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  Introduction
  Interview
  Footnotes
  

    
     
		
	

     INTERVIEW
   
The Curatorial Turn and Opera: On the Singing Deaths of Maria Callas.
A Conversation with Marina Abramović and Marko Nikodijević.
            *
        
		

    Jelena Novak
    


    Sound Stage Screen, Vol. 1, Issue 2 (Fall 2021), pp. 195–209, ISSN 2784-8949. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. © 2021 Jelena Novak. DOI: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss16640.




    


    Marina Abramović is a conceptual and performance artist with a particular
    interest in the relationship between the artist and the audience. She is
    especially interested in exploring the extreme limits of her (the artist’s)
    body. In recent years, she has nurtured these interests by restaging some
    of her earlier works of performance art. To chart some of the more
important stages of her career I single out a few key works. In    Rhythm 0 (1974) Abramović stood silent and motionless for six
    hours in a gallery in Naples, while members of the audience were allowed to
    do to her whatever they wanted, having at their disposal seventy-two
    objects. The Great Wall Walk (1988) was performed with her then
    partner Ulay; they walked for ninety days from opposite ends of the Great
    Wall of China, and when they finally met, they ended their relationship and
    said goodbye to each other. Balkan Baroque (1997) reflected on the
horrors and tragedies unfolding in post-Yugoslavia. In    The Artist is Present (2010) Marina sat motionless in a chair at
    the MOMA (New York) for ninety days, eight to ten hours per day, gazing
    into the eyes of members of the audience who took turns sitting in front of
    her one by one. In 2011 Abramović collaborated with Robert Wilson on the
    music theater piece The Life and Death of Marina Abramović.
Although some people already considered that piece an opera,    7 Deaths of Maria Callas (2020) is actually Abramović’s first
    opera project.



    In 7 Deaths of Maria Callas Abramović used operatic music by five
    historical composers of the Western canon: Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini,
    Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Georges Bizet. One living
    composer, Marko Nikodijević, was invited to assemble all these separate
    strands into a single fabric. Nikodijević wrote the Introduction, then a
    kind of epilogue “The Eighth Death,” and also some interludes conceived as
    “cloud musics,” as he calls them, which were incorporated between the
    arias.



    Like Marina Abramović, Nikodijević was born in Yugoslavia, where he
    completed his composition studies at the Belgrade Faculty of Music. He then
    moved to Germany, where he built a successful international career.
    Nikodijević has been influenced by techno music and by developments in
    advanced technology, including fractal procedures and computer music. His
    music is often freighted with a kind of melancholy that is somehow filtered
    through carefully calculated structural procedures.
    
        [1]
    
Nikodijević has himself composed an opera:    VIVIER. Ein Nachtprotokoll (2013–14), a chamber opera in 6 scenes
    dealing with the Canadian queer icon of new music Claude Vivier. The opera
    is related to Vivier’s life, but also to his unusual death.



    The basic form of 7 Deaths of Maria Callas is simple. Seven arias
    were selected from the mainstream operatic repertoire, arias that have been
    performed by soprano Maria Callas in an unforgettable manner. Seven
    sopranos were engaged, each taking one of the leading roles from the
following operas: La Traviata, Otello (Verdi),    Tosca, Madama Butterfly (Puccini), Carmen
    (Bizet), Lucia di Lammermoor (Donizetti), Norma
    (Bellini). The arias are separated by electronic interludes (Nikodijević,
    with sound design by Luka Kozlovački). While the singer is performing an
    aria on stage, a short silent film (directed by Nabil Elderkin) is
    projected on stage as a kind of music video. In those videos Abramović and
    the actor Willem Dafoe comment on operatic deaths in surreal, fantastical,
    and sometimes absurd scenes. Unexpectedly, the arias are heard as a film
    music sequence.


		
    



    Fig. 1. Marina Abramović, 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, 2019. Photo
    credit: Marco Anelli, courtesy of the Marina Abramovic Archives.



    It might seem that the focus of the opera 7 Deaths of Maria Callas
    is the life, voice, and career of Maria Callas, but first and foremost this
    piece is autobiographical. Abramović tells us that she has been fascinated
    by the character and work of Callas since childhood, when as a young girl
    in Belgrade she discovered her voice and fell in love with her
    interpretations. As time went on, the relationship between Marina and Maria
    became more complex. Marina realized that they both have a lot in common,
    that they even look alike, and that their lives were marked by an unhappy
    love. It might be claimed that this opera is primarily about Marina
    Abramović, depicting her art, her status as a diva, her rise on the
    international art scene, her ego, her pain, her suffocation, her motionless
    waiting, her undressing, her youthful looks, her unhappy relationships.



