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    6 Highlights of Maria Callas’s Opera Career at La Scala

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    The soprano appeared in more than two dozen productions at the house in Milan as she rose to become opera’s leading lady. Here are six highlights.No opera house has been more instrumental to the enduring myth of Maria Callas than the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.Her more than two dozen productions at La Scala mirrored the peaks and troughs of her life and marked her finest years as an opera singer.It was near the start of her La Scala years that Callas underwent a physical transformation, losing some 80 pounds and becoming a global celebrity; and it was toward the end of that period that she left her husband Giovanni Battista Meneghini for the wealthy magnate Aristotle Onassis, who then married someone else (Jacqueline Kennedy).Callas’s many performances at La Scala “have passed into legend,” said Neil Fisher, executive culture and books editor, The Times and Sunday Times in London. “If La Scala is a temple to opera, then Maria Callas is one of the goddesses.”Callas during a rehearsal for Cherubini’s “Medea” with the Canadian tenor Jon Vickers at La Scala in 1961. “Medea” was her final show at La Scala.Associated PressLa Scala’s reputation, in turn, is “almost inseparable” from her, Mr. Fisher added: “Postwar, the glamour of opera, and also its mystique, swirls around this character of Maria Callas.”Why does a soprano who died in 1977 remain the single most celebrated opera singer of all time?Because she made opera “about the story and the drama and the narrative,” said the American soprano Lisette Oropesa. “It wasn’t just about the beauty of the voice: She used her voice to tell a story.”Crucially, Ms. Oropesa noted, Callas became the story herself — a “hot-topic, controversial figure” — after her life became mixed up with those of Onassis and Kennedy. As a result, “people to this day cannot stop talking about her,” Ms. Oropesa added. She’s “a legend.”Callas appearing as Violetta in “La Traviata” by Giuseppe Verdi, in a 1955 production at La Scala. The character is widely considered one of her three finest roles.DeAgostini/Getty ImagesFollowing is an overview of some of Callas’s career highlights at La Scala.“Aida” (Verdi): April 12, 1950Callas’s very first performance onstage at La Scala was as a substitute for the much-adored Renata Tebaldi, who was unwell. It was, by all accounts, a tepid debut. A skin condition had given the 26-year-old soprano facial blemishes that she awkwardly covered with veils. In “Maria Callas: An Intimate Biography,” by Anne Edwards, the director Franco Zeffirelli (who would go on to work with Callas) recalled “this overweight Greek lady, peeping out from behind her trailing chiffon,” with an “unevenness” in her voice. Her two remaining performances of “Aida” went much better, but this inaugural “Aida” was a blow to the young prodigy’s self-confidence.“I Vespri Siciliani” (Verdi):Dec. 7, 1951This was the first time that Callas was headlining a La Scala production — kicking off the opera house’s season, in fact — and it was a triumph. She was understandably nervous at the start. “The miraculous throat of Maria Meneghini Callas did not have to fear the demand of the opera,” the music reviewer Franco Abbiati wrote in the newspaper Corriere della Sera (according to the biography “Maria Callas: The Tigress and the Lamb,” by David Bret). Mr. Abbiati lauded the “phosphorescent beauty” of her tones, and “her technical agility, which is more than rare — it is unique.”“Lucia di Lammermoor” (Donizetti): Jan. 18, 1954This was Callas’s first time with the renowned conductor Herbert von Karajan at the baton, and she didn’t disappoint. In the famous “mad scene” — where Lucia stabs her new husband on her wedding night — Callas appeared barehanded, in a nightgown and messy hair, on a dimly lit staircase; she had turned down the dagger and fake blood that are usually used to portray the murder. Yet her performance was so realistic that mesmerized audience members jumped up mid-performance, clapping and cheering, and tossed red carnations onstage that Callas touched as if they were gobs of blood. In Opera News, the critic Cynthia Jolly hailed “Callas’s supremacy amongst present-day sopranos,” and “a heart-rending poignancy of timbre which is quite unforgettable,” according to the Bret biography.“La Traviata” (Verdi): May 28, 1955The character of Violetta in “La Traviata” is widely considered one of Callas’s three finest roles — along with Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Bellini’s “Norma.” And the May 1955 staging by the director Luchino Visconti is, in turn, considered her finest “Traviata.” It was “a revolutionary production” that was “renowned for its realism, the intimacy and the gorgeousness of the setting, the painterly qualities,” said Mr. Fisher of The Times. It also “encapsulated so much” of the Maria Callas that audiences have come to know and revere. Set in La Belle Epoque, with ornate décor and costumes, the show triggered another audience frenzy on opening night. People cried out Callas’s name, sobbed uncontrollably and showered the stage with red roses, which a tearful Callas picked up as she took a solo bow. The conductor Carlo Maria Giulini later confessed that he, too, had wept in the pit. Yet Callas’s monopolizing of attention in her solo bow was too much for the tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano, who quit the show that night.