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.
Composers’ dependence on women is unique to opera. Beethoven piano sonatas can be played by men, and men are capable of playing the trombone or conducting an orchestra, but no boy soprano could ever sing operatic female roles. Women are thus critical in authoring the operatic work as an audible reality; they cannot be prohibited from the work’s production unless (as Britten did) the composer limits himself to an all-male cast. And once they start singing, these women—cozily envisaged as pleasurable objects—will begin creating sound instead. Carolyn Abbate, “Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women”
I think that Abbate’s point about boy sopranos may hold only for “modern” opera. Isn’t it true that in eighteenth-century Rome, for example, Papal censors did not allow women on stage, and female rôles were taken by boys?
(Let’s not even go near the issue of castrati, and of whether or not they be “boys,” “males,” or what have you.)
The image, I believe, shows Maria Callas as Medea, in the Margherita Wallmann production that opened the 1953–1954 La Scala season. (If you happen to know otherwise, please speak up.)
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.
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 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.”
She is for me exciting and deeply moving—Her sense of design, her never-failing animal-like absorption in the instant—that spiral of inner activity which is rare and devastating to watch—the precious calculation of her appearance and the fact that she has an innate courtesy to her audience which makes her wear her costumes for their pleasure… Martha Graham after seeing Callas in Norma (1956)
The images are taken from the 1961 or 1962 Medea footage from La Scala.
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