Maria Callas in “Médée”, the voice that has fallen silent

by time news August 11, 2023

August 11, 2023

2023-08-11 16:27:06

Maria Callas was Greek. Born in New York to immigrant parents, Maria Anna Sophia Cecelia Kaloyeropoulos returned to the land of her origins in 1937 with her mother and sister, after her parents separated. It was in Athens that she made her stage debut at a very young age: in 1939, she sang Santuzza in Rustic cavalry by Pietro Mascagni, the student’s first theater experience at the conservatory.

End of his operatic career

It is therefore understandable that the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, thirty years later, thought of her to embody the magician Medea in his film of the same name. The feature film did not meet with success but remains legendary for admirers of the diva, by its very singularity: Callas does not sing in it. In 1969, the one who ignited the boards left them for several years. And, despite a recital tour with her friend the tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano in 1973-1974 where the public applauded the one who was and is no longer, the curtain has definitely fallen on her operatic career.

Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini directs Maria Callas on the set of Medea, 1969 / San Marco/Corbis via Getty

In Greek mythology, Medea, granddaughter of the Sun, is this terrible foreign magician who, out of love for the Greek hero Jason, agrees to give up her powers. Betrayed by her husband, drunk with revenge, she will commit the irreparable by killing her own children. Lyrical composers seized on this dreadful fate, such as Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1693) or Luigi Cherubini (1797). Maria Callas encountered this infanticide in 1953 in Florence then, under the direction of Leonard Bernstein, at La Scala in Milan. A recording bears witness to the incandescent emulation between the soprano and the American maestro, who described her as “energy bomb” which in the mouth of the seething Bernstein means a lot! The ductile voice of Callas, roaring or plaintive, terrifying or pitiful, sinks into the sick and unconventional psychology of the magician.

«Callas adhered to the personality of Medearemembers the director Margarete Wallmann (1). Like her, she was a stranger, succumbing to a love that may have robbed her of her strength as a singer as Jason robbed Medea of her power. » Pasolini draws from this pain – in 1968, Aristotle Onassis had married Jackie Kennedy and not Callas… – and magnifies it: «Medea is the confrontation of the archaic and priestly universe with the world of Jason, a rational and pragmatic world (…) He is the willless ‘technician’ whose aspirations exclusively serve success.” wrote the director in The Centaur’s Dream. He fashions his Medea from the “individual traits” of the diva, «the most modern of all women. “But within her lives a woman from ancient times, strange, mysterious, magical, with terrible inner conflicts,” declared Pasolini again.

Barely a few lines of dialogue, the presence of Callas on the screen is essentially visual, his hieratic presence, his look and the heavy jewels that adorn his clothing bringing the viewer back to the story. It is reported that Luchino Visconti, who notably staged Callas in a astrayof anthology, tried to dissuade her from shooting this Medea. He would even have predicted that this first film would also be his last… In which he was not mistaken.

“Didn’t you know that girls don’t have ties (…) May the hair like the skeins of threads black like the ancestresses not hold you to the ground, but float around you like jellyfish. And that it only takes a little to forget the memories and disappear into the abyss (2). »

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