“Anna Bolena” (Donizetti):April 14, 1957This was another Visconti spectacular, and another triumph. Callas played Anne Boleyn, a doomed wife of Henry VIII, in a somewhat lesser-known Donizetti opera. Queenlike, she appeared in a dark blue gown and enormous jewels at the top of a grand staircase, surrounded by royal portraits. Musically, she gave it her all, triggering 24 minutes of applause (according to the Edwards biography), a La Scala record.Yet offstage, in Milan, her star was starting to fade, after she had refused to perform a fifth time with the La Scala opera company on a tour in Edinburgh (she was only contractually obligated to four performances, and was feeling unwell). Protesters awaited her as she headed to the “Anna Bolena” premiere, the Edwards biography reported, and she was accompanied inside by armed police officers. When she got home on the last night of the show, there were obscenities scribbled with animal excrement on her front door and windows.“Medea” (Cherubini): May 29, 1962By the time of her final performances at La Scala, Callas was divorced and in a relationship with Onassis. Her voice was still dazzling audiences worldwide. Just 10 days before this performance of “Medea,” she had sung two arias from the opera “Carmen” at a celebration of President John F. Kennedy’s 45th birthday (where Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday”).Yet as she was performing “Medea” that night, a sinus infection led Callas’s voice to waver in parts, though she sang all the way to the end, and still managed to draw some press acclaim.Long after her passing, Lord Harewood, a Callas supporter and onetime director of the Royal Opera House, recalled in an Evening Standard article that was excerpted in the Bret biography that it was “evident that her voice had deteriorated markedly,” and attributed it to her “being at sea with Onassis in his boat” and attending “too many parties.”“You felt that this wonderful career was coming to an end,” he was quoted as saying in the Bret biography. “But I thought that she still had great power, a tremendous grandeur about everything she did. In spite of everything, she never lost that.” More

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      Maria Callas Was Opera’s Defining Diva. She Still Is.

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      Her voice is the shadow that remains after shock, after anger: the sound of a woman realizing she has nothing left to live for.It is the second act of Verdi’s opera “La Traviata.” Violetta and Alfredo, a prostitute and a wealthy young man, have fallen madly in love. But his father confronts her, demanding she drop the disreputable affair to salvage the marriage prospects of Alfredo’s sister.For Violetta, it is an unbearable sacrifice, but she’ll do it. “Dite alla giovine,” she sings, in a broken murmur: Tell your daughter that I will abandon the one good thing I have, for her sake.Singing that passage on May 28, 1955, at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the soprano Maria Callas reached the phrase about how “bella e pura” Alfredo’s sister is — how beautiful and pure — and inserted the tiniest breath before “pura.” It’s a barely noticeable silence, but within it is a black hole of resignation. Callas’s split-second pause achingly suggests Violetta knows that if she, too, were pure, her happiness would not be expendable.Tiny details like this are how Callas — who would have turned 100 on Dec. 2 — gave opera’s over-the-top melodramas a startling sense of reality, and her characters the psychological depth and nuance of actual people. Tiny details like this, captured on hundreds of recordings, are how this most mythical of singers has stubbornly resisted drifting entirely into myth.Maria Callas rehearsing “Medea” in 1953 at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.Erio Piccagliani/Teatro alla ScalaThe defining diva of the 20th century, Callas is not so far from us in some ways; a normal life span would have brought her well into the 21st. Those many recordings — endlessly remastered, repackaged and rereleased — have kept her in our ears, the benchmark of what is possible in opera, musically and emotionally. Her dramatic art and dramatic life, often intertwined, have made her an enduring cultural touchstone: a coolly glamorous stare in Apple ads and the inspiration for plays (including a Tony Award winner), performances by Marina Abramovic (bad) and Monica Bellucci (worse), a coming film starring Angelina Jolie (we’ll see), even a hologram tour (sigh).Yet Callas can also seem like a figure of faraway history. Her lonely death was back in 1977, when she was just 53 — and by then, her days of true performing glory were almost 20 years behind her. The number of people who saw her live, particularly in staged opera, is dwindling, and her short career was just early enough that precious little of it was filmed.So she has been for decades, for most of us, a creation of still images and audio. We have to use those tools to conjure what her performances were like, to complete them.But when you hear her, this is surprisingly easy. You listen to that “Dite alla giovine” and immediately see, in her voice, the blankness of her face, the mouth barely moving and the rest a mask of surrender, the shoulders collapsed. At the end of her classic 1953 “Tosca” recording, you can again “see” that indelible face, this time shifting in