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ARTICLES

Sound Stage Screen, Vol. 2, Issue 1 (Spring 2022), pp. 5–29, ISSN 2784-8949. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu-
tion 4.0 International License. © 2022 João Pedro Cachopo. DOI: 10.54103/sss18310.

Callas and the Hologram:  
A Live Concert with a Dead Diva*

João Pedro Cachopo

Writing about Callas in Concert during the COVID-19 pandemic brings 
with it a strange feeling. Premiered in 2018, the show employs holographic 
digital and laser technology to bring the legendary diva back to the stage 
almost 50 years after her death. It is a technically and artistically savvy 
spectacle that reflects the spirit of the times with a tinge of nostalgia. At the 
same time, as so many other live shows, especially those that are meant to 
go on tour, Callas in Concert was severely impacted by the pandemic and 
its restrictions. Lockdowns, quarantines, and curfews, leading to a wave of 
cancelations, brought the project’s career to a standstill.

Due to the phantom-like apparition of Callas, the show itself—which I 
had the opportunity to attend in Barcelona on November 7, 2019—is already 
somewhat uncanny. But the present circumstances provide an additional 
layer of strangeness to my memory of it. The experience feels distant, but 
also—thanks to the technological complexity of the concert—strangely fa-
miliar. To recognize the intersection of these two layers of unease is crucial 
for understanding the purpose of this article. In fact, while examining this 
recent instance of the Callas myth, my aim is to understand what it tells us 
about the present situation of opera, in a moment when it becomes appar-
ent that the pandemic has not only accelerated but also revealed changes 
that were already underway over the past two decades.1

* I am grateful to the two anonymous readers who provided critical observations and de-
tailed suggestions. This work is funded by national funds through the FCT – Fundação para 
a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under the Norma Transitória – DL 57/2016/CP1453/CT0059.

1 For a philosophical reflection on how the pandemic—having accelerated the digital 
revolution and brought awareness to its ethical, social, and political consequences—trans-
formed not only the way we imagine the arts, especially the performing arts, but also our 
experiences of love, travel, and study, see my recent book The Digital Pandemic: Imagination 
in Times of Isolation (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).



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I decided to focus on this show for still another reason. Maria Callas, 
it should not be forgotten, is not only opera’s prototypical diva, but also a 
dead singer whose cult has outlived her and, in some ways, even intensi-
fied in recent years. For this reason, Callas in Concert—a show in which 
the artist resurrects from the spirit of technology, as it were—provides an 
invaluable opportunity to examine how closely the interplay of opera and 
new media has evolved against the backdrop of latent anxieties about the 
alleged death of opera. It is this mixture of technological and artistic inno-
vation, on the one hand, and recurrent concerns about opera’s survival in 
a media-saturated culture, on the other hand, that I try to disentangle in 
this article.

1. Resurrecting the Diva 

Callas in Concert was launched by BASE Hologram in 2018.2 A branch of 
BASE Entertainment, the new live entertainment company aims to intro-
duce “a revolutionary new form of live entertainment artistry that fuses 
extraordinary theatrical stagecraft with innovative digital and laser tech-
nology to bring true music legends back to the global stage in a state-of-the-
art hologram infused theatrical experience.”3 Four shows have been pre-
sented so far: In Dreams: Roy Orbison in Concert (2018), Callas in Concert 
(2018), Roy Orbison & Buddy Holly: The Rock ‘n’ Roll Dream Tour (2019), 
and An Evening with Whitney [Houston] (2020). In 2019, the company was 
also working on a hologram of Amy Winehouse, but the show did not see 
the light of day.4

2 See “Maria Callas: Callas in Concert,” Productions, BASE Hologram, accessed February 
10, 2022, https://basehologram.com/productions/maria-callas.

3 “BASE Entertainment Announces New Cutting Edge Live Entertainment Company: 
BASE Hologram,” News, BASE Hologram, posted January 11, 2018, https://basehologram.
com/news/base-entertainment-announces-new-cutting-edge-live-entertainment-compa-
ny-base-hologram.

4 It could be questioned whether it is accurate to say that BASE Hologram features a hol-
ogram of Maria Callas. The doubt is plausible not the least because, as I will explain below, 
the holographic apparition of the diva is based on the recording of an actress representing the 
soprano, rather than on the recording of any of Callas’s performances. That having been said, 
for the purposes of this article, I’m less interested in discussing the definition of holography 
than in examining the phenomenology of the show—a show in which a 3D image of Maria 
Callas, synchronized with live and recorded music, appears and behaves on stage as a live 
performing artist.



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One thing is certain, Maria Callas is not alone in providing the inspi-
ration for these multimedia adventures where the so-called great divide 
between high art and popular culture seems to have very little relevance. 
In fact, it is significant that almost four decades after the heyday of the 
postmodern debate, these holographic shows have been equally successful 
regardless of whether the performer being emulated is a pop singer or an 
operatic soprano. This gives us a hint as to what the fans of Whitney Hou-
ston and Maria Callas might have in common—i.e., not only a fascination 
with the unique voices and charismatic presence of the two singers, but 
also a penchant to fall for the thrill of attending a live concert with a dead 
singer. Apparently, the blurring of the divide between high art and popular 
culture, which Andreas Huyssen celebrated in the 1980s, did not immedi-
ately entail the undermining of the ideological assumptions—namely those 
associated with the values of uniqueness, charisma, and authenticity—on 
which the edifice of high art stood.5 On the contrary such values seem to 
persist in the imagination of audiences and practitioners, albeit in updated 
or disguised forms. 

Similarly to other BASE hologram projects, Callas in Concert proposes 
a two-in-one experience in which “liveness” and “mediatization” are in-
delibly intertwined. Their relation, as Philip Auslander convincingly ex-
plains in seminal volume Liveness, is never of opposition. The very notion 
of liveness emerged due to the need to distinguish between recorded and 
live performances on the radio.6 This conceptual and historical co-depend-
ence finds in Callas in Concert a paradigmatic instance. From their seats 
in theatres and auditoriums around the globe, the spectators-listeners are 
given the opportunity of seeing the hologram of Maria Callas and hearing 
her recorded voice, while a live orchestra is performing on stage. Needless 
to say, neither the voice nor the body of the dead diva is entirely “real.” 
Contrarily to the orchestra and the conductor, the singer is not there, either 
in space or in time, despite the fact that Callas in Concert is a live show. Yet 
in their posthumous appearances, the diva’s voice and body are “unreal” in 
different ways. This distinction is not irrelevant and drawing attention to it 
allows me to better explain how the show was put together.7

5 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism 
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

6 Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York: Routledge, 
1999), 59.

