Visual Intermezzos: Marco Brambilla Sound Design: Luka Kozlovacki Costumes: Riccardo Tisci for Burberry Conception of the Stage Design: Anna Schöttl Lighting: Urs Schönebaum Dramaturgy: Benedikt Stampfli Conductor of the Bayerische Staatsoper Choruses: Stellario Fagone 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 quasi-sacred 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.