    Against the background of electronic Ligetian “clouds” in the interludes,
    Abramović as the narrator speaks of her texts inspired by operatic heroines
    and their deaths. Here, the disquieting, almost frightening music of
    Nikodijević and Kozlovački seems to “squeeze” through itself the
    transformed vocals. Then, towards the end of the opera in “The Eighth
    Death,” Abramović is on stage as Callas is shown dying in her Paris
    apartment. In the final moments, Abramović is seen in a glittering golden
    dress, enacting slow, deliberate movements. The singing voice of Maria
    Callas is eventually heard, and the live, golden figure of Marina becomes
    like a doll. Abramović pays homage to Callas with this opera, celebrating
    her unique capacity to connect body and voice into a single, extraordinary
    whole.
    
        [2]
    



    The opera 7 Deaths of Maria Callas is also a kind of didactic
    musical spectacle through which Abramović masterfully displays to Callas and to
    everyone how she herself has struggled with deaths, lives, ups, downs, and
    unhappy loves in different worlds, and how she has re-channeled these
    eternal themes in her art.






    Interview



    
        JN: 
        Why did you choose to create an opera today? What makes it
        different from a theater piece with music? And what is so intriguing
        about the genre of opera today that more and more artists, including
        those from the visual arts, take it as a source of inspiration or as a
        material to work with in their pieces?
    


    MN: Opera provides an opportunity to bring different artistic media together.
    When successful, it can produce the kind of artistic effect and emotional
    impact that a purely musical work or a piece of video art, for example,
    cannot achieve. So, when all these different media come into a perfect
    union, then a type of theater magic happens, and that magic has been
    intriguing artists for more than four hundred years now.




    
        JN: 
        Marina, I know about your fascination with Maria Callas. What is it
        about opera that fascinates you? What exactly draws you to it?
    


    MA: Maria Callas is one thing. But opera is a different matter for me. I
    never liked opera, I think it is so boring and so long, it is like a
    dinosaur in art. There was a very traditional way for people to approach
    opera. Any kind of change, any different point of view, would be disturbing
    for the public. The public really likes it done in the traditional way, as
    it was always done, and they want to continue with the genre in that form.
    It is so interesting for an artist to depart from tradition, to break the
    rules, to re-conceive the genre, and to make something new. To me, opera is
    one of those art forms that has never been touched, so that was reason
    enough for me to touch it and to put in it something really different,
    creating a much more complex work than opera as it has been conceived up to
    now. There is a video, an installation, a “situation,” a performance; there
    are opera singers, novel musical combinations, and so many other
    ingredients all working to create something fresh. Normally, an opera lasts
    four hours, or even five hours, a very long duration for a work. This piece
    lasts only one hour and thirty minutes, because the act of dying takes less
    time than telling the story of an opera. With Marko working with me, it was
    really a dream to create something that stands on its own in a very
    original way, a way that has not been attempted before.




    
        JN: 
        When I look back at some of your pieces I find a fascination with
        the voice, and especially with the screaming voice. Some of the early
        pieces, like AAA-AAA (1978) that you did with Ulay, feature
        the screaming voice. There you screamed at each other’s mouths. And
        there was another piece, Freeing the Voice (1975–76),
        performed in the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade, where you were
        lying down and screaming for a long time. More recently, there was the
        piece The Scream (2013–14) that referred to the famous canvas
        of Edvard Munch, in Oslo, where members of the audience were invited to
        scream through the frame that you constructed on the spot where Munch
        supposedly executed that painting. What is the relationship between the
        screaming and the singing?
    