7 Here I use the terms “real” and “unreal” with the sole purpose of explaining how the 
show is constructed. On a more fundamental level, these elements—live performers, video 



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Compared to Callas’s reproduced voice, her projected figure is “unre-
al” to the second degree: the movements of the hologram, though inspired 
by the soprano’s bodily postures and gestures, are not hers. That is to say, 
the hologram is not a reproduction of any of Callas’s performances, but a 
reproduction of someone else reenacting her body language on stage. The 
company hired Stephen Wadsworth from the Juilliard School, who worked 
closely with an actress so that she would move and behave like Maria Cal-
las. “We worked on Callas’ gestural language,” he recalls, “how she held 
herself, her physical life, down to how and when her fingers moved, and 
her symbiotic relationship with her gown.” The challenge, however, went 
beyond simply mimicking her gestures: “She [the actress] is three people up 
there,” the director adds, “the private Callas; Callas the public figure; and 
Callas as the character she is embodying in any given aria.”8 The rehearsal 
process took twelve weeks, after which the double’s performance was re-
corded. It was this recording that a team of experts manipulated using new 
digital and laser imaging, and Computer-Generated Imagery, so that the 
hologram would resemble Callas in terms of physical appearance as well 
(figure 1).

When it comes to the sonic part of the show, the creative process took 
a different path. We are actually listening to Callas’s voice: that is to say, 
to remastered recordings of her performances. In fact, a partnership was 
established between Warner Classics—the company that owns the rights 
to Maria Callas’s recorded legacy—and Base Hologram, thus allowing the 
show to be developed. Technology was crucial at this stage as well: the 
sound of the voice was carefully isolated from the sound of the orchestra, 
so that the original recordings of Callas’s voice, dating from the 1950s and 
1960s, could be paired with the sound of live performing orchestras today. 
In each performance, it is the job of the conductor to ensure that no tempo-
ral mismatch occurs.9

projections, or holographic images—are all, as components of a live performance, absolutely 
real and equally significant.

8 Stephen Wadsworth quoted in David Salazar, “Bringing Maria Callas Back to Life,” Op-
era Wire, June 16, 2018, https://operawire.com/bringing-maria-callas-back-to-life-the-team-
behind-callas-in-concert-on-creating-a-hologram-of-la-divina/.

9 For a preview of the show, see “Callas in Concert: The Hologram Tour,” video trailer, 
uploaded on May 27, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zoVzGOA_84.



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2. Posthumous Collaborations

This is not the first time that a deceased Callas “performs” with living art-
ists. Angela Gheorghiu’s 2011 studio album Homage to Maria Callas gave 
online access to a video in which the two singers interpret the “Habanera” 
from Bizet’s Carmen in a duet.10 In “The Limits of Operatic Deadness,” Carlo 
Cenciarelli rightly emphasizes that the dynamic of this “intermundane col-
laboration,” following Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut, is less audacious 
than the announcement of a groundbreaking artistic project would sug-
gest.11 “The Habanera duet,” he claims, “shows a cautious approach to the 
boundaries that separate the dead from the living. And it shows that, when 

10 “Angela Gheorghiu & Maria Callas – Habanera,” music video, uploaded on November 
20, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeH-U8dQZMM.

11 Carlo Cenciarelli, “The Limits of Operatic Deadness: Bizet, ‘Habanera’ (Carmen), 
Carmen, Act I,” Cambridge Opera Journal 28, vol. 2 (2016): 221–26; the reference is to Ja-
son Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut, “Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane,” TDR: The 
Drama Review 54, no. 1 (2010): 14–38.

Fig. 1 The hologram of Maria Callas next to a live performing orchestra. (© Evan Agostini/Base 
Hologram)



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it comes to opera, such boundaries are heavily over-determined. … They 
protect the aesthetic identity of the popular aria, the memory of the im-
mortal diva and the truth of the photographic image.”12

An apparently anodyne detail about the video confirms this diagnosis, 
while also serving as a touchstone to compare this intermundane collabo-
ration with the holographic concert: the use of color versus black-and-white 
footage. Freedom to travel in time is not equally distributed in the Habanera 
duet; Callas stays in the past, or at least her image does, whereas Gheorghiu 
occasionally joins Callas on the evening of her 4 November 1962 concert at 
Covent Garden.13 In other words, whereas their voices mingle in the per-
formance of the original “solo” aria—which only the fact of being sung by 
two voices, be it in sequence or in unison, allows us to distinguish it from a 
conventional rendering—the images of their bodies remain technically and 
stylistically distinct. Most of the time, we see Gheorghiu inside a pentago-
nal studio surrounded by screens projecting videos of Callas. At a certain 
point, however, we also see the two singers side by side, as if Gheorghiu had 
travelled to the black and white past in which Callas remains stuck (figure 
2). This marks a fundamental difference between the time-travelling video 
and the holographic show, since the purpose of the latter is first and fore-
most to bring Callas’s auratic presence to the present.

But there is a second, perhaps even more important, difference between 
the two projects: Callas in Concert happens live, whereas the duet of Gheor-
ghiu and Callas is a video recording. As a live performance, what is unique 
about Callas in Concert is the fact that the live-recorded matrix pervades 
both the audio and visual dimensions of the spectacle. The situation is not 
as simple as when the image is live and the sound is recorded (in shows, for 
instance, where the singer is lip-syncing) or, conversely, when the image 
is recorded and the sound is live (when an orchestra accompanies a silent 
film or, to give a more concrete example, in Philip Glass’s 1994 opera La 
Belle et la Bête, whose singularity consists in the fact that the instrumental 

12 Cenciarelli, “The Limits of Operatic Deadness,” 225. Cenciarelli’s reflection culminates 
in the following observation: “the Habanera duet can be seen as a representation of what is at 
stake in the debate about opera and digital culture: not so much the survival of the operatic 
canon, its canonical performances and canonised performers, but rather the role that media 
will play in their afterlife” (225).

