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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).