    MA: It is so very different for me, because screaming really emerges from my
    way of being as a performance artist, trying to find my own physical and
    mental limits. I wanted to scream until I couldn’t scream anymore. And when
    you scream for such a long period of time, the voice becomes a kind of
    independent element, so that you start listening to things that you have
    never heard in your own voice: the voice of a child, the voice of a bird,
    the voice of anger, of fear, the voice of love. There are so many elements
    in the voice when you actually get to the point where you reach the limit
    of possibilities, where you actually scream until you lose your voice,
    which is what happened to me. For three months I lost my voice completely
    and so this was an investigation, an investigation of the body, and really
    had nothing to do with singing. But I worked with sounds, even before I got
    to performances. Sound to me is interesting, the sound itself. As for the
    singing, I used it in some video works, and I even sang in Bob Wilson’s
    piece myself, but this is totally different. I don’t actually see a
    connection between releasing the voice, where I am exploring the limits of
    the voice, and singing.





    JN: Marko, what is your reference point for the voice, and especially
        the operatic voice, both the conventional operatic voice and those
        non-conventional voices that are sometimes used in opera today?



    MN: The voice is a very limited instrument and has a very narrow range
    compared to most traditional instruments. But, as we communicate through
    the voice, we are used to registering even very small differences within
    it. The voice can transmit so much emotion and meaning in the smallest
    possible way. It is an instrument that is sitting inside our throat, and it
    is also somewhat fragile. We know that from opera singers who are
    constantly protecting their voices. At the same time, it is capable of
    communicating in a manner that does not exist in any other medium.




    JN: 
        What is so special about Maria Callas’s voice? I was thinking about
        that when watching 7 Deaths. At the Munich performance we
        heard seven extraordinarily good singers, and it almost seemed at one
        point like a kind of an audition for Maria Callas, so to speak. You
        hear all of them, and then at the end you hear this recorded fragment
        of Maria Callas singing “Casta diva.” At that point I realized
        that Callas’s voice, when compared to all the other beautiful voices
        that we heard, exists in some kind of separate, and very special,
        dimension. Why do you think she has this special dimension to her
        voice? What is that special there?
    



    MA: I only remember having breakfast in my grandmother’s kitchen when I was
    fourteen years old. We had an old Bakelite radio, and I remember I heard
    this voice coming out of the radio. I had no idea it was Callas, and I
    didn’t know what she was singing. I didn’t understand the words—it was in
    Italian—and I remember that I stood up, feeling the electricity going
    through my body, and with this incredible sensation of emotions passing
    through me. I started to cry uncontrollably, and it was such an emotional
    effect that I have never forgotten it. After that I wanted to know whose
    voice it was, who was this person, and I really wanted to know everything
    about her. Her voice has such an enormous emotional impact, and it has some
    kind of electric energy passing through it, a gift that very few people in
    the world have.


	MN: I think there are artists like Maria Callas who seem to break down
    conventions, the pedigreed ways of doing things. Callas invaded the scene
    as a technically excellent singer, but she did so with exceptional
    vehemence, and in a society where, of course, women were certainly not seen
    as equal to men. She barged in with such force and decided to impose her
    artistic vision. A lot of people thought that her voice, especially from
    the early 1960s, when the registers acquired an even more extreme coloring
    between her chest voice and her head voice, had such an emotional impact
    because she had such a relentless need to communicate through music. She
    wasn’t just a canary that was twittering around and making nice melodies…
    It was really life and death to her, she died constantly on stage, day
    after day, night after night, and she sort of traumatized herself with this
    endless dying, because she had died so many times. I don’t know if there
    were many roles where she was actually alive at the end. She was either a
    broken woman or (usually) a dead woman. She lived through this, and it was
    a sort of a real-life performance. She brought herself to a state of
    expressing such extreme emotion with her voice and with her body that she
    was completely exhausted at the end. Her marvelous career ended, and she
    left the operatic stage at just the age of forty-three which is incredibly
    young.




    JN: 
        We can see that today opera more and more often becomes, so to
        speak, “curated” by the director. This opera project moves in this
        direction. In earlier times the main creator was the composer, or even
        before that, the librettist. But today there is a tendency in some
        pieces, notably with directors such as Pierre Audi or Michal
        Grover-Friedlander in Tel Aviv, to piece together various pieces from
        musical history or arias from historical operas and sort of “curate”
        them into the new piece. How do you see this tendency?
    



    MA: I don’t have much opinion about this. I think opera can’t be made the
    same way it has always been made, so there can be very different
    approaches. The opera sets are not anymore made in a traditional way: the
    setting can be in a parkway, or a garage, or a hospital. The settings
    change, and the directors have many different ideas about how to give a new
    point to opera. I think it’s a kind of a normal evolution.





    JN: 
        Did you have in mind any reference from the world of what we might
        call new opera, like Einstein on the Beach, for example?
    