13 Although most of the footage used in the video is taken from this concert, the sound 
recording (of Callas’s voice, not of the orchestra) originates in a studio performance with 
the Orchestre national de la radiodiffusion française, made for EMI between March 28, and 
April 5, 1961.



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and vocal parts were composed to match the pre-existing images of Jean 
Cocteau’s 1946 film). In Callas in Concert, both the auditory and the visual 
dimensions of the concert are partially recorded and partially live. 

True, this is also the case whenever a video is projected on stage during 
a performance. However, the three-dimensionality of the hologram, sur-
rounded by flesh and blood musicians on stage, suggests physical presence 
in a way that no video does. While this fact illuminates the singularity and 
the appeal of Callas in Concert, it also complicates its description. More 
than any other mediatized performance, holographic shows rely on fiction. 
To understand the stakes of such fiction is crucial to interpret Callas in 
Concert.

3. Back to the Stage

Callas in Concert has been—or was, before the pandemic hit—a box-office 
success. After a preview concert on January 14, 2018, at the Rose Theater 
in New York, Callas’s hologram went on tour in the United States, Mexi-
co, Puerto Rico, Europe, and South America. People adhere to the concept 
of a live concert with the hologram of Callas because of their fascination 
with, interest in, or curiosity about the diva. I would argue, however, that 

Fig. 2 Still frame from the “Gheorghiu-Callas ‘Habanera’ duet” video (EMI Classics Music Video. © 
2011 EMI Records Ltd. All rights reserved).



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the reasons behind the popularity of the show are more complex than they 
seem at first glance. Is the opportunity of seeing and hearing “La Divina” 
the only and main trigger? 

I think the answer to this question is twofold. On the one hand: yes, 
of course; people go to the show because they want to experience the art 
of Callas with their own eyes and ears. On the other hand: yes, but not 
quite. For one simple reason: the possibility of seeing and hearing Maria 
Callas is not new. Recordings of her voice have been widely disseminated 
for decades. They have been remastered and re-remastered several times.14 
Photos and videos of Callas are not hard to find either. They are everywhere 
online. Google, for instance, has nearly fifteen million entries on her name. 
In short, and despite the fact that video recordings of Callas’s live perfor-
mances are surprisingly scarce, opportunities to see and hear Callas on 
stage, backstage, performing, rehearsing, being interviewed, walking her 
dog in Paris, sunbathing on Onassis’s yacht, starring as Medea in Pasolini’s 
film, and so on, are not exactly rare.

What in any case is new, what this first-of-its-kind operatic show adds 
to all these instances of postmortem audio-visibility, is a “fiction of live-
ness” that none of the others possess. Although the artist is not physically 
present, the conductor interacts with the holographic double of Callas in 
front of the audience as if she was “really” there (figure 3). The spectators 
are also invited to suspend their disbelief. Indeed, most of them applaud at 
the end as if the singer—and not just the orchestra and the conductor—had 
performed live. In short, the whole point of the show is to bring Callas back: 
not to life, but rather to the stage—to resurrect Callas as a live performer. 

Callas in Concert provides—and wants to be seen and heard as provid-
ing—a “drastic” experience. In fact, although only the orchestra and the 
conductor are physically present and performing live, the interaction be-
tween them and the pre-recorded, projected hologram happens hic et nunc. 
As always in a live performance, things can go wrong: the conductor might 
stumble; violin strings might snap; somebody in the audience might start 
singing; the diva’s disembodied voice and image, if a power cut occurred, 
would vanish immediately, while the orchestral music would continue for 
at least a few seconds. Although the concept of drastic, as Carolyn Abbate 
formulated it in “Music—Drastic or Gnostic,” refers first and foremost to 

14 On Callas’s recordings, see Giorgio Biancorosso, “Traccia, memoria e riscrittura. Le 
registrazioni,” in Luca Aversano and Jacopo Pellegrini (eds), Mille e una Callas. Voci e studi, 
Macerata: Quodlibet, 2016, 293-306.



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physical presence and bodily engagement, the facts of technological medi-
ation do not as such contradict it. As long as the thrill of unpredictability 
and the charm of ephemerality are in place, the drastic experience might 
well escape the claws of gnostic voracity.15

In sum, and to answer the question I raised above, the charm of authen-
ticity that is still perceived as a sine qua non component of a live perfor-
mance must to be taken into account in understanding why people adhere 
to the show. It is because Callas in Concert responds to a double fascina-
tion—with Maria Callas, certainly, but then also, not less important, with 
liveness and all the characteristics it entails—that the show has also been 
so popular. I will now consider these two fascinations in turn—with Callas, 
considering the actuality and the genealogy of her cult, and with liveness—
before I draw a few broader conclusions.

15 For a challenging reflection on Abbate’s theory of the “drastic,” see Martin Scherzinger, 
“Event or Ephemeron? Music’s Sound, Performance, and Media (A Critical Reflection on the 
Thought of Carolyn Abbate),” Sound Stage Screen 1, no. 1 (2021): 145–92.

Fig. 3 The hologram of Maria Callas gesturing at the conductor and vice-versa. (©Evan Agostini/Base 
Hologram)



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4. The Callas Cult Today

Callas in Concert is not an isolated phenomenon. In fact, the admiration 
for the diva seems to be once again (or perhaps it has never ceased to be) 
in the air. The hologram show appeared in 2018 and was only possible, as 
I mentioned before, thanks to a partnership with Warner Classics. The 
label had recently launched two lavish box sets of Callas live and studio re-
cordings.16 Around the same time, French filmmaker Tom Volf, a self-pro-
claimed newcomer to the cult of Callas, had already dedicated four years of 
his life (which, he claims, was transformed by the encounter with Callas) 
to gathering unique archival sources, including testimonies and audiovis-
ual materials, many of which were still unpublished. His efforts eventually 
culminated in “Maria by Callas,” a multi-object project including one doc-
umentary film, one exhibition, and three books.17

What is unique about this enterprise—or so a well-devised marketing 
strategy wants us to believe—is that for the first time it gives voice to Cal-
las.18 Needless to say, this is a well-worn—albeit still commercially-effec-
tive—cliché. At the same time, and despite the rhetoric of nostalgia and 
authenticity in which the project indulges, the fact that the documentary 
draws exclusively on words said or written by Callas does produce some 
interesting results. Acknowledging such merit is not meant to forget that 
no documentary is transparent. Although Callas’s words provide a filter 
through which Volf ’s reading is conveyed, the film is the result of the film-
maker’s own sensibility, thoughts, and decisions (from the choice of mate-
rials to the narrative thread, up to the editing process). His film will always 
be a “Maria by Callas by Tom Volf.”19

16 Maria Callas Remastered – The Complete Studio Recordings (1949–1969), Warner Clas-
sics, 0825646339914, 2014, box set (69 CDs, 1 CD-ROM); Maria Callas Live – Remastered 
Recordings 1949–1964, Warner Classics, 190295844707, 2017, box set (42 CDs, 3 BDs).

