»In ihr erkenne ich mein Leid« - Deutsche Oper Berlin
What moves me
"I see my own suffering in her"
Performance artist Marina Abramović has been obsessed with soprano Maria Callas for decades. She is now memorialising her on stage – and lets her die seven times.
Maria Callas came into my life when I was 14 years old. I was having breakfast with my grandmother when I heard a voice from the old Bakelite radio, a stronger and more forceful voice than I had ever heard. Tears came to my eyes and I wanted to know everything about this woman. I read everything I could dig up, listened to recordings, watched film material. After all, I was sadly unable to see her on stage.
The more time I spent with Callas, the more I identified with her and discovered what we had in common. Like me, she had an extremely strict mother who did love her, but also placed enormous pressure for success on her. We are both obsessed and put our art above almost everything else; I have often been told that we even look alike. Her death in particular moved me – she died alone in Paris of a broken heart due to her unrequited love for the Greek billionaire Aristotle Onassis. The greatest singer of all time would not have hesitated for one second to become a housewife if it meant she could have a man at her side. I am enraged by how willing she was to do this. I strongly believe that when one has such talent, it no longer belongs solely to the individual, but rather one has the obligation to share it with the public. I see my own suffering in the suffering that Callas experienced, and I have learned first-hand what it means to have your heart broken. My work saved me then, but Callas' art could not help her.
I have wanted to create a work about Maria Callas for more than 30 years. At some point I knew that the opera is the only proper place to get closer to the myth. Seven deaths will be performed on stage that evening, great death scenes from Callas' famous roles: in LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR, TOSCA, CARMEN, MADAMA BUTTERFLY, NORMA, LA TRAVIATA, OTELLO.
Each character dies in a different way. She is stabbed, strangled, jumps to her death, or descends into madness. The same man kills me in video sequences: actor Willem Dafoe. I am a performance artist, so acting was strange to me. What I now know was taught to me by Dafoe. He helped me depict the final, eighth death – Maria Callas' actual death in her flat in Paris.
It was important to me that I reconstruct the flat as precisely as possible based on photos: I placed the same painting over the bed, even the sleeping pills next to the phone, and the exact same flowers are also shown. This final scene is the most emotionally challenging for me. I can only play her in that moment when I think about my own pain. My own family members are looking at me from the photos on the nightstand, people whom I have loved and lost in my life. And the photo that I ultimately hold in my hand, with which I slowly walk across the stage, shows my former life partner. Only then can I immerse myself in the pain, which becomes my own.
As a performance artist, I long considered the opera to be a world of artifice, of the unnatural – almost a dinosaur among art forms. I have since learned that this is not necessarily the case, and that a special energy and connection can form between the audience and the stage, an oscillation that can bridge proverbial divides. When I die on the stage as Maria Callas, I feel the audience's collective breath.
We show seven operas in one and a half hours, deconstructed in a new context. This draws young people too, which pleases me. A friend of mine told me that, following the premiere at the Opéra Garnier in Paris, she saw an older woman, presumably from the bourgeoisie, who said with pique, "Mais ce n'est pas classique!" I thought then that I've done everything right.
