This video by Richard Move features Barbie and Ken “acting out” dialogue from the Italian-language voice track of Pier Pasolini’s film Medea, which starred Maria Callas.
The video was shown at the University of California, Irvine, as part of an exhibition curated by Martha Gever, VIDEO DADA. From the UCI website:
…VIDEO DADA surveys the Internet’s amalgamation of popular culture and art, calling into question the difference between the two.
I am drunk with fatigue today and half convinced that this is a hallucination born of too little sleep.
During the trips and vacations that they took together, Pier Paolo Pasolini made several portraits of Maria Callas, sometimes using sea water, stones, sand, and other natural elements.
Following is my translation of the the last section of “La presenza,” another poem that Pasolini wrote about Maria Callas.
Allow the little girl to be queen, to open and close windows as if in a ritual respected by guests, servants, faraway spectators. And yet she, she, the little girl— if she is neglected for only one moment, she feels lost forever; ah, not upon motionless islands but upon the terror of not being, the wind streams, the divine wind that brings not healing, but ever more sickness; and you seek to stop her, she who would turn back, there isn’t a day, an hour, an instant in which this desperate effort can cease; you cling to almost anything, begetting the desire to kiss you.
Pier Paolo Pasolini: The man who didn’t make Maria Callas sing…
It wasn’t his choice to take part in the great masquerade that transforms a woman into a female transvestite. In the case of opera singers, this masquerade is so powerful that it can ultimately destroy these (apparently cherished) live marionettes. It wasn’t his choice as a homosexual. In the world of opera, there swirls around divas a world of men who “adore” women, all the more and all the better when they are no longer women, but masks...
The singer, finally mute and yet shown, in her violence and her life. The singer finally set free from her song. Catherine Clément, “La Cantatrice muette ou le maître chanteur démasqué”
Catherine Clément, the French philosopher and novelist, seems to inspire extreme reactions. Her beautiful screed, Opera: Or the Undoing of Women, is a fundamental, must-read text for me, yet scholarly friends for whom I have the deepest respect dismiss it as rot.
(OT, but please bear with me: For more than ten years, I have been looking for an English-language publisher for my translation of Clément’s beautiful novel La Señora, based on the life of Doña Gracia Nasi.)
Clément’s 1980 essay on Callas and Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The Mute Singer; or, the Master Singer Unmasked,” is brief and difficult. The title riffs on Eugène Ionesco’s “anti-play,” The Bald Soprano.
By not making (forcing) Callas to sing in his Medea film, Pasolini, in Clément’s view, avoided the “trap,” the “blackmail” (chantage), inflicted on her by others. In the French-speaking world, this is a familiar theme: Pierre-Jean Rémy, in Callas, une vie (1978), presented the soprano as a victim “forced” to sing first by her mother, then by Meneghini, and so forth.
Incidentally, the issue of Callas and film, Callas in film, is rich and filled with ironies. In Medea, her only feature, Callas not only does not sing but is actually mute for long stretches. Zeffirelli’s Callas Forever shows the soprano mourning her voice, trying (and failing) to bring it back to life. In Fellini’s E la nave va, the dead soprano’s voice is heard only when her ashes are scattered over the sea—as if her voice were being swallowed up by the depths along with her earthly remains.
And then there is the thorny issue, explored by Michal Grover-Friedlander and others, of dubbing. In contrast to French and Anglo-American films, Italian films (even those for Italian audiences) are often dubbed, evincing a blithe attitude toward the “integrity” of voice and person. It is a practice ultimately rejected by the fictional Callas in Callas Forever. In life, though, the Rome Opera's insistence that “nobody can double (dub) Callas” created mayhem for the soprano. (“To dub” and “to double” are the same word in Italian; “nobody can double Callas” are words that Callas cited, with bitterness, a decade after the 1958 Rome Norma fracas.)
There is more to be said, but it is 39°C today, and I need a nap. Back at you real soon.
This is the third (actually, the fourth) installment of Dacia Maraini’s 2007 interview about Maria Callas. Here is the preview, followed by part I and part II.