    MA: No. Einstein on the Beach, of course, I know, but I was trying
    not to look at anything for inspiration. I was trying to make something
    that is my own and original, though my original idea is more than forty
    years old now; I mean the idea that in every opera a woman dies in the end,
    so why not show only the deaths and nothing else? I don’t think that
    anybody had this idea before. So, I’m showing only dying scenes through the
    prism of Callas. And then, there is also the eighth death. That is the
    death of Callas herself and we don’t talk about that. We know that in the
    end there is a voice that comes out of the old tape recorder, and that is
Callas. Marko Nikodijević did an ingenious thing: he stopped the voice    in medias res, so that the voice actually continues in our heads,
    even if you can’t even hear it. And then you understand that—yes, she can
    die, but her voice is immortal, her voice will never die. And that’s what I
    would like to leave the audience with.





    JN: 
        I heard in some parts of the electronic music some transformation
        of the voice, even maybe the screaming voice…
    



    MA: Marko went to such amazing lengths, he wanted to even record the sounds
    of the street where I was born in Belgrade.


		
    MN: That was Luka [Kozlovački]’s recording of the street corner where Marina
    was born, which is very beautiful, because she says: “It is only Paris” and
    opens the windows and we hear the sounds of the Stari Grad (Old Town) from
    Belgrade. We had children screaming, and we were adapting the electronic
    part as we went along. I’m opened to revisiting and redoing some things or
    making them somewhat different. I don’t think I have to be a living museum,
    so that there is just a statue and you cannot touch it and it has to be
    like that. I’m much more open to a sort of a live concept of music.





    JN: 
        The male voice can be heard at some point towards the end of the
        opera, in “The Eighth Death”?
    



    MN: Yes, that is Willem Dafoe recycling certain sentences from operas like    Carmen, Traviata, Lucia and so on, both in the
    original language and in English translation. In the National Theatre
    Munich [the Bayerische Staatsoper’s main venue] it probably didn’t sound
    the same as in the stereo mixdown for the video stream on television. It is
    a large opera house and has a very complete cupola so that these sounds
    literally go from the bottom to the top and then spin around, so that they
    sort of move around the whole opera house, including the audience and
    stage, so that you imagine you’re in the midst of a storm created by this
    voice.




    JN: 7 Deaths of Maria Callas begins with what I would call the
        amazing “music of bells.” Listening to it, I started to ask myself if
        this music stands for church bells, or some other kind of bells, and I
        think it’s extremely exciting to enter the opera in this kind of way.
        To me it was as if the church bells were ringing all the time at the
        beginning. And the oboe, maybe, represents the voice. If you narrated
        in this Introduction, how would you describe it?





    MN: My starting point for this opening cloud music was actually how the
    clouds would appear. The first cloud sequence is one of early morning
    clouds. In the cloud sequences there are always these epigrammatic poetic
    texts before each of the film deaths, and they sort of explain, or give a
poetic introduction to, what kind of a death we are moving towards. And so I looked at the clouds. It started with these
    morning clouds, so that is why there is so much Italian impressionism. The
    oboe melody is just a slowed down aria from Traviata that the
    singer is about to sing. “Addio, del passato” is somewhat stretched out and
    slowed down, but exactly the same notes are used with just a few additional
    flourishes.





    JN: 

        And how did you select these seven arias? Why these seven and not
        some others, and why precisely seven of them?
    



    MA: Seven is my destiny number, and I really like that. Also, seven is such a
    biblical number, with the seven days in which God made the world… I was
    looking for all different types of deaths, so I actually chose
    tuberculosis, a leap, strangulation, burning, radiation, death from madness
    and knifing. I tried to present every possible way of dying, as far as I
    could; that was the idea. And then, also, I was looking for the best of the
    aria performances by Callas.






    JN: 
        It is intriguing to see this opera both through the prism of your
        art and through Callas’s. At times it seemed as though you were Maria,
        and at other times you were Marina. You managed to entangle the two
        lives through this piece. Moreover, there are references to some of
        your other pieces in the videos.
    