a couple of seconds from hushed excitement to catastrophic loss. (Listen to the sudden fear in that second cry of “Mario!”) With Callas, the aural always presses toward the visual; the voice, with its specificity and pungency, its weirdly death-haunted vitality, makes you imagine her body, moving in space.In her performances, there was never a sense of opera as mere entertainment, a night out with pretty music. She took every note seriously, where others fudged and coasted; she was refined where others were vulgar. In her powerfully expressive voice and magnetic presence, opera really, truly mattered.Watch her perform “Tu che le vanità” from Verdi’s “Don Carlo” in concert in 1962, near the end of her career. You are aware even before she opens her mouth of opera’s founding paradoxes. She is grand, and honest; epic, and intimate.Opera in the modern era is at its core an exhumation of the past, a literal revival. Callas is the essential singer — she is opera — not because of her instrument or her acting, but because, with a combination of born intuition and carefully acquired skill, she imagined and reconstructed a vanished world.She took on a whole repertory — the bel canto of the early 19th century, notably operas of Donizetti, Bellini and Rossini — that had been ignored or distorted for generations. And she approached pieces that had never left the public, like “La Traviata,” Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Bellini’s “Norma,” as if they were being done for the first time. The title character of “Lucia,” then widely assumed to be a chirpy cipher, was in Callas’s throat a morbid, ecstatic gothic heroine — more intense, and more believable. In the wake of World War II, she showed that Europe’s patrimony could emerge from the rubble.Born in New York to Greek immigrants, Callas grew up listening to Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts and, at 13, returned with her mother to Greece. Just a year later, she was singing Carmen’s “Habanera” and Norma’s “Casta diva” as a conservatory student in Athens.She had no real apprenticeship. There were no supporting parts, no young-artist programs. By her early 20s, she was singing some of the most challenging roles in the repertory; by her early 30s, she was singing them all over the world.She made her name with outlandish feats like doing Brünnhilde in Wagner’s “Die Walküre” and Elvira in Bellini’s “I Puritani” — which few sopranos paired in the same lifetime — in the same week. And once she became an object of worship, scratchy pirated recordings of a passionate “Traviata” from Lisbon were passed around like religious relics; ditto a Mexico City “Aida,” in which Callas stretched an old but rare interpolated high E flat to gleaming length at the end of the Triumphal Scene.Her voice, matchlessly articulate and often quite beautiful but also idiosyncratic and fragile, didn’t hold out too long, and her career was brief; there was maybe a decade of prime singing, largely in the 1950s. By the time she was 40, it was essentially over.Brief — and unbelievably dense and tumultuous. Who knows the root of Callas’s restlessness, her insane commitment, her ferocity, her rivalries? There was clearly a deeply ingrained sense of unworthiness that you could trace back to her difficult childhood, with a mother who openly preferred her prettier sister. Self-buttressing, self-hating, self-defeating, Callas needed the stage desperately, and yet she always needed to be pushed onto it.Her loss of some five or six dozen pounds in the early ’50s, slimming into one of the century’s most stylish women, made news, as did her dropping out midway through a “Norma” in Rome in 1958. The year before, she had pleaded illness before missing a performance of Bellini’s “La Sonnambula” in Edinburgh, then was photographed at a swank party in Venice. A lifetime later, it all seems so petty, but the venom that greeted these cancellations — hard to imagine today — helped usher in the end of Callas’s career.Callas in 1958 on a train in Rome. She had maybe a decade of prime singing, largely in the 1950s. By the time she was 40, her career was essentially over.Alfredo Miccoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesShe left her husband for the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, largely giving up performing in the process. When Onassis eventually married Jackie Kennedy instead, Callas was alone and bereft, without either the vocation that had given her purpose or the man who had replaced it. Living mostly in seclusion, though always harboring hopes of returning to the stage, she became for many a kind of saint or martyr, an embodiment of the hopelessly loving, direly abandoned characters she had played.“Until the end,” a friend said, “she continued her vocal exercises.”As Callas’s life fades ever further into the distance, her voice is more and more what we are left with. “Generally, I upset people the first time they hear me,” she told a biographer, “but I am usually able to convince them of what I am doing.”Francesco Siciliani, an impresario who engaged Callas as she rose in the late 1940s, was right when he said, “Parts of the voice were beautiful, others empty.” But the flaws that grew more prominent over time — the thinnesses and wobbles, the metallic harshness and questionable intonation — were, as she knew, usually convincing, not least because her sound, for all its troubles, was so instantly recognizable, and such a perfect vessel for extreme emotion. There was always that sense of every phrase being considered, without feeling studied — of a voice with a purpose.We can see from photos the amazing ability of her face — and, perhaps just as important, her hands — to capture anguish, authority and charm. But among the most pernicious stereotypes about Callas is that she was an actress who could barely sing, who got by on charisma alone.The records disprove this. Listen to her tender “O mio babbino caro.” Listen to her delicate yet commanding “D’amor sull’ali rosee.” She was always a bel canto singer at heart. In the early 1970s, when she led a series of master classes at the Juilliard School, a student defended herself after a bad high note by saying it was meant as a cry of despair.