»Maria Callas exuded strength but also a high degree of vulnerability. I’ve been interested in her character for years. We even look a bit like each other, at least that’s what many people say. When I was young, I had a complex about my big nose. Someone once said: no, no, your nose is nice, it’s like Callas’s. So I accepted my nose.

Callas’s mother was pretty nasty to her daughter. That’s another thing I had in common with her. But most importantly: she died of a broken heart, because of her love for Aristotle Onassis. In interviews she stated plainly that she would happily have retired from professional singing for his sake. The world’s greatest soprano would have become a housewife and had his children. I wouldn’t exactly give up my career for someone, but I, too, almost died of a broken heart once. So I know what being lovelorn is like, when you can’t face eating or drinking. And that’s the big theme in opera, of course. A woman is always having to make the ultimate sacrifice for her country, her lover, her family.

I’ve spent thirty years reflecting on Maria Callas. My first idea was to do a series of films on her. Alejandro González Iñárritu and Roman Polanski were already onboard, but now I know that the only format that really fits is opera.

The evening will address seven great death scenes that were important to Maria Callas: LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR, TOSCA, CARMEN, MADAMA BUTTERFLY, NORMA, TRAVIATA, OTELLO. Carmen is stabbed, Tosca jumps from a building, Madama Butterfly commits hara-kiri. I act out onstage their various ways of dying.

I’m running a bit of a risk. Opera fans don’t like change. But we’re showing seven operas over a period of one and a half hours, all deconstructed and presented in a new way. I’m hoping that’ll bring a breath of fresh air to the world of opera. I myself went to the opera a lot with my mother, but I just used to get bored. With Maria Callas something clicked.

So now I’m dying with Callas and for Callas. The audience will see me and her simultaneously. And in the same way that she’s always being driven to distraction by a man – Onassis, the love of her life -, I too am going to be suffering death over and over again onstage at the hands of the actor Willem Dafoe. I wanted it to be the same man with me, too, doing it again and again. The evening is going to convey a feeling of mortality. Our time on earth is measured in the twinkling of an eye and we have to dance and sing and get the most out of it that we can. Opera is perfect for that.«

Marina Abramović, 73, is a performance artist from the former Yugoslavia whose works attract worldwide attention. Her tribute to Callas is a co-production with the Bayerische Staatsoper