    MA: Definitely, like the snake in the video—I was doing this before in the
    live performance. But, talking about number seven, I also wanted to present
    seven types of women, all different types, and all dying for love in the
    world. We all die for love and we are all different types of women, and I
    really wanted to show this through the singers. So, we were casting people
    who actually represented these types. Normally, people cast singers just
    for their voice, but for me it was also important to see how they looked
    visually, and also where they came from, from a Nordic country, for
    example, or from Asia, or Spain—so all these elements really played a role
    in my decision. I needed in this piece not just Callas. It is a Callas
    story, it’s my story and it’s seven different women’s stories, because I
    wanted these themes to be universal, applying actually to anybody in the
    world dying from a broken heart, and not just one person. It’s not the
    story of one person, but the story of all of us.





    JN: 
        And what would you say about the question of realism in opera? I
        think achieving realism in opera is quite an impossible task, because
        opera always tends to be “larger than life.” Even if what we can see in
        the opera is realistic, the very fact that characters are singing
        undoes that realism immediately. How do you look at these issues of
        realism in opera?
    



    MA: I was looking more into the conceptual part. I was thinking more of the
    fact that Callas left everything to her maid Bruna, all her possessions and
    all her jewelry and everything she ever had, because Bruna was the only
    person who was always with her. So, all of the opera singers are actually
    different forms of Bruna, the same maid, and they are all dressed in the
    same “uniform.” At the end, when they come to leave the room and clean the
    broken glass on the floor and cover all the possessions and take away the
    memorabilia, you understand that, actually, Callas is not there anymore.
    So, I simplified the work to a point where there is indeed some kind of
    realism, but of a conceptually different kind. Callas’s room on stage is
    the exact replica of the room where she really died in Paris. We examined
    every single photograph and reproduced the furniture, the paintings on the
    wall, and even the sleeping pills next to her telephone. Everything was
    done to enable that kind of realism. And yet within this realism, there in
    the bed is Callas, but also me, because of the photographs I’m looking at.
    I’m not looking at Callas, nor at photographs of Onassis, Zeffirelli,
    Pasolini, or any of her friends. I’m looking at my own photographs, at the
    man over whom I really did almost die of broken heart. So, it is a mixture
    and it is constantly going on through the piece.





    [JPC]: 7 deaths of Maria Callas is truly an intermedia
        project. I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about its
        videographic component, namely about your collaboration with Nabil
        Elderkin and, more broadly, about how you elaborated that interaction
        between stage and screen.
        
    
            [3]
        



    MA: I was looking for somebody who was doing great music videos, because this
    is a music video in many ways. It’s not just the decoration in the back
    that you project. I wanted the video to be the integral part of the story.
    Actually, I stripped the stage to nothing, to just a single singer singing
    in the middle. But that, in a way, is a part of the video at the same time,
    visually. So, working with Nabil was great for me because I found he was a
    great filmmaker himself. I also wanted to have just one person in the video
    killing me over and over again, and that’s Willem Dafoe—because it’s
    basically in the mind of Callas, with Onassis killing her constantly over
    and over again. So, it was a very conceptual approach. Then we lifted the
    stage a little bit higher, so that actually the singer became a part of the
    screen. So, sometimes she’s entering the room, and sometimes she’s a part
    of the killing scene, in some ways. And then there is also the bed, which
    is a replica of Callas’s, on the stage itself, where I’m lying for an
    entire hour before “The Eighth Death” even gets started. So, this bed also
    becomes a part of the screen. In other words, the singer will go to the bed
    on the screen, which is on the stage, but at the same time you see the
    second bed of Traviata on the stage, projected on the screen, so
    it all gets mixed up in a single entangled web. You have to have an image
    that works for the public. Also, the fact that the orchestra is not in the
    pit—since for social distancing and coronavirus we had to raise it up—made
    it a part of this installation, too. It became in effect more opera
    installation then opera.


    I wanted to ask Nikodijević one question myself. How did this
        change affect you? Seeing the orchestra in that way and not hidden in
        the pit—how did that change the fabric of the music?
    



    MN: It depends on which hall it is done in, and on how high the parquet is.
    For me it is mostly an acoustic thing. Being in a pit focuses the
    orchestral sound much more, so it sort of emerges from the orchestra pit
    already blended and glued together, much more so than when the orchestra is
    in the main hall, where there is just much more reverb. I mean, that is why
    Wagner used the covered orchestra in Bayreuth, to achieve the ultimate
    magic effect, where you don’t see the orchestra at all, it is completely
    covered and it allows the sound to come from everywhere, so to speak. You
    feel that you are in the midst of this enormous ocean of sound, but that
    doesn’t have any biting quality. There is always something very mellow
    produced by this covered orchestra. So, it has both a dramatic effect, and
    also a purely acoustic one.



