Point the Blade Away From Yourself with the Bavarian State Opera’s 7 Deaths of Maria Callas

COVID-19 makes for strange bedfellows.

In quarantine, previously unknown aspects of the people with whom you share a space and perhaps blood can emerge as a result of lack of external stimuli and under a harsher light than usual, because you’re dealing with your own aching, idle mind.

It’s never a delight to learn the person you place your trust in every day has a proclivity for clipping their toenails with their teeth or listening to hours of podcasts concerning the history of gnomes.

And with the boundaries of your world having been brought so suddenly close, with so little else to arouse your passions and nothing else through which to let your anxieties filter, reacting to their behaviour with wild dramaticism can seem like the only option.

But before you start screaming, “Gnomes? Gnomes you f***ing pervert?!”, it’s important to remember that in a few months both your worlds will be big again and you’ll no longer be two giant, consumptive, powerless blobs on a tiny rock, but two beings with an important bond at the behest of a huge, wild and unpredictable universe full of arsehole baristas, natural sunlight and abundant toilet paper.

Luckily, there is a way to experience a cathartic, hysterical explosion of passions without verbally abusing your roommate.

The Bavarian State Opera’s 7 Deaths of Maria Callas.

With music by Marko Nikodijević and scenes from works by Vincenzo Bellini, Georges Bizet, Gaetano Donizetti, Giacomo Puccini and Giuseppe Verdi, experience the premiere of Marina Abramovic’s creative project livestreamed.

The project will see Abramovic play her lifelong hero Maria Callas dying in seven operas including Madame Butterfly, who stabbed herself, and Tosca, who jumped to her death from a parapet. Abramovic’s performances will be filmed and screened as part of the new production. “I have been thinking about this romantic idea of dying for love for a long time,” she says, adding that Callas “died of a broken heart”. The original plan had been to employ seven of the biggest film directors in the world to each direct one death scene and create a series of ten-minute videos. By the end of 2014, Roman Polanski, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Marco Brambilla, Giada Colagrande and Yorgos Lanthimos had all agreed, but Polanski and Iñárritu were later reported to be no longer working on the project. The Norwegian writer Petter Skavlan has written the script.

We are all feeling stranger than usual.

Don’t kill an important and financially necessary relationship.

Kill Maria instead.

 

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