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7 Deaths of Maria Callas by Marina Abramović

Antonio Pizzo – Marida Rizzuti

If the event that Marina Abramović presented at the Bavarian State Opera 
in Munich were an opera piece, we could try to compare the different codes 
that the artist has put in place, including linguistic offshoots from areas 
normally less frequented by opera houses. If that hour and a half of music, 
song, action, and video were decipherable through an aesthetics of produc-
tion or reception, it would be fascinating to reconstruct the story narrated 
by the dramaturgy. If the elegance of the scenography could be part of a 
refined stage writing, we might evaluate the specific effectiveness of a per-
sonal approach to the intermediality of the performance.

The hypotheticals are necessary considering that the overall creator is 
an artist who has established herself in the field of performance art so far 
from the operatic canon. Yet, all these “ifs” constitute the most interesting 
and richest elements in Abramović’s project, because they succeed to get to 
the core of the very notion of opera theater, to the idea of   cultural heritage 
that guides many European productions, and to the traditional audience 
contract which links spectators with the stage. And Abramović dives into 
this nucleus with grace and sincere participation, far from iconoclastic or 
violent rage. The work is constructed in such a way as to seduce the audi-
ence with the elements of opera, but at the same time it instills, in those 
who watch and listen, queries that erode the spectatorial experience itself.

In other words, Abramović fashions an event in real time whose raw 
material comes entirely from the tradition of opera, but she molds this ma-
terial in such a way that the final result does not coincide with the horizon 
of expectation. Back in 2018, the artist had a first experience with musical 
theater at the Opera Vlaanderen in Antwerp, where she created the visual 
and conceptual apparatus for Pelléas et Mélisande, whose staging was in-
tended as an opéra-ballet by choreographers Damien Jalet and Sidi Larbi 
Cherkaoui. Three years later, the show had a revival at the Grand Théâtre 
de Genève. It is almost as if someone were using a canvas, colors, brushes, 
and even the painted subjects or the exhibition space typical of a figurative 
painting to obtain something that is not a figurative painting, but rather the 
enactment of thoughts on the essence of the painting.

In any case, these metadiscursive reflections can be considered just the 
seeds that the work plants in the audience and in the history of opera itself. 
They may be regarded as the effects that this live event produces and there-
fore it is possible to review the mechanisms it puts in place for such pur-

Sound Stage Screen, Vol. 1, Issue 2 (Fall 2021), pp. 224-228. ISSN 2784-8949.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. © 2021 Antonio Pizzo, Marida Rizzuti. DOI: 
10.54103/sss16657.



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pose. So, let’s proceed step by step and begin with the material organization 
of the space in which the actions take place.

The orchestra is in the traditional pit, except for the choir which is dis-
tributed on two boxes facing the stage. The scenography is articulated in 
two main scenes: the first sees the entire proscenium covered by a veil (on 
which various projections of increasingly dark and disturbing clouds ap-
pear); placed right behind a platform, it covers the entire length of the stage 
from one wing to the other, hosting (on the left) an elegant bed—on which 
Abramović lies motionless—and, from time to time, the singers. Behind it, 
an equally large rear-projection screen on which various short films appear 
and illustrate the famous arias performed. At little more than half into the 
show, and after seven singers have taken turns, the screens and the platform 
retreat to reveal a luxurious room where, still on the right, we find the bed 
and Abramović lying down. At the end of the show, the curtain falls to re-
veal the protagonist on the proscenium for the last, brief scene.

The action has a very clear direction. During an orchestral prelude, clouds 
appear on the veil while a light frames Abramović, whose recorded voice in-
troduces the theme of the aria that is about to be performed. Meanwhile, the 
singer who is placed at the center makes her entrance. When the orchestra 
begins to play the aria, a lighting effect allows the veil to become transpar-
ent, while a few videos are projected on the back screen; there, Abramović 
(for five of them with Willem Dafoe) stages personal reinterpretations of the 
character portrayed. Within this dramaturgical structure, seven singers al-
ternate on stage to interpret just as many heroines and their respective arias: 
Violetta Valery, “Addio, del passato” (La traviata); Tosca, “Vissi d’arte” (To-
sca); Desdemona, “Ave Maria” (Otello); Cio-Cio-san, “Un bel dì vedremo” 
(Madama Butterfly); Carmen, “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” (Carmen); 
Lucia, “Il dolce suono” (Lucia di Lammermoor); Norma, “Casta diva” (Nor-
ma). Immediately afterwards the scene darkens and an interlude, in which 
electronic music is followed by an original composition, favors a change of 
scene. After a few minutes, the raising of the curtain reveals her apartment’s 
room; this time, the orchestra accompanies Abramović’s stage action: her 
recorded voice marks her awakening, the getting out of bed, the wander-
ing around the room, until she leaves for the boudoir. The singers reenter 
as a group, armed with various cleaning tools, and start tidying up; at this 
point, the costumes worn during the arias acquire meaning because they 
clearly present them as the maids of the house where Maria Callas died. 
The cleaning ends as they cover the furnishings with black sheets, until one 
of the maids switches a turntable on. As the orchestra approaches the final 