“It’s not a cry of despair,” Callas shot back. “It’s a B flat.”Callas in “Norma” in Paris, in 1964. She approached operas that had never left the repertory as if they were being done for the first time.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt’s appropriate that this is the lasting image of her final years, and the theme of Terrence McNally’s Tony-winning play “Master Class”: Callas as a wise but overbearing, even fearsome teacher. She and those hundreds of recordings continue to teach, continue to loom over opera. Singers are still compared to her, especially those with compelling presences and voices on the acidic side.Sixty years after Callas sang “Medea,” the star of a new production at the Met in 2021 said Callas’s legacy hadn’t stopped being the “elephant in the room.” Opera is still asking the question that the writer Ethan Mordden recalled being posed by a friend back in 1969: “Is there life after Callas?”Should there be? She and her flash of a career remain a beacon of artistic integrity and profundity — of the cultivation of tradition and craft, of a desire to bring the past to bear on the present — in a culture that values those qualities less and less.The costume designer Piero Tosi was there for her great “Traviata” at La Scala in 1955. “She scarcely seemed to be singing,” he said of her “Dite alla giovine.” “Yet everyone heard.”Impossibly distant, yet immensely present: At her centennial, Callas still occupies a position in opera something like the sun.Audio and video courtesy of Warner ClassicsProduced by More

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      Monica Bellucci Tries on the Dress, and Life, of Maria Callas

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      The film star embodies one of opera’s greatest divas in the solo show “Maria Callas: Letters & Memoirs,” coming to the Beacon Theater.There are opera stars, and then there is Maria Callas.Birgit Nilsson or Luciano Pavarotti may have been great, but they haven’t sung posthumously. Callas, on the other hand, has toured — as a hologram — decades after her death. Few have heard of the William Luce play “Bravo, Caruso!,” about that classic tenor, but Terrence McNally’s “Master Class,” which revolves around Callas’s exacting methods as a teacher, won a Tony Award in 1996 and is regularly revived.This soprano’s fans — the fiercest of whom the critic Anthony Tommasini affectionately dubbed “Callas crazoids” — will be kept busy this year, which marks the 100th anniversary of her birth. Early out of the gate, in New York, is the actress Monica Bellucci, who is bringing her solo show, “Maria Callas: Letters & Memoirs,” to the Beacon Theater on Friday.Bellucci, 58, has been performing the piece, in which she reads selections from Callas’s writings, on and off since 2019. Yet she still finds it hard to explain the peculiar, enduring hold that the soprano often referred to as La Divina still has on the collective imagination.“She had an aura,” Bellucci said during a recent visit to New York.Bellucci herself was regally resplendent that day, projecting the kind of smoky-voiced elegance often associated with marquee names of Golden Age Hollywood. But her résumé is less predictable than that reference might suggest: She has leapfrogged from intimate dramas to the James Bond movie “Spectre,” from Mary Magdalene in Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” to the victim of a brutal rape in the French “provoc-auteur” Gaspar Noé’s “Irréversible.” Her reputation as a symbol of European glamour and sophistication is so firmly established that she made fun of it in an episode of the series “Call My Agent!” (One crucial difference from that guest appearance: “I never had a relationship with my agent,” she clarified with a laugh.)Maria Callas, one of the most storied sopranos in opera, greeting fans at Carnegie Hall in 1974.: Larry C. Morris/The New York TimesStill, as open to new adventures as Bellucci has been, she had steered clear of theater. Undaunted, the director, writer and photographer Tom Volf, who had made the 2018 documentary “Maria by Callas,” trekked to her apartment to pitch a project based on his book “Maria Callas: Lettres & Mémoires.”“I remember we were in the living room, and she opened the book randomly and started reading out loud,” Volf, 37, said in a video interview. “That’s when I really saw the alchemy right away. Suddenly her physique, her attitude, her emotion were matching the one that I sensed was Callas’s, especially in some specific letters where you can see the woman and not the artist or the public figure.