Nikodijević & Abramović - 7 Deaths of Maria Callas (Munich, 2020)

Marko Nikodijević & Marina Abramović - 7 Deaths of Maria Callas

Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich - 2020

Marina Abramović, Lynsey Peisinger, Yoel Gamzou, Willem Dafoe, Hera Hyesang Park, Selene Zanetti, Leah Hawkins, Kiandra Howarth, Nadezhda Karyazina, Adela Zaharia, Lauren Fagan

Bayerische Staatsoper TV - 5 September 2020

The idea of building an opera around seven stage deaths enacted by Maria Callas in her most famous roles is such an extraordinary idea for an opera that it's likely to provoke two immediate and almost contradictory reactions. On the one hand you might think why did no one think of that before, even from the point of view of a gala performance of great arias. And then you realise why you can't do that. The emotional impact of all those tragic bel canto deaths all gathered together in one opera? And aligning them with the tragic circumstances of Maria Callas's death as well? It's going to be overload surely, emotionally overwrought and too much to take in all in one go?

Well, we are talking about the Serbian conceptual and performance artist Marina Abramović, who often uses her self and her body as a provocative vehicle for her ideas, so she's not exactly one for low-key and understatement. This is a performance artist who for her piece "The Artist is Present" sat silently at a table every day at New York's Museum of Modern Art for nearly three months. Some might even see her as a narcissist and self-publicist who sees herself as something as a work of art, and in the case of her Maria Callas project for the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, she has no qualms about identifying closely with an artist in the opera world who was no stranger to making headlines.

In her opera piece, the seven operatic deaths of Maria Callas are enacted in movie sequences (directed by Nabil Elderkin) with Abramović and Willem Dafoe as her lover/killer. Abramović herself is present on the stage, lying silent and unmoving as Maria Callas on her death bed while the film sequences are projected on the walls of her hotel room in Paris, the most famous arias of those works accompanying the extravagant visuals of the re-imagined ways that those characters meet their death. The arias are all sung live by different opera singers who take to the stage like ghosts, none of them however really looking or singing like Callas. Which would be a bit much to ask for really. Abramović however ensures that there is no doubt as to who is the main subject (Callas/herself) and that it's more than just an opera gala of Callas's greatest hits.

In the first of the filmed sequences, Violetta (Hera Hyesang Park) sings 'Addio del passato' from La Traviata while lying dying of consumption in a bed, nursed and mourned by Willem Dafoe in a dreamscape of coloured mists and clouds. The death of Tosca, to the strains of Selene Zanetti singing 'Vissi d'arte' is enacted as Abramović falling from a New York skyscraper in slow motion to land with a crash on a car roof. She is wrapped in pythons as Desdemona (Leah Hawkins) in Otello, dies while removing her protective suit as Madama Butterfly's Cio-Cio-San (Kiandra Howarth) in a nuclear holocaust wasteland. And so on with Carmen (Nadezhda Karyazina), Adela Zaharia's rendition of the mad scene from Lucia Di Lammermoor and the immolation of Norma (Lauren Fagan) singing 'Casta Diva', all with a twist on the original traditional death scene.

So 7 Deaths of Maria Callas is clearly not an opera in the conventional sense, a cross between opera gala and performance art. Some might see opera as already tending in that direction, particularly if you've seen any of Romeo Castellucci's often even more abstract productions. It might not be quite as high concept as Castellucci, but as you might expect from an artist like Abramović, it's a more deeply personal and distinctive vision where the the artist/director puts herself into the art. It's a work that comes from the heart, in response to Callas and her fame as an opera singer, blending the two in a direct and emotional way. They could hardly be otherwise, the projected mini-movies accompanying the sentiments of these great arias powerful in their visual aesthetic and emotional punch.