17 Maria by Callas, documentary directed by Tom Volf (Elephant Doc, Petit Dragon, 
and Unbeldi co-production, 2017); Maria by Callas, exhibition created and curated by Tom 
Volf (La Seine Musicale, Île Seguin, Boulogne-Billancourt, France, September 16–December 
14, 2017); Tom Volf, Maria by Callas: In Her Own Words (New York: Assouline, 2017); Tom 
Volf, Callas Confidential (Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, 2017); Maria Callas, Lettres & 
Mémoires, ed. Tom Volf (Paris: Albin Michel, 2019).

18 On the director’s personal website, a brief presentation of the documentary reads as 
follows: “Tom Volf ’s Maria by Callas is the first film to tell the life story of the legendary 
Greek/American opera singer completely in her own words.” See “Tom Volf – Director, Pro-
ducer, Photographer,” accessed February 22, 2022, https://www.tomvolf.com.

19 For a brief analysis of Maria by Callas, see João Pedro Cachopo, “The Aura of Opera 



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To consider another recent example, Marina Abramović, after planning 
to consecrate a piece to Callas for a long time, has ultimately put her ideas 
into practice. After leaving behind different plans—including collaborat-
ing with several contemporary filmmakers—her 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, 
a performance-like opera, premiered on September 1, 2020, at the Bayer-
ische Staatsoper.20 The opera should have taken on the stage in April 2020. 
However, due to the pandemic, these performances were postponed and a 
few adaptations—mainly regarding the distribution of the musicians in the 
theater—had to be made.

The production, which was live-streamed on the company’s website on 
September 5, 2020, includes seven major scenes in which seven sopranos 
sing seven famous arias from seven well-known operas: Verdi’s La travia-
ta, Puccini’s Tosca, Verdi’s Otello, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Bizet’s Car-
men, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, and Bellini’s Norma. While each of 
these arias is performed live, a pre-recorded video by Nabil Elderkin is pro-
jected on the back of the stage. Marina Abramović stars in all of them, ei-
ther alone or accompanied by William Dafoe, to incarnate the seven deaths 
of the above-mentioned characters under the sign of consumption, jump-
ing, strangulation, hara-kiri, knifing, madness, and burning. But there’s an 
eighth death at the end: the death of Maria Callas herself. In this epilogue, 
which fictionalizes the circumstances of the singer’s death in 1977 in her 
Paris apartment, Marina—this time on stage, where she had been lying in 
a bed since the beginning of the performance—embodies Maria. It is also 
in this last scene that we have the chance to listen more to the music com-
posed by Marko Nikodijević, who is also responsible for the composition of 
the prelude and the interludes between the scenes.21

Among other points of interest, Abramović’s project explores the sensual 
and imaginary transitions between what happens on stage and what hap-
pens on screen. This peculiarity also invites us to briefly compare Callas 

Reproduced: Phantasies and Traps in the Age of the Cinecast,” The Opera Quarterly 34, no. 
4: 271–72.

20 See “7 Deaths of Maria Callas,” video trailer, Bayerische Staatsoper, uploaded on Sep-
tember 1, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQmfd_KZfFA.

21 For a “multivocal” examination of 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, see “Review Colloquy: 
7 Deaths of Maria Callas, Live stream from the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich, September 
2020,” ed. Nicholas Stevens, The Opera Quarterly 36, no. 1-2 (2020): 74–98. See also Jelena 
Novak, “The Curatorial Turn and Opera: On the Singing Deaths of Maria Callas. A Conver-
sation with Marina Abramović and Marko Nikodijević,” Sound Stage Screen 1, no. 2. (2021): 
195–209.



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in Concert and 7 Deaths of Maria Callas. Both projects, unlike Maria by 
Callas, embrace fiction, yet while the former insists on the importance of 
liveness (for the price of giving up the corporeality of the performer), the 
latter seems to stake everything on presence (for the price of effacing both 
the voice and the image of Callas). Her voice is replaced by the voices of the 
singers. Her demeanor is reinvented by the postures and gestures of Abram-
ović herself. This project, however, is not only a deeply personal homage to 
Callas in which the images of Marina and Maria are brought together as if 
not only their faces but also their personae were akin to each other—it is 
also an artistic experiment that questions the hegemony of presence and 
liveness. It does so, perhaps unintentionally, insofar as it makes it impos-
sible to assign greater importance to the Marina on stage than to the Ma-
rina on screen. Since the same performer dominates the screen as much as 
the stage, the hierarchy between the two collapses (figure 4). In this sense, 
when it comes to the fiction of bringing the diva back to the stage, Callas 
in Concert is more literal. However ethereal and transparent, the hologram 
never ceases to appear as the real Callas performing on an actual stage.

Fig. 4 7 Deaths of Maria Callas (© Charles Duprat—OnP)



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5. A Deadly Genealogy

In addition to an effervescent context, Callas in Concert also benefits from a 
long and complex genealogy. The Callas cult goes back to the years following 
the soprano’s death and persists, manifesting itself in both research-driven 
and fiction-based projects to this day. In cinema, for instance, films as di-
verse as Tony Palmer’s Callas (1978), Federico Fellini’s E la nave va (And the 
Ship Sails On, 1983), and Franco Zeffirelli’s Callas Forever (2002) embody 
quite different visions, although an element of veneration seems nonethe-
less pervasive in all of them. I will not consider this genealogy in depth, let 
alone delve into the consideration of what seems to be its seminal episode: 
the cremation of Callas’s body and the scattering of her ashes to the sea.22 
Instead, I propose two hypotheses that may shed some light on how the 
Callas cult intersects with a broader debate on the contemporary fate of 
opera. The first concerns the connection between the historical and myth-
ical dimensions of the Callas cult, while the second suggests that this cult 
has known two peaks since the death of the singer.