Tell us about Callas’s love for Pasolini. How did she love him? They loved each other, but in different ways. She would have married him, but he wouldn’t have married her. She knew that he was a homosexual but believed that she could “redeem” him. Still, Pier Paolo never gave her false hopes. He never said that he would abandon his sexual habits. This love was a pious desire on Maria’s part. As usual, she preferred dreams to realities.
Did she ever sing in private—for example, for you and Moravia? No, I never heard her sing behind the scenes. She never even hummed a song. She was very protective of her voice and always kept a scarf on hand even when it was hot. She was a singer through and through who knew the delicacy and fragility of the voice.
What did success and popularity mean to her? How did she bear them? She seemed to take success as something natural, something that was her due given the magnificent voice that was nature’s gift to her. She knew her own worth as a singer, but only that. Otherwise, she was diffident.
When did you stop seeing each other? When her “love story” with Pasolini ended. What’s more, she lived in Paris, and it was hard to meet up with her.
How did you learn of her death? I heard it on the radio—early one morning when I got up and turned on the radio. I felt a sense of emptiness. I can’t say that she was a close friend, but we had spent time together in a spirit of affection.
From time to time she would ask me what I thought of Pier Paolo. I think that she didn’t understand him at all and feared disappointing him. Still, I never discouraged her, even if I thought that Pasolini never would have changed his inclinations on her account. Pier Paolo’s love for her was chaste, almost brotherly, even paternal. However, I thought that she had to discover this for herself. I wasn’t there to reproach her or warn her. She was adult enough.
The final installment will follow later this week.
What was your relationship like? She was reserved at first. Then, little by little, as she got to know me, she became affectionate. I remember her once confiding that she had always gotten everything wrong with men. She said that she had loved Onassis immensely, but that he had been brutal to her. Somewhat comically, she thought that she would convert Pasolini to heterosexuality. She was naïve and sometimes seemed like a little girl. Her love for jewels was that of a poor girl enchanted by a magic ring or dress.
What differences were there between her private behavior, with friends, and with the public? There were enormous differences, if by “public” you mean opera audiences. She was free from uncertainty, shyness, fears; she was sure and sublime. But in private, with friends, she was awkward, though by nature she was a very controlled person, self-taught, who knew how to get by in life.
Tell us about the long trips that you took with Moravia, Pasolini, and Maria. We took two long trips to Africa, both a month long, and one to Yemen. Wherever we went, Pasolini and Moravia would disappear when Maria was there. She was a queen, and that’s how they treated her. Heads of state came to greet her, planes and cars were put at her disposal. But she didn’t avail herself of them—on the contrary, she tended to resist getting involved with authorities.
She was used to luxury hotels, but she adapted even to hostels, which is what happened when we were travelling through central Africa in Land Rovers. We lodged where we could.
The funniest thing? Once, in a large hotel, I went up to tell her that dinner was ready, and I found her in a dressing gown, sitting in front of the radio. I thought that she was listening to an opera. To my surprise, she was listening, rapt, to one of Nilla Pizzi’s songs.
For those unfamiliar with her work, Maraini is a keen observer of people and events and a gorgeous prose stylist. I have read only one of her works in English: The Silent Duchess (La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrìa), an unforgettable novel. (I reviewed it back in 1999, and please steel yourself, because my old site template is a horror.)
When did you meet Callas? Pasolini introduced me to her one evening at dinner in a Roman trattoria. Of course, I knew her as an artist: I had heard her sing, and I admired her greatly. I had formed a different image of her having seen her on stage, where she seemed to be a panther. In private, she was shy and awkward. I took an immediate liking to her because of her shyness and awkwardness. There was nothing of the diva about her.
What kind of personality did La Divina have? I realized immediately that she was a complicated person but also simple. She wasn’t an intellectual, and she was probably somewhat ashamed of this. She wasn’t well read. She trusted her instinct. She was extremely sensitive and highly intelligent, but hers wasn’t a systematic or rational intelligence. She was archaic: She thought that women should receive rather than analyze, love rather than reason.