It's clearly motivated principally by a love and perhaps even an obsession with Maria Callas, with whom Abramović clearly identifies. It blends the tragedy of Callas's life with that of opera, and that's certainly a subject worthy of an opera. It's surprising indeed that it hasn't been done before as far as I know, although Rufus Wainwright's Prima Donna comes close and Franco Zeffirelli, a personal friend of Callas as well as her director, turned his fantasy about Callas into a movie Callas Forever. Evidently, focussing on the deaths of opera heroines, putting them all together like this dying in graphic and violent circumstances often at the hands of men, fits into Abramović's feminist perspective and invites you to think about the fate of women, but perhaps no more so and no more powerfully than say a full presentation of Madama Butterfly or La Traviata.

It's nearly all classic opera arias that are used for the first hour of the opera, with only recorded drone ambient noise in the interludes accompanying the Abramović voice-over of introductory texts of Callas reflecting on the different ways to die. It's a pasticcio of sorts with only an overture by fellow Serbian composer Marko Nikodijević that is new. It's only in the final third of the work that we really hear new music composed by Nikodijević as the focus for the remainder of the opera turns to Abramović as Callas in her bed in her room in Paris on the day that she dies. Dramatically there's not a lot here to grasp as Callas wills herself to get out of bed, wonders where all her former friends and colleagues have gone now, smashes a vase and leaves the room, taking her final exit. While the voice-over thoughts are distracting and scarcely illuminating, the music itself is a powerful requiem of sorts for Callas.

Is this a work of performance art that relies on the original creator? Abramović is on stage throughout and the focus in the mini movies as the tragic heroine who dies seven times in her greatest operas. Can 7 Deaths of Maria Callas have an independent life (or seven deaths) after these performances? I don't see why not. Yes, the personality of Abramović dominates but only in so far as it is she who is breathing life into the character of Callas here. Callas is big enough a personality not to be subsumed by that and there's no reason why - like any opera singer stepping into shoes that Callas once filled - that someone else can't bring their own reinterpretation of this opera performance piece. The concept is strong enough, the music is strong enough (old and new) and the work is open enough to interpretation for another artist with sufficient personality (and love for Callas and Abramović) to bring something new and personal to this. Whether anyone will want to is another matter, and whether Abramović becomes as enduring an artist as Callas worthy of being revived remains to be seen.

Links: Bayerische Staatsoper TV

Mozart - Così Fan Tutte (Belfast, 2017)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Così Fan Tutte

NI Opera, Belfast - 2017

Nicholas Chalmers, Adele Thomas, Kiandra Howarth, Heather Lowe, Samuel Dale Johnson, Sam Furness, Aoife Miskelly, John Molloy

Grand Opera House, Belfast - 17 November 2017

Opera in Ireland is going through a period of change at the moment with a new national opera company being formed in the south of the country and a new director taking over the running of opera in the north. Considering how successful Northern Ireland Opera has been over the last few years, there would undoubtedly be some interest to see how Walter Sutcliffe would follow, taking over from Oliver Mears. I don't think there would have been any concerns about a high standard being maintained, but it remained to be seen whether there would be any change in repertoire and style. I'd say that things have got off to a very good start with Così Fan Tutte.

It's been a while since I've seen anyone approach Così Fan Tutte as a pure comedy. With Mozart's third collaboration with Lorenzo da Ponte is often regarded as being a lesser work than The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, perhaps because it is a little more overtly frivolous. In order to give it the true stature that many think it undoubtedly deserves and address the genuine social commentary that is hidden behind the gender comedy, directors like Michael Haneke and Christophe Honoré have tended to work extra hard to try and give the opera a little more of contemporary edginess that is worth exploring, but perhaps doesn't really match the true spirit of the work.

It was refreshing then to see that this first new production with Walter Sutcliffe in charge of NI Opera didn't set out to make a statement, or if there is a statement to this Così Fan Tutte it's that the intention is to be true to the spirit of the works rather than impose any kind of inappropriate modern revisionism upon them. That doesn't mean either that there can't be a refreshing and original approach taken to the work, and one interesting development is that this Così Fan Tutte opera is directed by Adele Thomas, who - judging from her biography in the programme - is a theatre director with no previous experience of opera.