    JN: 
        What Marina described worked especially well, I think, in moments
        when in the video—for example, I think, in the madness scene—you can
        see Marina/Maria screaming, but you cannot hear the scream, you can
        only see the open mouth screaming and then, at the same time, you can
        see the singer on the stage, singing. There is a discord or
        ventriloquism between what we hear and what we see on stage. These
        moments (and there are a few of them throughout the piece) work
        extremely well, and they open up all kinds of questions about the
        continuous discord of body and voice in opera.
    



    



    Fig. 2. Marina Abramović, 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, 2019. Photo
    credit: Marco Anelli, courtesy of the Marina Abramovic Archives.


    
    
        [FM]: Are you planning to do different versions of 7 Deaths 
        when it will be performed in different spaces in the future? And are
        there also plans to put it on DVD? How can you preserve this kind of
        performance?
        
    
            [4]
        



    MA: Right now, I’d really like to perform it as it is for a while. Our next
    performances are going to be in Paris and Athens in 2021, and at the Teatro
    di San Carlo in Naples in 2022. We also have plans for Berlin and New York…
    We would like, at least for the next two or three years, to perform it as
    it is. As long as I can be on the stage, I will perform this piece. I don’t
    see any reason why we should change it and make another version. Right now,
    it really works for me as it is and I want to have the pleasure of doing it
    for a while. Moreover, every theater produces a different experience, and
    every audience is different. Also, different countries—how will the
    Italians react to this, for example, given that Callas had her biggest
    career in Italy; or how will the Greeks react, and what will the French
    say, or what will happen if we perform it in Asia? I want to experience
    this as long as I can.



    MN: And, of course, one cannot achieve the depth of sound and visual field on a
    video that you have in the theater. It’s just that it’s a very deep
    three-dimensional field and you cannot recreate what you are hearing even
    with the best hi-fi systems. It is simply impossible to reproduce that kind
    of sound experience. It cannot be recorded—it’s just made to be live.



    MA: I have to agree with Marko completely, because, you know, the live stream
    and the DVD or anything else is only a form of documentation, it’s not the
    real thing and will never be the real thing. You have to be in a theater,
    you have to feel, you have to smell, you have to touch, you have to be
    there.





    JN: 
        Marko, I understood that you re-orchestrated the piece because of
        the pandemic developments, since the number of people in the orchestra
        needed to be smaller. So, will the next performances of the piece be in
        this reduced version, or will you return to a bigger orchestra?
    



   MN: That depends on the coronavirus and not on me. I mean there exists a
    version for reduced orchestra and a version for full orchestra, and it all
    depends on how many people we can have in the orchestra, and also in the
    audience, for which version we will use. I can manage with forty-five
    musicians, but I find it very hard to perform in an opera house designed
    for two thousand people with only three hundred people present. I mean, I
    know that the attention is there, but it is also a very strange situation.



    MA: In Munich we gave five performances for five hundred people, which means
    2500 people; it’s still something, and maybe it’s going to be the same in
    Naples, so let’s see…



    MN: And we had to fight for five hundred people; we were given that number on
    the day of the premiere…



    MN: Exactly, it was a very nervous moment, but we were lucky. So, every time
    it changes, and every time we have to see what the new situation will be;
    we can’t predict it.





    
        
        [IN]: If the future is disembodied and even more distanced, physically
        and otherwise, what if the heartbreak ceases to exist, at least in the
        form we know it now? What is art going to do about that possible
        dystopian scenario? Why is it still important to reenact love and
        longing in this way as in opera?
        
    
           [5]
        



    MN: Well, I don’t think the tragedy of the future will be a matter of
    unfriending people on Facebook, because I cannot see that platform as any
    kind of musical tragedy: I mean whether you get unfriended on Facebook, or
    your Instagram gets spammed. So, I mean, there are potentials in new
    technology, but obviously virtual reality and a one-dimensional “app
    society” is no substitute for the one thing that we feel as real.