As Marco Beghelli claims, the importance of the singer and actress in the 
history of opera needs to be acknowledged beyond the myth. Callas opened 
the path to and provided the model for a new operatic subjectivity. “By af-
finity or sheer instinct,” Callas became “the vocal and dramatic instrument 
for the rebirth of the bel canto tradition.”23 However, according to Beghelli, 
this is just the tip of the iceberg. Not only did Callas reconnect coloratura 
singing and dramatic truth—she also explored, with her “grainy,” “une-
ven,” and “ugly” voice, the ambivalence between female and male timbres 
as well as the transition between contralto and soprano registers. All this, 
and especially her capacity to reconcile “the personal need for reinterpreta-
tion and the faithful adherence to the composer’s intention” made of Callas 
a model for the coming generations of singers.24 

Following Beghelli, while also putting some pressure on his argument, 
it bears adding that it is impossible to completely excise myth from his-
tory when it comes to Callas. The terms used by Beghelli to capture the 

22 For an exploration of this episode, in the context of an insightful reading of Fellini’s 
E la nave va, see Michal Grover-Friedlander, Vocal Apparitions: The Attraction of Cinema to 
Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), chap. 6 “Fellini’s Ashes,” 131–52.

23 Marco Beghelli, “Maria Callas and the Achievement of an Operatic Vocal Subjectivity,” 
in The Female Voice in the Twentieth Century: Material, Symbolic and Aesthetic Dimensions, 
ed. Serena Facci and Michela Garda (London: Routledge, 2021), 46.

24 Beghelli, “Maria Callas,” 44.



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singularity of Callas are telling in this regard, namely when he claims that 
“Callas proposed her own interpretation of coloratura as a completely in-
dividual outcome, having no living model from which to take her inspi-
ration,” something she did “instinctively.”25 This formulation is curiously 
reminiscent of Kant’s definition of genius. As “the talent … which gives 
the rule to art,” the genius has no model.26 It corresponds to an innate crea-
tive aptitude, which they exercise instinctively, being unaware of what they 
do. Of course, when it comes to the performing arts, the notions of talent, 
genius, or creativity are as much a matter of creation/production as of rec-
reation/reproduction. But, as long as the myth of the genius survives, the 
values of originality and singularity persist, despite the need to negotiate an 
alliance between the “genius of the composer” and the “genius of the per-
former.” The question, however, arises whether identifying the “historical 
modernity” and “everlasting relevance” of a performer with their capacity 
to put their subjectivity at the service of the “objectification of the score” is 
not itself another myth.27

This interrogation paves the way for my second hypothesis. In fact, look-
ing at the previous decades without forgetting the inextricability between 
the mythical Callas and historical Callas, there seems to have been two 
golden ages in the Callas cult: the 1980s and 2010s, that is to say, the two 
decades in which the subgenre of opera film, in the first case, and the cine-
cast phenomenon, in the second case, reached their peaks of popularity.28 I 
don’t think this is a coincidence. Could the obsession with the diva’s death 
not be seen as a symptom of the broader preoccupation with the demise of 
the genre? This would explain why the cult of the diva reemerges each time 
the debate about the genre’s survival, and the media fuss around it, is on 
everybody’s lips.

Beyond these two hypotheses, one thing is certain: today, whenever the 
promoters, critics, spectators, fans, or detractors of Callas in Concert talk 
or write about it, the metaphor of “resurrection” consistently emerges. Fur-

25 Beghelli, 48.
26 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 46, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: 

Oxford University Press, 2007), 136.
27 Beghelli, 57.
28 On the opera film debate, see Marcia J. Citron, Opera on Screen (New Haven: Yale 

University Press, 2000); on the cinecast phenomenon, see James Steichen, “The Metropolitan 
Opera Goes Public: Peter Gelb and the Institutional Dramaturgy of The Met: Live in HD,” 
Music and the Moving Image 2, no. 2 (2009): 24–30 and “Opera at the Multiplex,” ed. Christo-
pher Morris and Joseph Attard, special issue, The Opera Quarterly 34, no. 4 (2018).



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thermore, this metaphor seems to be all the more effective when it presup-
poses a symbiosis between the artist (Callas) and the genre (opera). One 
says “diva,” yet one also means “opera,” and vice versa. “Many are already 
resigned to watching old videos or listening to old recordings,” David Sala-
zar comments in the Opera Wire, “but there are some that have different 
ideas. In fact, their ideas involve bringing her back.”29 Of all critics, Antho-
ny Tommasini has been the most explicit in emphasizing how closely the 
admiration for the artist and the concern with the genre intertwine, while 
also acknowledging the uncanny mixture of attraction and repulsion trig-
gered by the spectacle:

It was amazing, yet also absurd; strangely captivating, yet also campy and 
ridiculous. And in a way, it made the most sense of any of the musical hol-
ograms produced so far. More than rock or hip-hop fans—and even more, 
you could say, than fans of instrumental classical music—opera lovers dwell 
in the past. We are known for our obsessive devotion to dead divas and old 
recordings; it can sometimes seem like an element of necrophilia, even, drives 
the most fanatical buffs.30

This association of opera to death, murder, and suicide is far from being 
an anodyne feature of the genre. In Temple of the Scapegoat, Alexander 
Kluge follows the threads of various stories of sacrifice punctuating the 
history of the genre. These include anecdotes, such as the death of baritone 
Leonard Warren, while passionately interpreting Don Carlo in Verdi’s La 
forza del destino on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in 1960, 
which for Kluge emblematizes “Warren’s total commitment—his readi-
ness to sacrifice his own life;”31 or an episode during the Nazi occupation 
of Paris, when the entire cast of a production of Beethoven’s Fidelio got 
trapped in underground rehearsal rooms of the Palais Garnier, where they 
kept working nonetheless. “Busy with their rehearsals,” Kluge comments, 
“these lost souls in the opera’s bowels were blind to the desperate nature of 

29 Salazar, “Bringing Maria Callas Back to Life.”
30 Anthony Tommasini, “What a Hologram of Maria Callas Can Teach Us About Op-

era,” New York Times, January 15, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/arts/music/ma-
ria-callas-hologram-opera.html.