Whatever her background, there's no question that Thomas's setting of Così Fan Tutte in the era of the Hollywood silent movies of the 1920s is completely in the spirit of the work. Or it is for the first half of the opera anyway; the second half perhaps needed a little more. For the first half of this production however there was a permanent grin on my face all the way through to the interval. Conducted by Nicholas Chalmers with attention to mood and played with spirit and a lightness of touch by the Ulster Orchestra, this was joyous, glorious Mozart at his most playful, buoyant and brilliant.

Trying to give some credibility to the rather innocent couples of Così Fan Tutte can be difficult, unless one does indeed set it in a more innocent age. The 1920s is not such an innocent age as an idealised one, where the excess and indulgence of an America that hadn't fully experienced the horrors of the Great War in Europe and had yet to suffer the impact of the Wall Street Crash at the end of the decade. For many, particularly in Hollywood, this life was an endless party and not to be taken too seriously. And it's delightfully depicted that way in this production, with a few bottles of champagne always ready to hand and a conga line of revellers with balloons and streamers weaving through the proceedings at regular intervals.

For the first half of the opera at least, this captures the spirit that Mozart weaves through Così Fan Tutte perfectly, and you could even say that it anticipates the darker side of the opera in the second half when the party inevitably comes to an end and the characters have to pick up the pieces. Heedless of the consequences, they belatedly discover that there is a price to be paid when the fun comes to an end, and that life can also involve deception, betrayal and disappointment. In Hollywood, the reality would also hit home with scandals, affairs and alcoholism destroying the promising careers of many of the silent film actors - the lifestyle ending more careers than the advent of talkies.

Adele Thomas tries to bring out this aspect in the direction of the characters and Nicholas Chalmers certainly finds the rich sophistication of how Mozart depicts those contradictory sentiments, but the necessary tone isn't quite as well established in the second half of the production. I think the limitations of Hannah Clark's set designs don't extend as well into the second half. Wonderfully colourful and vibrant, with curtains revealing stages within stages to match the play acting of the comic drama, a little more could have been done perhaps with flickering projections or silent-movie imagery to differentiate or vary the tone in the latter part of the show.

Thomas however clearly worked hard with the singers to bring real personality to each of the characters, and it's a measure of the individual performances that each one of them made a good impression. The most confident performances were from the most experienced members of the cast; John Molloy and Aoife Miskelly. Molloy was an outstanding Don Alfonso, neither calculating nor manipulative, but one rather who wanted to enlighten the younger innocents with his experience of life. The role was comfortably within Molloy's range and he sang it unimposingly but with characteristic aplomb and with deference to character and situation. His double-act with Aoife Miskelly's similarly unshowy, comically nuanced and delicately expressive Despina was a joy to watch.

As you would expect, there was a playful innocence to Flordiligi, Dorabella, Guglielmo and Ferrando that was well brought out in the production, and the casting of young lyrical singers is key to making that convincing. There was nothing sinister suggested in the male roles, which are played with the same kind of youthful fervour as the female roles. If there was perhaps a tendency to overact by Samuel Dale Johnson and (more so) by Sam Furness in the male roles, that could however be seen in keeping with the silent movie acting style. The girls were really deserving of the production's focus however, Kiandra Howarth impressing as Fiordiligi and Heather Lowe bringing that extra little characterisation to Dorabella with little interpolations, gasps and sighs fitted into the singing expression.

And it was in Italian! That might not be the most significant change of direction in the new NI Opera, and I'm sure other works (such as the forthcoming Threepenny Opera) will suit the previous English language singing only policy, but it's a good to have a more flexible approach and Mozart's well-known operas always work better in the original language. It also meant that the occasional 20s-era touches to the surtitles, which might have been inaudible in singing performance, took some of the sting out of Da Ponte's libretto and got plenty of laughs. The lyrical Italian singing and rapid-fire recitative (to a suitably silent-movie like fortepiano) certainly posed no problems for the cast. Or the chorus, who were in wonderful voice and an energetic presence. Hugely entertaining, this was a very promising start to a new NI Opera season.

Links: NI Opera