“I call it an alchemy; I think it’s beyond resemblance,” he continued. “I believe in destiny, like Callas did.” (Whenever Callas comes up, quasi-spiritual references to “aura” and “destiny” have a way of seeping into the conversation.)Equally bowled over, Bellucci forgot her longstanding reservations about appearing onstage. “The sense of beauty I felt was stronger than being scared,” she said. “I wanted to share what I felt with other people. It was through theater that I could get into that.”It’s hard to deny that a Callas-Bellucci pairing feels like it was predestined. Bellucci even played a Callas-like Italian opera star nicknamed La Fiamma in Season 3 of the series “Mozart in the Jungle.” Beyond their physical resemblance, Bellucci, an Italian-born Parisian, has led a border-crossing, multilingual international career, just like Callas, a Greek, New York-born singer decades earlier.Both had to navigate the specific tests that greet famous female celebrities. “I think that Monica can very instinctively and strongly relate to Callas as a woman,” Volf said. “Perhaps because she understands the duality between trying to lead a life as a woman and an artist with worldwide fame, and all the difficulties and the challenges that come with it.”The Callas mystique, beyond her acting and singing talent, was fed by an agitated, to put it mildly, personal life. She was rumored to have bitter rivalries with colleagues; was crushed by a torrid and unhappy affair with the Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis; and had a conflicted relationship with her body. (She lost a considerable amount of weight in a crash diet, which some blame for her eventual vocal issues.)“She’s someone who had the courage to follow her heart, so that’s why when people say she had a tragic life. …” Bellucci said, trailing off. “She had a brave life. She wanted to divorce in a moment when, in Italy, divorce was forbidden. She’s still inspiring today because she had everybody against her and she was a fighter.”Callas’s physical reinvention can be also be seen as a sign of autonomy rather than of weakness. “She created what she wanted to be, like many, many, many people in the business,” Bellucci said sympathetically. “Marilyn Monroe wasn’t the blonde bombshell when she started. We call this ‘les femmes du spectacle’: They know how to create illusion. An artist uses her own body as a transmitter, as a way to show themselves. The body becomes an instrument.”At the Beacon, Bellucci’s instrument will be sheathed in one of Callas’s actual dresses, a black Saint Laurent number that Volf borrowed from a private collection in Milan. The couch that plays a central role, however, is only a replica of one Callas had at her apartment on Avenue Georges-Mandel in Paris.“The idea was a ghost of Callas is coming back to her house,” Bellucci said. “So I move to different places on the sofa, as if it represents this circuit of her life, from when she’s young, full of excitement, and then when she was more mature, finding a balance between work and private life. And then the end, when she was in her sadness and melancholy, but so elegant in that.”Because this is not a biographical show per se, but rather a peek into the singer’s more intimate side, in conversation Bellucci and Volf often differentiated between Callas and Maria, as a way to separate her public and private personas. They also pointed out that “Master Class,” for example, focused on a very specific element of her life: “This was the hard part of her,” Bellucci said. “People used to say that she had a temper. Actually, she was uncompromising and completely dedicated to her work with her soul, her heart.“But the more intimate part of her,” Bellucci continued, “the one that nobody knows, was so fragile and sensitive. And this sensitivity was also the base of her talent: She had the capacity to perceive things like a child. But nobody protected this child — not her mother, not her family. No men protected this child. So the child gets destroyed, and the artist as well.”As rich as her experience with “Letters & Memoirs” has been, Bellucci is not sure she will stick with theater. She said she had turned down, at least for now, an offer to play Medea — not coincidentally, perhaps, the role that gave Callas her sole movie experience, under the direction of Pier Paolo Pasolini.“I think maybe Callas did the one film, and I’m going to do one experience in theater,” Bellucci said. “I’m very thankful for the experience, and I’m going away like I came.” More

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      The Met Opera Takes on ‘Medea’ in the Shadow of Maria Callas

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      “Let’s talk about the elephant in the room,” the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky said after a recent rehearsal of Luigi Cherubini’s “Medea” at the Metropolitan Opera. “Everybody knows this opera because of Maria Callas.”Callas may loom over the legacy of this opera — her various recordings from the mid-20th century dominate the work’s discography — but her star power was never enough to bring it to the Met, which is staging it for the first time only now, with a new production by David McVicar opening the company’s season on Tuesday.Like many people, McVicar was unfamiliar with the opera until he began to study it for this production. It’s a rarity within a rarity — a seldom performed work from a composer who, despite celebrity and respect in his time, is known today for just a sliver of his output, if at all. A tourist at Père Lachaise, the cemetery in Paris where Cherubini is buried, is more likely to visit the neighboring grave of Chopin.