31 Alexander Kluge, Temple of the Scapegoat, trans. Isabel Fargo Cole, Donna Stoneci-
pher, and others (New York: New Directions Books, 2018), 4.



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their situation. Their bread and water were as tightly rationed as in a Span-
ish prison at the actual time the opera was set.”32 

Seen from the perspective of gender, the problematic nature of such 
“sacrifice mania” boils down to the following perplexity: why does the so-
prano have to die in the end? Why always (or almost always) the soprano? 
Why is the price of tragic enjoyment to be paid by the female protagonist? 
In Opera, or The Undoing of Women, Catherine Clément explores this issue 
with insightful vehemence: 

Opera concerns women. No, there is no feminist version; no, there is no liber-
ation. Quite the contrary: they suffer, they cry, they die. Singing and wasting 
your breath can be the same thing. Glowing with tears, their decolletés cut 
to the heart, they expose themselves to the gaze of those who come to take 
pleasure in their pretend agonies. Not one of them escapes with her life, or 
very few of them do.33 

Clément’s book has been widely debated and contested. Abbate, for in-
stance, was unconvinced by Clément’s focus on the libretto, and agreed 
with Paul Robinson in claiming that when it comes to pondering the fate 
of these operatic heroines, their vocal triumph cannot be downplayed, let 
alone ignored.34 There may be other ways of putting pressure on Clément’s 
reading that do not rely on the dichotomy of music and text—the text it-
self, in which the undoing of women becomes explicit, is prone to multiple 
interpretations. In any case, from Catherine Clément to Marina Abramo-
vić—but also to Christophe Honoré, who directed a production of Tosca for 
the 2019 Aix-en-Provence festival, focused on the figure of the diva—the 
entanglement of adulation and violence that impregnates opera’s attitude 
toward women, both in fiction and in reality, remains a most debated topic 
among scholars, critics, and artists, one on which Callas in Concert also 
takes a stand. 

As I mentioned before, Stephen Wadsworth’s curatorial work went be-
yond choreographing the actress. It also involved devising a script reflect-
ing the story of Maria Callas. In this regard, it is significant—and a sign 

32 Kluge, Temple of the Scapegoat, 14.
33 Catherine Clément, Opera, or The Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapo-

lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 11.
34 Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Cen-

tury (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), ix; Paul Robinson, “It’s Not over until the 
Soprano Dies,” New York Times, January 1, 1989.



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that Callas in Concert is not only a business-oriented, but also an artistic 
endeavor—that in some versions of the concert the program kicked off with 
“Je veux vivre” (from Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette) and wraps up 
with the monologue “Suicidio!” (from Amilcare Ponchielli’s La Gioconda), 
as if suggesting that, at least in her afterlife as a hologram, Callas regains 
power over her destiny.35 She wants to live, and it is by expressing such a de-
sire that her posthumous show begins. It will not end before she decides, in 
hopes perhaps of holding those who rejected and betrayed her to account, 
to commit suicide. Would there be an alternative way to put an end to the 
show? This question remains in the air.

6. To applaud or not to applaud

The “Suicidio!” may well be the last piece announced in the program. But 
will it be the last aria performed? Will the hologram of Callas not sing an 
encore? How willing will she be to take the audience’s wishes into account 
in making such a decision? These questions lead us back to the topic of live-
ness. It may, however, come as disappointing news for many spectators that 
the holographic diva, albeit keen to sing encores, will not be able, regardless 
of the audience’s reactions and wishes, to improvise her decisions. After all, 
technology has its limits—limits that one may either lament (while looking 
forward to new developments) or commemorate (as a proof that the gim-
mick has its flaws).

The question of whether the hologram of Callas will play an encore or 
not leads me to the consideration of a Live in HD broadcast of Donizetti’s 
La fille du régiment in 2019. In her introductory remarks, soprano Nadine 
Sierra announced that for the first time in the history of The Met: Live in 
HD series an encore during the performance might indeed happen. She 
had in mind Javier Camarena’s delivery of “Ah! Mes amis,” which in previ-
ous evenings had triggered the applause of the audience to the point of en-
couraging the tenor to resume the aria from the beginning. Her prediction 
turned out to be exact and Camarena did sing the number twice.36

35 This was the case for the performance of September 7, 2019, at the Lyric Opera of Chica-
go. See Maria Callas in Concert, program notes, September 7, 2019, Lyric Opera House, Chi-
cago, https://www.lyricopera.org/learn-engage/audience-programs/opera-program-books/
maria-callas-in-concert-program/.

36 See The Metropolitan Opera, “On opening night of the 2019 revival of Donizetti’s La 
Fille du Régiment, tenor Javier Camarena made history by becoming one of only a handful 



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I recall this episode because I think it bears interesting similarities with 
the pre-planned encores of Callas in Concert. Of course, there are many 
differences between a hologram show and a live cinecast. However, in light 
of their analogous treatment of the encore, they both seem to lay bare the 
oscillation between predictability and unpredictability that characterizes 
a great number of live-mediatized performances today. I find this conver-
gence symptomatic of how intricate and tense the marriage of operatic tra-
dition and technological innovation has become in recent years. In fact, 
whether the drastic element is reconcilable with audiovisual remediation is 
a question to which both enthusiasts and detractors of technological inno-
vation are far from being indifferent.

Now, I would like to turn the discussion to the audience’s perspective 
by considering a brief reportage after the Paris concert at the Salle Pleyel 
in which several spectators share their impressions on the show. Here are 
some statements worth considering:

– It’s pretty powerful. You really feel like she’s there. I don’t know how it’s 
possible.
– She’s there, she’s present. It’s an exceptional vibrato.
– Callas has always touched me, and here she didn’t. And that’s a shame. 
– She comes on like a diva, waiting for everyone to stand up and scream … 
and there’s some timid applause. People are wondering “is this art? is it seri-
ous? do I get on board or not?” And we’re captivated. It’s scary.37

To applaud, or not to applaud, that is (also) the question. The responses, as 
the previous pronouncements show, vary significantly between excitement 
and disappointment. However, there seems to be something in common 
between those who applaud and those who do not applaud, between those 
who are excited and those who are disappointed: the idea that a spectacle 
with the hologram of Callas, much like a live concert featuring her, is meant 
to move the audience, to making it feel “touched.” In fact, what the gentle-
man who says that “you really feel like she’s there” and the young lady who 
corroborates “she’s there […], it’s an exceptional vibrato” share with the 
Callas admirer who laments “Callas has always touched me [m’a toujours 

of soloists to give an encore on the Met stage,” Facebook, June 29, 2020, https://fb.watch/
cG5P-Wg5EM/.

