When the most famous living performance artist deals with the diva assoluta of opera, it seems logical and united in pain. Especially since Marina Abramović does not skimp on words to emphasize parallels between herself and Maria Callas, such as the pressure from a hard mother who did not have a protected childhood in mind, but success.
“We’re both obsessed, subordinating almost everything else to our art,” Abramovic says of the Callas and himself. “I’ve often been told that we look alike.” Despite this promising starting position, it took a good 30 years for the opera project “7 Deaths of Maria Callas” to take shape. After the premiere in Munich in 2020, it can be seen at the Deutsche Oper with a corona delay – and ends in standing ovations after 100 minutes.
Marina Abramović has managed to reach the peak of her popularity. She lies in bed for a good hour, motionless, lit up like the preserved shell of a deceased potentate. And indeed she dominates the scene. No second can lie like that. Abramovic majestically defies the projections that surround her bed with wispy clouds, flashes of lightning and whirlwind winds between the seven death arias, as if she were in an underfunded fantasy film.
And then there is her voice. Dark, deep, with an awareness of the space to be filled, she speaks introductions to the women who will die singing: Violetta, Tosca, Desdemona, Cio-Cio-Sen, Carmen, Lucia and Norma.
Abramović’s hypnotic voice
“No, it’s not dangerous to fall. It only becomes dangerous when you land,” Abramović whispers to Tosca before jumping out of Castel Sant’Angelo, while she drives Lucia mad with the words “Love becomes hate, hate becomes love, and death becomes the ultimate liberation”.
There’s something hypnotic and inescapable about that voice, even as it accompanies Norma’s steps into the fire with close observation of the burning body. Resistance is futile. Marina Abramović is not concerned with destroying the slaughterhouse that opera creators take for granted for their heroines.
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She is concerned with the absolute affirmation of fate and the inherent authority to interpret one’s own death. For this she has made films that fill the huge stage of the Deutsche Oper during the arias, while the singers in maids’ uniforms stand next to them.
Tosca falls on a car roof
The men who appear in the clips are all played by Willem Dafoe, and that’s fortunate. For while Abramović seems trapped in her statuesque physicality, he is the moving part, delicate and vulnerable, with an intensity of emotion that collides so head-on with her maskedness that it hurts.
All of this takes place at a solemn pace and with a high-gloss stylization of death: Tosca’s fall from a New York high-rise building and her painterly impact on a car roof, the entwining of the snake that Otello puts on Desdemona’s neck.
[Deutsche Oper, weitere Vorstellungen, So 10.4., 15 und 19 Uhr]
Cio-Cio-San, called Butterfly, walks through the contaminated area with her son. When the man appears, she rips off her protective suit and falls bare-breasted to her death. As the 75-year-old Abramović explains, Article 3 of her “An Artist’s Life Manifesto” – An artist should be erotic – can only be achieved with tools that armor her central medium, her own body.
Abramović stays away from the essence of opera
After the seven death arias, all of which Callas also sang, and a rumbling interlude, Marina Abramović slowly gets out of bed. It is in the bedroom of the apartment where Maria Callas died in 1977 at the age of 53. Heartbroken, as all the world knows.
“Breathe,” says the dark voice, the composition by Marko Nikodijevic scrapes echoes of long-faded music from the walls. The room is laboriously measured, one last vase breaks, then the performer, who is reenacting the death of Maria Callas, leaves the stage – and the serving singers clean the room and cover the objects with black cloths.
“The greatest singer of all time would have become a housewife without batting an eyelid in order to tie a man to herself,” Abramović shudders in the program booklet. “That she was willing to do this makes me angry.” But this anger lands softly in the fluffy dance of images of an artist who has become an icon of herself and entangles herself in her identification with Callas without sparking it. Perhaps because she ultimately lacks the essence of opera and its singing. Callas lost the power of her voice early on, her art was broken.
What is the difference between performance and theater? In the performance, the blood is real, says Marina Abramović. But at the height of her fame, she strides motionless through a bland passion play that makes you think how radically this artist knows how to confront her audience. Yoel Gamzou, who conducted as if in a trance, repeatedly stumbled over her golden train during the final applause.