As a result, she was very humble and fearful with Pier Paolo. Sometimes he would reproach her, very sweetly, for certain trite, even racist remarks that she had made unawares—like when we were in Africa, and she made certain less-than-anthropoligical observations. At his reprimand, she would shrink back like a snail into her shell and say, “You’re right, forgive me.”
She was also very worried about her body, which she considered malformed. She didn’t consider herself beautiful and tended to hide. Yet she was utterly beautiful. Still, she thought that she looked good on stage, not on a movie set. In fact, she wasn’t very natural during a shoot or with the cameras rolling. She had a natural understanding of acting, yet on the set she was simply someone doing her duty. She lacked spontaneity because she was ill at ease in front of the camera, which bore down upon her mercilessly.
I recently saw [Pasolini’s] Medea again, and I must say that one can sense her rigidity, her fear. In cinema, actors must know how to let themselves go, otherwise they become statues. And she was something of a statue in Medea, in both negative and positive ways. What I mean is, when she was only acting, she couldn’t recapture the freedom, the marvelous abandon she had when she was singing.
The caption reads: “Maria Callas and Pier Paolo Pasolini, departing for Paris en route to Mar del Plata, where they will present the film Medea. Callas and Pasolini avoided answering questions about their wedding, which some sources describe as imminent.”
(Pasolini, for those unfamiliar with the man and his work, was gay.)
Pasolini wrote several poems for and about Maria Callas. They are dense and gnarly. Following is my (wretched) translation of the closing lines of “Timor di me?” from the collection Trasumanar ed organizzar.
(“Timor di me?”—“Fear for me?”—are words from Leonora’s Act IV scena in Verdi’s Il trovatore.)
You give, you scatter gifts, you need to give, But your gift was given by Him, like all; And it is a Nothing, the gift of No one; I feign receiving; I thank you, sincerely grateful; But the weak, fleeting smile Is born not of shyness; It is the dismay, more terrible, far more terrible, Of having a separate body, in the realms of being— If it is a sin, If it’s not simply an accident; but in place of the Other For me there is a void in the cosmos, A void in the cosmos, And from there, you sing.
In the early 1970s, Callas travelled to Africa with Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, and Dacia Maraini. (Wow, wouldn’t you like to have gone on that trip?)
Maraini interviewed Callas, and I offer you a translation of part of the interview.
Which operatic character did you most enjoy interpreting? Norma. That scold who understands everything but can do nothing. Perhaps she resembles me.
What rôle has religion played in your life? I believe in a divine power, even if I don’t know its name. The stagecraft, the coups de théâtre of organized religion don’t appeal to me at all. But I wouldn’t be an atheist, because that would be a negative outlook. My only sanctimonious gesture is making the sign of the cross before I go on stage. It’s a habit, a superstition.
You were born Orthodox, yes? Yes, and I’m still Orthodox, though not in a traditional way.
If you had to define your moral in a few words, what would it be? I don’t hurt others, though it might be easy for me to do so. First, because I don’t want to—vengeance depresses me—and second, because I fear that the hurt would fall back on me. Sooner or later the ugly things that we do come back to haunt us. I love good manners; I hate hypocrisy. I’m kind with those who respect me. I don’t easily forgive those who lash out at me.
The clip shows a 1969 NBC report on Callas in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Medea, including many outtakes.
As was her wont, Callas affects a posh accent, and her dismissive remarks about music and opera are humbug. Still, I am not aware of an interview in which she appears more serene and fulfilled. Her trust and admiration for Pasolini, her cinematic taskmaster, seem wholehearted.
He feels my mind the way I feel. He’s like an eagle that looks straight into the mind and soul. This is his great quality… I call it quicksilver. I’m quicksilver, and he is the same kind.
Contrast this with footage shot from the orchestra pit of Callas in the title rôle of Luigi Cherubini’s Medea, during one of her last performances at La Scala (in 1961 or 1962).
To quote one of the YouTube comments: “Seeing her performing is like watching a goddess blessing us.”
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