37 N. Handel, A. Mesange, R. Moussaoui, “Astonishment as hologram, live orchestra put 
Callas back onstage,” AFP News Agency, post-show video reportage, Salle Pleyel, Paris, up-
loaded on November 29, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieTsKYg1_Qo.



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fait vibrer], and here she didn’t” is the assumption that “making you vi-
brate” is the gauge on which a judgment about Callas in Concert should be 
made. They differ as to whether the show achieves the goal. Yet they all agree 
about what the goal is: namely, nothing less than reproducing the sense 
of uniqueness, exceptionality, and authenticity associated with attending a 
live performance of Maria Callas. 

Could we then conclude that reproducing the aura of Maria Callas as a 
live performer is what Callas in Concert is all about? As I suggested above, 
the fascination with the diva’s charismatic presence and the fascination with 
the charm of liveness are the two ingredients behind the success of Callas 
in Concert. However, since Maria Callas is not physically present on stage 
(nor is an actress embodying her, as is the case with Abramović in 7 Deaths 
of Maria Callas), it is not the aura” of the performer (the “originality” of 
their bodily presence) that is being reproduced. What is being reproduced, 
evoked, emulated is the aura of the performance (the “originality” of a live 
event happening hic et nunc).38 And yet, Callas remains the raison d’ être 
of the show. In order to avoid this somewhat paradoxical formulation, we 
could perhaps say that what is being reproduced in Callas in Concert is the 
persona—not the aura—of Maria Callas as a live performer.

In his recent book In Concert: Performing Musical Persona, Philip Aus-
lander returns to the notion of “persona” to discuss the identity of musical 
performers.39 Instead of thinking of the musical performer as a real person 
who may or may not—depending on whether they are portraying fictional 
entities (as singers sometimes do)—embody different personae, Auslander 
argues that the identity of all and every performer consists of a persona. 
Whenever they play or sing for an audience, performers, however modest 

38 It is a complex question how the notion of aura, and the very dichotomy of original 
and copy, can be applied to the performing arts. In any case, if we address this question in 
light of Benjamin’s theory of technological reproducibility, it becomes clear that, when it 
comes to the performing arts, the experience of the aura is associated not so much with the 
contact with an artwork as with the attendance of a performance: the performance—in its 
uniqueness and ephemerality—is the original that can be reproduced. Meanwhile, as there is 
no performance without performers, the fact that performers and audiences are co-present 
in time and space is also part and parcel of that sense of originality.

39 Philip Auslander, In Concert: Performing Musical Persona (Ann Arbor: University of 
Michigan Press, 2021). See also “Musical Personae,” TDR/The Drama Review 50, no. 1 (2006): 
100–119, “On the Concept of Persona in Performance,” Kunstlicht, vol. 36, no. 3 (2015): 63–64, 
and “‘Musical Personae’ Revisited,” in Investigating Musical Performance: Theoretical Models 
and Intersections, ed. Gianmario Borio, Giovanni Giuriati, Alessandro Cecchi, and Marco 
Lutzu (London: Routledge, 2020), 41–55.



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or self-effacing their playing or singing might be, are immediately perform-
ing their own identity (which is not the same as expressing themselves). In 
making this claim, Auslander emphasizes that, no matter the genre, style, 
aesthetic, idiosyncrasy, character, race or gender, the identity of the per-
former, to the extent that it is socially and culturally constructed, is always 
already, to a certain extent, a fiction. 

While Auslander does not intend to undervalue the importance of cor-
poreality in musical performance, he nonetheless notes that he has in mind 
“all instances in which musicians play for an audience, including on re-
cordings.”40 Therefore, to the extent that it applies to live and recorded per-
formances alike and stresses the fictional dimension of musical identity, the 
concept of “persona” also sheds light on how a show that turns around the 
admiration for an absent, long-dead artist can be so effective. Moreover, 
since the hologram of Maria Callas portrays different characters in this 
concert, while at the same time never ceasing to behave as Maria Callas on 
stage, it seems adequate to claim that the “persona” of Maria Callas—not-
withstanding her disembodied, technically reproducible substance (which 
is incompatible with the intimation of bodily presence that the notion of 
“aura” entails)—is indeed the core of Callas in Concert.

7. Dreaming into the future

The fiction of a live concert with a dead diva sets boundaries to the im-
agination that some critics, consciously or not, were eager to police. As I 
conclude, instead of looking at complaints about how the spectacle fails 
in its attempt to emulate a live concert with Maria Callas, I want to briefly 
consider reactions that go in the opposite direction.

Wondering about what the future could bring, critic Richard Fairman 
speculates: “At the speed technology is advancing, just imagine where this 
could lead. We could have operas starring imaginary casts from the past. 
How about Verdi’s La traviata with Callas and Enrico Caruso? Or Nellie 
Melba and Luciano Pavarotti? Neither pair was alive at the same time, but 
that will not matter any more.”41 In the same vein, but going even further, 

40 Auslander, In Concert, 91
41 Richard Fairman, “The Immortal (Hologram) Maria Callas,” Financial Times, Novem-

ber 2, 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/ee8c37c2-d872-11e8-ab8e-6be0dcf18713. 