“Every version of Medea has a slightly different narrative and slightly different accretion to the myth,” the director David McVicar said.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesBorn in 1760, a French-assimilated Italian who straddled music’s Classical and Romantic eras, Cherubini premiered his “Médée” in 1797 from a French libretto inspired by both the Euripides and Corneille tragedies. It’s a version of the Greek myth in which she, having helped Jason retrieve the Golden Fleece, exacts revenge on him after he abandons her.“Every version of Medea has a slightly different narrative and slightly different accretion to the myth,” McVicar said. “Euripides introduces the idea of the murder of the children for the first time, and the Baroque opera introduces myriad subplots, and twists and turns. This goes back to Euripides. It’s a Classical piece but also gothic: It belongs to a period of gothic Romanticism in arts and literature.”“Medea” has remained on the outskirts of the repertory for its difficulty.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesAfter the premiere, “Médée” didn’t catch on, and wasn’t the most beloved of Cherubini’s operas among fans like Beethoven. And his reputation after his death, in 1842, was certainly not helped by portraits — however accurate — such as the one in Berlioz’s memoirs, which include a scene of Cherubini, decades after “Médée” and by then the director of the Paris Conservatory, behaving with fussy villainy.But his fortunes changed in the 20th century. In 1909 “Médée” arrived at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, in an Italian translation, called “Medea,” that replaced the spoken French dialogue with new recitative. That version, which McVicar described as “bigger boned and more concise,” was revived in the 1950s by Callas, who went on to perform it widely, including at La Scala and the Royal Opera House in London.For that reason, the work is most familiar as “Medea” — which is how the Met is presenting it, in the Italian translation — though it has remained on the outskirts of the repertory for its difficulty, taken on by a select group of singers including Leonie Rysanek, Gwyneth Jones and Montserrat Caballé.Radvanovsky, center, with Ekaterina Gubanova, left, who sings Neris, and Axel and Magnus Newville, who play Medea’s children.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesThe Italian version replaced the spoken French dialogue with new recitative.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesMcVicar referred to the opera as a soprano version of “Hamlet” because once Medea enters, she more or less never leaves the stage, in various states of distress and fury.Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times“You need to have somebody who can sing it,” said the conductor Carlo Rizzi, who is leading the Met production. “If you have that, you do it. If you don’t, you don’t do it. It’s as simple as that.”Hikers, he added, might take on Mont Blanc or Kilimanjaro; but fewer will try Everest. McVicar, for his part, referred to the opera as a soprano version of “Hamlet” because once Medea enters, she more or less never leaves the stage, in various states of distress and fury.At the back of the stage is an enormous, angled mirror that reflects the action from an aerial perspective.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesIt’s a challenge that appealed to Radvanovsky. The idea for the Met’s production came in the wake of another season-opener, Bellini’s “Norma,” which featured the same trio of Radvanovsky, McVicar and Rizzi. She said that Peter Gelb, the house’s general manager, told her he was happy with her performance and asked what she would like to do next. “‘Medea,’” she answered.“Peter said, ‘Are you sure?’” Radvanovsky recalled. “And I said yeah because after ‘Norma,’ where can one go?”She felt that it was a logical fit for her voice — a way to combine her Met history of bel canto works, like Donizetti’s Tudor operas, and verismo classics like Puccini’s “Tosca.” The question was which language she would sing it in. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director, had wanted to do the French original and was at first attached to this production, but it was decided that they would follow Callas’s tradition, a better fit for both Radvanovsky and the Met.Following Callas’s tradition was a better fit for both Radvanovsky and the Met.Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times“I think both are valid,” McVicar said of the two versions. “But you have to be mindful of the house and the cast that you have. The French can work, but you need a much smaller theater, like the Opéra Comique in Paris. And frankly, the dialogues aren’t very good; they’re clunky and old-fashioned.”McVicar joined the production, not only because he and Radvanovsky have a long, fruitful relationship together in opera, but also because a work like “Medea” is where, he said, he feels most at home.“I’m very much identified here with big Italian war horses because I can do them,” he added. “But is that where my interests lie? I’d have to say no. I’m much more interested in something in the hinterlands, like this.” (That’s why he’d also like to work on Janacek operas in the future, with Radvanovsky, whom he could see in “The Makropulos Case.”)Radvanovsky, left, and McVicar. The stage design is deceptively minimal.