The 7 Deaths of Maria Callas

05 SEPT 2020: Performance artist Marina Abramović’s opera project The 7 Deaths of Maria Callas at Bayerische Staatsoper Munich is going to open the new ARTE Opera Season.

Marina Abramović has been fascinated by Callas – “The Tigress” as she calls her – for decades. And now she has conceived an opera project, “7 Deaths of Maria Callas”, in which the seven stage deaths that mark the musical and dramatic climax of seven different operas – all of them arias that were of the utmost importance to Callas – are re-enacted. At the end of the evening, after seven films in which Marina Abramović appears seven times alongside Willem Dafoe, the performance artist herself enters the stage for one final re-enactment, that of Maria Callas’s own death in Paris in 1977. The famous arias of the nineteenth and twentieth century are woven together by additional music composed by Marko Nikodijević. His score describes how Callas’s devotion to her art was so unconditional and so intense that the stage persona and private individual could no longer be separated. Seven singers sing seven of Callas’ greatest roles under the baton of Yoel Gamzou.

The ARTE Opera Season is a European Opera Season that ARTE presents in partnership with leading opera houses from all over Europe since 2018 – available worldwide and with subtitles in six languages. The project’s third season starts on 5 September 2020 with a livestreaming of The 7 Deaths of Maria Callas from Munich. The stream will be available online for 30 days.

A coproduction between ARTE Concert, BR-Klassik and Bayerische Staatsoper.