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media theorist Tien-Tien Jong wrote (after attending the show at the Lyric 
Opera in Chicago in September 2019):

Maybe it’s because our seats were way up in the balcony, and I spent most 
of the evening squinting down at the stage, but I kept thinking: why not use 
a skyscraper-sized Maria Callas, looming like a Godzilla monster over the 
Lyric orchestra? […] And why does the fantasy to recreate one of her concerts 
mean investing so much effort in constructing a strange deepfake of Callas 
to realistically lip-sync along to old recordings […] instead of revolutionizing 
concert technology in a different way, like giving the audience really great 
headphones and a video headset to imitate attending an intimate chamber 
recital with Callas instead?42

Although a Godzilla-sized hologram of Callas might seem a bit over the top, 
I find these questions thought provoking. Richard Fairman’s “imaginary 
casts” underline that the hologram technology virtually effaces spatiotem-
poral boundaries, yet he does not question the assumption that everything 
should look like a regular live concert. That’s exactly what Tien-Tien Jong’s 
more radical fantasy does in suggesting that, along with spatiotemporal 
coordinates, realistic conventions and audiovisual habits can also be chal-
lenged. Following such a line of inquiry opens up a much more interesting 
discussion. When we look back at the tradition of opera films, we bump 
into works such as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Tales of 
Hofmann (1951) and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Parsifal (1982), which not only 
defied lip-syncing protocols but also played with ontological boundaries, 
such as the human/machine and the male/female divides.43 A priori, there is 
no reason for a hologram spectacle to shy away from exploring experimen-
tal paths along similar lines. 

In practice, it would perhaps be naive to expect such a project to risk dis-
appointing traditional operagoers even further. Some of Callas’s fans were 
quite taken aback already. Be that as it may, it would be inaccurate to say 
that Callas in Concert fully complies with the principles of realism. The 
scene with the playing cards falling in slow motion is a noticeable excep-
tion and stands out as one of the most suggestive moments of the concert 

42 Tien-Tien Jong, “Maybe it’s because our seats were way up in the balcony,” Facebook, 
September 23, 2019, https://www.facebook.com/tientien.jong/posts/10217127834202181.

43 See Citron, Opera on Screen, chap. 4 “Cinema and the Power of Fantasy: Powell and 
Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffmann and Syberberg’s Parsifal,” 112–60.



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(figure 5).44 It contains a seed of fantasy that contrasts with the otherwise 
conventional tricks of the show. It also occurs at a significant moment—i.e., 
when the “card scene” from Bizet’s Carmen transitions into the “sleepwalk-
ing scene” of Verdi’s Macbeth. As soon as the cards, on which the future 
can be read, are thrown into the air, time is out of joint. The image slows 
down while the sound keeps its pace. It is as if we have entered a dream. 

Fig. 5: The playing cards scene in Callas in Concert. (© Evan Agostini/Base Hologram)

This dream is not only a reminder that the show boils down to an illusion 
(this is, in a sense, the Brechtian moment of the show, in which the “fic-
tion” of the hologram denounces itself in front of the audience). It is also 
an allegory of our time’s fears and desires. In fact, I think that this scene, 
considering the mix of perplexity and fascination it may cause, shows how 
strongly the fear of losing presence and liveness acts in the opera world. 
Would the essence of opera, as a live performing art, not be damaged by 
these losses? The question may sound obsolete today, as we acknowledge 
that not only technology and opera are inseparable, but also that the notion 

44 The scene is featured at the end of the official video trailer (see note 9).



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of liveness can only make sense in a highly mediatized culture. As Karen 
Henson argues, following Auslander and Jonathan Sterne, “the very idea 
of opera’s essence being live and technologically unmediated singing is a 
product of technology, for one cannot have an ideal of unmediated singing 
unless one is in a profoundly technological environment.”45 

However obsolete it may be, the question also expresses an anxiety that 
intensified during the pandemic as a defensive mechanism against the 
boom of online events. Luckily, the resulting rhetoric that reserves the label 
of “operatic” to performances in which the physical copresence of singers, 
musicians, and audiences is preserved does not have the last word. In fact, 
the scene of the flying cards also suggests how radically new technologies 
can stimulate and enliven operatic imagination to the point of challenging 
the genre’s most ingrained musical and theatrical conventions. When we 
wake up from the dream, reality won’t be the same.

45 Karen Henson, “Introduction: Of Modern Operatic Mythologies and Technologies,” 
in Technology and the Diva: Sopranos, Opera, and Media from Romanticism to the Digital Age, 
ed. Karen Henson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 22.



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Musical Persona. Ann Arbor: University of 
Michigan Press, 2021

———. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized 
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———. “Musical Personae.” TDR/The Drama 
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———. “‘Musical Personae’ Revisited.” In 
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and Marko Nikodijević.” Sound Stage Screen 
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Abstract

In this paper, I investigate Callas in Concert, a multimedia show that employs holographic 
digital and laser technology to bring the legendary diva back to the stage almost 50 years after 
her death. The aim of the spectacle, which bears witness to the persistence of the Callas cult 
to the present day, is to allow audiences to see and listen to a digitally manipulated reproduc-
tion of the dead singer’s body and voice. At the same time, Callas in Concert is a live concert, 
where an orchestra performs in front of an audience. My interest lies in two interrelated 
issues. The first concerns the question as to whether the visual or the aural dimension takes 
the lead in the attempt to fictionally resurrect a dead singer as a live performer. The second 
revolves around the paradox inherent in the use of digital technologies of reproduction and 
remediation to emphasize the peerless uniqueness of Maria Callas’s artistry. In bringing to-
gether these two issues, my ultimate goal is to shed light on the artistic nuances and ideolog-
ical assumptions that pervade the fascination with operatic liveness today.

João Pedro Cachopo teaches Philosophy of Music at the New University of Lisbon, where he 
is a researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Sociology and Aesthetics of Music. His inter-
ests include the relation of aesthetics, politics, and technology; the interplay between opera 
and film; and issues of performance, dramaturgy, and remediation. He is the author of The 
Digital Pandemic: Imagination in Times of Isolation (Bloomsbury, 2022), originally published 
as A Torção dos Sentidos: Pandemia e Remediação Digital (Documenta, 2020; Elefante 2021), 
and the co-editor of Rancière and Music (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). An expanded 
version of his PhD dissertation on Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetics, Verdade e Enigma: Ensaio 
sobre o pensamento estético de Adorno, received the Portuguese PEN Club Award in the First 
Work category in 2014. Between 2017 and 2019, he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at 
the University of Chicago. He also taught as a visiting professor at the Pontifícia Universidade 
Católica do Rio de Janeiro (2016), the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (2016) and the 
Universidade de Brasília (2022). He is currently working on two interrelated monographs 
titled “The Profanation of Opera” and “When Film Becomes Opera”.