    MA: So, we like to think that loneliness, solitude, alienation, and a broken
    heart are thousands and thousands of years old and have always been there
    with us, with or without the epidemic; none of that really changes. The
    same goes for how art will look. The epidemic comes and goes, and right now
    we have to wait for a better time. I hate to compromise because of the
    epidemic. I hate Zoom performances with bad quality and terrible images. I
    just don’t see this is the right way to go. I really think we don’t need to
    compromise. We just have to wait. That’s it.





Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade during the early 1970s,    Marina Abramović has pioneered performance art, creating
    some of the form’s most important early works. Exploring her physical and
    mental limits, she has withstood pain, exhaustion, and danger in her quest
    for emotional and spiritual transformation.


    Abramović was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 1997 Venice
    Biennale. In 2010, Abramović had her first major US retrospective and
simultaneously performed for over 700 hours in The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
    Abramović founded Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a platform for
    immaterial and long durational work to create new possibilities for
    collaboration among thinkers of all fields.


    Her most recent publication is Walk Through Walls: A Memoir,
published by Crown Archetype on October 25, 2016. Her retrospective    The Cleaner opened at Moderna Museet, Stockholm in February 2017
    and has toured to seven additional European venues, ending at the Museum of
    Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia in 2019. In September 2020 the
Bayerische Staatsoper presented the world premiere of    7 Deaths of Maria Callas, which will continue to tour to other
    venues. In 2023 she will present the solo exhibition After Life at
    the Royal Academy, and become the first female artist in the institution’s
    250 year history to occupy the entire gallery space with her work.


Marko Nikodijević was born in 1980 in Subotica, Serbia and studied composition in Belgrade with Zoran Erić and Srdjan Hofman between 1995 and 2003. In addition, he attended courses and lectures in nonlinear mathematics and physics. Following his education in the Serbian capital, he undertook advanced training in composition with Marco Stroppa at the Academy of Music and the Performing Arts in Stuttgart in 2003. Nikodijević settled in Stuttgart, from where he received stipends and attended master courses and composition seminars in Apeldoorn, Visby, Weimar, Amsterdam, Salzwedel and Baden-Baden. His compositional production has won prizes and awards at the International Young Composers Meeting in Apeldoorn, the Gaudeamus Music Week in Amsterdam, the 3rd Brandenburg Biennale and the UNESCO Rostrum of Composers. He resided in Paris from 2012 to 2013 as a scholarship holder at the Cité internationale des Arts. In 2013 Marko Nikodijević received one of the three composition furtherance prizes of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation and in 2014 was awarded the Deutscher Musikautorenpreis (German Composers’ Prize) in the category Promotion of New Talent.

        
        
        
        

    

    

    
        
            
                *
            
            The conversation transcribed here took place via Zoom on October
            15, 2020, as the first talk in the Resvés Ópera Series of
            Conversations organized by CESEM, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de
            Lisboa.
        

        
            The talk was moderated by Jelena Novak. Some questions were taken
            from the members of the audience and that is further indicated in
            the footnotes. The author would like to thank Katarina Kostić for
            her help with transcribing the interview. The article was made with
            the support of CESEM – Research Center for Sociology and Aesthetics
            of Music, NOVA Lisbon University, FCSH, UID/EAT/00693/2019, with
            the financial support of FCT through National funds, under the
            Norma Transitória – DL 57/2016/CP1453/CT0054.
        

    

    
        
            
                [1]
            
            For further details about Marko Nikodijević’s music, see Jelena
            Novak, “Music as an Aggregate of Colours: A Conversation with Marko
			Nikodijević,” New Sound International Journal of Music 57,
            n. 1 (2021): 1–17.
        

    

    
        
            
                [2]
            
            These remarks on the opera 7 Deaths of Maria Callas draw
            on my critique written for the weekly Vreme following the
            world première of the piece by the Bavarian State Opera. The
            audience was subject to COVID pandemic restrictions, and the piece
            was also available for online streaming for a restricted period
            (this is how I watched it myself). The article is in Serbian and is
            available on the news magazine’s website: Jelena Novak, “Operski
			agregat uživo,” Vreme, September 10, 2020.
        

    

    
        
            
                [3]
            
            This question was posed by João Pedro Cachopo (CESEM).
        

    

    
        
            
                [4]
            
            This question, by Filipa Magalhães (CESEM), originated from the
            Zoom chat box during the interview.
        

    

    
        
            
                [5]
            
            This question was posed by Iva Nenić (Faculty of Music, Belgrade).
        

    

    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    




    



                

            

                

            

          
          
        
        
        