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesWith a team in place, the premiere was planned for the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto — this “Medea” is a coproduction with that house, as well as with the Greek National Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago — but the pandemic upended that. Instead, the first run will be at the Met, and McVicar ended up designing it during the most restrictive lockdowns, when he couldn’t work in person with his usual collaborators. What started as a practical move, though, ended up being his way to stay sane, and creative, he said.McVicar returned to the opera’s origins, and thought about how its tensions and turmoil — “the sheer chaos that Medea is capable of unleashing,” he said — fits with its time, coming out of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, as well as Directoire style.That gave the production its look, with costumes “from the Directoire period, roughly speaking, and a real sense of gothic decay,” McVicar said. His stage design is deceptively minimal: a thrust corner with sliding doors that open to reveal both spare scenes and episodes of opulence. At the back is an enormous, angled mirror that reflects the action from an aerial perspective but also serves as a screen for special effects made from projections on the floor — “literally smoke and mirrors,” as he put it.The angled mirror onstage also serves as a screen for special effects.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesThe score, too, can seem simpler than it is, Rizzi said. It’s not written for a very large orchestra, and it doesn’t contain isolated melodies that the audience will leave the house humming. “That doesn’t mean it’s a bad opera,” he added. “It’s a different opera.”A conductor could interpret the music as Classical, but Rizzi has been working with the Met Orchestra to bring out the mercurial tumult that courses through Cherubini’s instrumental writing. The opening Sinfonia alone, he said, “is not a planting of a stake, it’s a wave of a tsunami.”Much of the opera’s shifting character also relies on Radvanovsky as Medea, who in McVicar’s staging is portrayed with expressive physicality. “She can be serpentine, or what we’ve been calling the Hulk, or a goddess,” Radvanovsky said. “It’s exhausting.”“I could not have thought of a better role to be singing right now than Medea,” Radvanovsky said. “It’s the best therapy you can ask for.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesStill, she added, this is a role that a soprano can’t approach with fear — neither of its history nor of its demands. As an actor, she has drawn on experience that parallels the action of the opera: recently, the dissolution of her marriage and the death of her mother. “I could not have thought of a better role to be singing right now than Medea,” she said. “It’s the best therapy you can ask for.”Beyond the music, Radvanovsky has been working with a personal trainer. “I wear a corset onstage, which is great for singing, but then you combine that with Pilates moves,” she said. “I have to be strong, in the best shape my body can be in. We talk about things as a sprint or a marathon. This opera is a marathon.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times More

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      Review: Marina Abramovic Summons Maria Callas in ‘7 Deaths’

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      Part mixtape and part séance, this opera project by the famed performance artist attempts to unite two divas across time.MUNICH — In Leos Carax’s new film, “Annette,” the husband and wife played by Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard are described in inverse terms. As a comedian, he kills every night; as an opera star, she dies.That’s of course a reductive view of opera. But the alignment of the art form and demise persists in the popular imagination, and guides “7 Deaths of Maria Callas.” A dramaturgically misguided séance of a project by the performance artist Marina Abramovic, it played to its largest in-person audience yet on Tuesday at the Bavarian State Opera here, after a heavily restricted run and livestream last year. It is bound for Paris and Athens in September, then Berlin and Naples — and who knows where else, with Abramovic’s celebrity behind it.“7 Deaths” is a meeting of divas in which Callas is invoked through a series of the arias for which she was notable. She is then inhabited onstage and in short films — the summoning of a spirit who, Abramovic argues, is still very much with us.In the work, Abramovic inhabits Maria Callas, miming to a recording of “Casta Diva.”Wilfried HöslShe’s right. Callas died in 1977, yet lives on in a still-robust stream of albums, art books and, yes, hologram concerts. She was known even to a public beyond opera as tabloid fodder, especially because of her affair with Aristotle Onassis — a love triangle involving Jacqueline Kennedy, his eventual wife. But her pop celebrity emerged from her being an indelible artist, who contributed to the 20th-century resurrection of bel canto repertoire with a transfixing stage presence. Even when silent, she emoted with the entirety of her face, arrestingly expressive with just a small hand gesture. Her voice failed her too early, but she embodied the “Tosca” aria “Vissi d’arte”: “I lived for art.”That voice caught the attention of a young Abramovic, who has said that she first heard Callas on the radio when she was a 14-year-old in Yugoslavia. Since then she has been haunted by