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sections of the score, the curtain falls, and from the left enters Ambramović 
wrapped in the same golden lamé dress that Defoe had worn in the vid-
eo dedicated to Norma. As the performer reaches the center of the stage, 
and we hear a recording of “Casta diva” by Callas, Abramović’s grave ges-
tures reenact Callas’s own ones, avoiding any outward sign of emotion—but 
darkness cuts off the aria right before the end.

Therefore, much of the staging relies on the video’s narrative quality, both 
when dark clouds seem to foresee the heroines’ tragic destinies, and also 
when their most famous arias act as a background to the cinematic staging 
of what Abramović considers their main themes. Violetta is motionless on 
her raw deathbed while Alfredo regrets his choices; Tosca falls from a sky-
scraper and crashes onto a car; Desdemona is strangled by Otello/Jago with 
pythons; Butterfly gives up her son and lets herself die in a nuclear disaster 
setting; Carmen, depicted as a bullfighter, is roped by Don José; Lucia rages 
against the mirrors reflecting her dressed as a bride; Norma and Pollione 
(en travesti) approach a blazing fire in an ecstasy of flames.

These slow-motion videos—whose formal beauty is reminiscent of Bill 
Viola’s installations—are integrated on the stage in a way that is by now 
widely accepted and understood in the context of multimedia performanc-
es: here, the arias are performed at the front of the stage, coupled with a few 
actions and marked by the motionless presence of Abramović, while the 
background video elaborates on the arias’ themes. It matters little whether 
this is Abramović’s personal critical interpretation of those characters, or 
Callas’s dreams as she sleeps in her bed; the whole system works as a con-
tinuous restaging of the same content, which thus enters a loop of narrative 
references between Abramović, Callas, and the tragic heroines. The hier-
archy of these three elements is constantly and wittingly put into question: 
Which one is first? Callas’s hypothetical dreams? Abramović’s homage to a 
much-admired artist? the heroines’ tragic love haunting the lives of both? 
The conceptual scheme is made even more effective by the technical solu-
tion of having the platform and the lighting slightly raising from the floor 
the bodies of the individual singers and of Abramović, leaving them almost 
afloat in front of the projections.

The second part comments on these conceptual networks by highlighting 
the overlapping of performer and singer. We do not know if the actions on 
stage are part of a performance by Abramović or the depiction of Callas’s 
last hours—it could be both. The codes used are the ones we can recognize 
both in Abramović’s artistic career and in the history of performance art 
(i.e., actions performed according to a predetermined, carefully ordered set 



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of instructions; the exposure of the body for a closer connection with the audi-
ence; the artist’s own life on stage (a photo of Paolo Canevari and Abramović
emerges among those kept in a drawer). The language in which these codes are
set, however, is that of representation, opera, narration, and so on—until the 
end, when Abramović seems to take on herself Maria Callas’s persona, em-
bodying the recorded voice through a series of carefully measured gestures.

It reads, therefore, as a dramaturgy which aims to fill the gap between 
the two women but also, interestingly, to juxtapose performance and rep-
resentation to unveil the gaze towards a different status of opera and its 
present-day status.

The music by Marko Nikodijević also moves in this direction; it is neces-
sary to distinguish Nikodijević’s original interventions from the use of the 
famous arias. Therefore it is legitimate to argue that the use of pre-existing 
operatic pieces in 7 Deaths of Maria Callas strongly recalls the universe of 
the compilation, of the greatest hits of the author. In any case, the composer 
creates a space for himself within the transitions from one aria to another, 
and most importantly in the introduction and in the second part (Callas’ 
death). He treats them almost as a live DJ-set. For the transitions, Nikod-
ijević has created fluid and undaunted musical spaces that sound like the 
opposite of arias—just listen to their register: the arias, here, sound like 
they are lingering mostly on the middle register, whereas the instrumen-
tal interludes open up to the high and low extremes. By contrast, for the 
introduction and the second part, the composer ties together small motifs 
from each aria and blends them to create new ones. Here, he is re-arrang-
ing the operatic repertoire by combining musical motives and creating a 
modern texture where memories of the past can resurface. This technique 
is easily discernible in the opening overture with the curtain closed, when 
the incipit of “Addio, del passato” (La traviata) emerges from the orchestra. 
The transition between the first part (the seven arias performances) and 
the second (Callas’s death) is accompanied by an orchestral interlude with 
electronic music inserts and remixed voices from the choir.

What is interesting is precisely that for this show we can identify a more 
traditional dramaturgy, that is to say a specific arrangement of the stage 
movements according to a narrative project. The production strategies can 
be traced back to the design of a meaning identifiable through the codes of 
theatrical language. Such reading would be more of a stretch—if not down-
right untenable—for the celebrated performances of Lips of Thomas (1975) 
or Imponderabilia of 1977, in which the aesthetics were completely perform-
ative and centered around the feedback loop with the audience. 



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Thus, once the representational component (even partially mimetic) of the 
live event has been established, it remains to be seen whether the narrative 
project—the story told—can be traced back to the making of (some) sense. 

If the meta-narration, as we have seen, aims to construct a framework 
of juxtapositions (between celebrated women, or performance codes), the 
story that emerges from the staged dramaturgy narrates the “divinity” of 
Maria Callas. Indeed, it seems peculiar that the heroines are also the maids 
who cold-bloodedly rearrange the dead artist’s room. Without her, their 
only purpose is cleaning; their existence is entirely dependent on the great-
ness of the performer, not the other way around. In such a context exuding 
autobiographical flavor, Abramović creates an opera where the artist (her-
self, but also Callas) is the true dramatic protagonist, and where she can tell 
without hesitation that the performer comes before the character. 

Antonio Pizzo teaches Dramaturgy of the Performance at the University of Turin (DAMS). He 
directs the CIRMA Interdepartmental Center for Research on Multimedia and Audiovisual, 
where he developed the computational ontology for the drama Drammar (Applied Ontology 
2019). He founded the Officine Sintetiche project (www.officinesintetiche.it). For years he has 
been conducting research on the contamination between entertainment, technology, and dig-
ital multimedia. He studies virtual characters and their dramaturgical implications, and has 
published several papers for the Acting Archives Review. He has carried out research on the 
relationship between theater, algorithmic procedures, and artificial intelligence, with numer-
ous contributions on journals and at conferences in both the IT and theatrical fields (TDR/
The Drama Review 2019). He studies LGBT+ drama and has published on such topic (Mimesis 
Journal; Sinestesieonline / Rifrazioni). He is the author of Materiali e macchine nel teatro di Re-
mondi e Caporossi (1991), Teatro e mondo digitale (2003), Scarpetta e Sciosciammocca. Nascita di 
un buffo (2009), Neodrammatico digitale: scena multimediale e racconto interattivo (Accademia, 
Torino 2013), Teatro gay in Italia. testi e documenti (2019). He is co-author (with Vincenzo Lom-
bardo e Rossana Damiano) of Interactive Storytelling (2021). He has edited the Italian transla-
tion of Alan Sinfield, Out on Stage. Lesbian and Gay Theater in the Twentieth Century (2020).

Marida Rizzuti is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Turin. She has published books on 
Kurt Weill’s musicals and several essays on the history of musicals, film musicals, and musical 
TV shows, theory of adaptation and audio vision, music criticism in periodicals and the inter-
net. In the last few years, she has been the recipient of several grants from institutions such as 
the Paul Sacher Stiftung (Basel), The Kurt Weill Foundation for Music (New York), and by the 
Fondazione Giorgio Cini (Venice). Her primary interests are XX and XXI centuries American 
musical theater, exile and diaspora studies, film music, music criticism in the XX Century (US 
and Italy). She is the author of Il musical di Kurt Weill. Prospettive, generi, tradizioni (Edizioni 
Studio 12, 2006), Kurt Weill e Frederick Loewe. Pigmalione fra la 42ma e il Covent Garden (EAI, 
2015), Molly Picon e gli artisti yiddish born in Usa (Accademia University Press, 2021).