their similarities: They share astrology signs, toxic relationships with their mothers and, she told The New York Times last year, “this incredible intensity in the emotions, that she can be fragile, and strong at the same time.”In the opera’s initial run, Adela Zaharia, left, sang an aria from “Lucia di Lammermoor.” On Tuesday, it was sung by Rosa Feola, in a standout performance.Wilfried HöslIn that interview, Abramovic noted one essential difference: how they reacted to losing the loves of their lives. Callas, in her view, died of a broken heart — a heart attack, to be exact — but Abramovic, so shattered that she stopped eating or drinking, eventually survived by returning to work.All this background about “7 Deaths” is clearer than the work itself, in which Callas is never present enough to persuasively intertwine with Abramovic, who upstages the great diva throughout. That’s the insurmountable flaw of the project, and the main reason it doesn’t belong in an opera house.“7 Deaths” is best experienced in person; the spatial audio design and immersive, big-screen film element made its 95-minute running time a breeze on Tuesday, compared with the tedious livestream last year. But its use of live performers relegates them to mere soundtrack, while also erasing Callas from her own history.This might have been more satisfying as a set of video installations, something like Julian Rosefeldt’s “Manifesto.” If Abramovic’s homage were accompanied by Callas’s storied recordings, the goal of joining and blurring divas could be more naturally achieved. Instead, “7 Deaths,” directed by Abramovic with Lynsey Peisinger, never quite approaches actual drama in its succession of arias and films, then its dreamy re-creation of Callas’s final moments in her Paris apartment.Nadezhda Karyazina, left, sang the role of Carmen last year against a backdrop of a video with Willem Dafoe, left onscreen, and Abramovic. On Tuesday, Samantha Hankey sang it.Wilfried HöslThe piece does include new music, by Marko Nikodijevic — ably conducted, along with the opera excerpts, by Yoel Gamzou. The overture begins with haunting bells and slippery melodies whose glissandos render them distant memories of unplaceable tunes. Behind a scrim, Abramovic lies still in a bed under soft lighting; not since Tilda Swinton has an artist so easily gotten away with sleep as performance.Then swirling clouds are projected onto the scrim — a tacky recurring “visual intermezzo,” as it is called in the credits — and a maid enters. She is the first of seven singers who dress identically and whose arias follow introductions in the form of poetic texts prerecorded by Abramovic.The characters are never named, but opera fans will recognize them instantly: Violetta Valéry from “La Traviata” (Emily Pogorelc); Desdemona from “Otello” (Leah Hawkins); Cio-Cio-San from “Madama Butterfly” (Kiandra Howarth); and the title protagonists of “Tosca” (Selene Zanetti), “Carmen” (Samantha Hankey), “Lucia di Lammermoor” (Rosa Feola) and “Norma” (Lauren Fagan).Their onstage appearances are an insult to the singers, who feel like interchangeably anonymous musical accompaniment to the short films — though Feola’s Lucia was defiantly present, a performance that captured the role’s emotional force and vocal acrobatics, even stripped of its dramatic context.In the work’s coda, Abramovic imagines herself in Callas’s Paris apartment on the day she died.Wilfried HöslA spotlight remains throughout on the sleeping Abramovic, as behind her the short films — starring her and a game Willem Dafoe, and directed by Nabil Elderkin — provide not reflections on Callas but (on a superficial level) the arias themselves, and (on a more thoughtful one) the nature of operatic artifice.In their embrace of excess, these videos flirt with winking camp. As Abramovic falls from a skyscraper in slow motion, inspired by “Tosca,” her enormous earrings dance in zero gravity; when Dafoe wraps thick snakes around her neck to strangle her like Desdemona, their slithering bodies smear her lipstick. Her Carmen is a bedazzled matador, while in the “Norma” film she and Dafoe trade gender roles, with him in a glittering gown and the penciled eyebrows of Marlene Dietrich.Little, if anything, is said here about Callas, but after the seventh aria, Nikodijevic’s music returns — now rumbling and tumultuous, with singers and instrumentalists perched in the theater’s boxes — as the scene changes to her apartment on the day of her death. It’s realistic yet suggests a place beyond, the window opening not to a streetscape but to a pale blue emptiness.In this long coda, Abramovic’s prerecorded voice both gives her directions for onstage movement and imagines Callas’s final thoughts in a collage of non sequiturs resembling a mad scene. She contemplates her luxurious bedding, “Ari” Onassis, her gay friends (Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Zeffirelli, Leonard Bernstein). Then, at some point, she leaves through a door. The maids come in, dispassionately clean the room and drape black fabric over the furniture.One of them lingers, opening a turntable and dropping the needle on a record of “Casta Diva.” The sound is scratchy, but a distinct voice comes through: Callas, for the first time. Abramovic returns to the stage, in a sparkling gold gown, and mimes the performance — an outstretched hand, a downcast look. The two divas unite at last, too late.7 Deaths of Maria CallasPerformed Tuesday at the Bavarian State Opera, Munich. More