I cannot vouch for the quality/integrity of the Schroeter clip, since my “screener” DVD was unplayable. But here is Werner Schroeter’s Maria Callas Porträt, and here is my Capital New York advance on MoMA’s Werner Schroeter retrospective.

Callas and Pasolini on the Medea set.

ilsussidiario.net reports on a 1969 letter from Pasolini to Callas that is part of the Pasolini exhibit at Casa Testori. The letter, written during the Medea shoot, was apparently meant to reassure her, unaccustomed as she was to cinema’s stop-and-go process and close-range focus.

You are like a precious stone that is violently shattered into a thousand fragments so that it can be reconstructed in something more enduring than the material of life—that is, the material of poetry. One must shatter a reality that is “whole” in order to remake it in the image of its synthetic and absolute truth, which makes it still more “whole.”

Re-visioning Callas loves the gays.

Chapeau to President Obama, and Vice President Biden (“Crazy Uncle Joe”), and Mayor Bloomberg, and all people everywhere who are fighting for freedom and equality.

De jure this means nothing; de facto… we’ll see.

I say with Lady Gaga: Bless G-d, and bless the gays!

Magdalena Montezuma in The Death of Maria Malibran. Image courtesy of EYE Film Institute, Netherlands.

Let me tell you guys some of what’s happening in my mad little world. As I think you know, I recently started writing for Capital New York, a swell publication that publishes bigger-than-bite-sized articles. So far, I have written for them pieces about Cyrille Aimée, Verdi and Manzoni, and Don Giovanni and Ghosts of Versailles.

Because these articles are about twice as long as the longest ones I’m used to writing, I go berserk and do enough research for a dissertation. Really. Today I filed a piece about the Museum of Modern Art’s upcoming Werner Schroeter retrospective, and when I began working on it, I genuinely believed that it would be possible and necessary for me to discuss Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory at some length.

* head to desk *

I also reviewed Britten’s Billy Budd at the Met for The Classical Review.

Anyhow, Werner Schroeter: HUGE Callas queen. Since he worked outside of studio and institutional systems for much of his career, very few of his films have been distributed in the States, and only one is available to be viewed at the New York Public Library, which has fairly impressive film holdings.

I will post my CNY article when it runs (probably Friday), report on the most interesting Schroeter films as I see them, and start posting a little more regularly in general.

And how are you dear hearts?

Puccini’s Manon Lescaut is one of several operas that Callas recorded but never performed on stage. (The others are Puccini’s La bohème, Bizet’s Carmen, and Leoncavallo’s I pagliacci.)

Today’s rendition of “Sola, perduta, abbandonata” comes not from her complete Manon Lescaut (1957) but from her 1954 Puccini recital under Tullio Serafin. She also taught the aria at Juilliard and sang it frequently in 1974, during her “farewell” tour.

John Ardoin underscored the simplicity and understatement that Callas brought to this aria: “Rather than a voice racked with desperation, hers is colored with tired resignation. This is a Manon who has faced and accepted her death. This idea is reinforced later by the sense of release with which Callas frames ‘Terra di pace mi sembrava questa.’”

When I received EMI’s latest Callas compilation, The Callas Effect, I noticed immediately that this aria closes the set. In artistic terms, it is an odd choice: Puccini was not especially close to Callas’s heart, Manon Lescaut was not important in her career, and many sopranos have sung this music at least as well as she. (I am especially fond of Mirella Freni in the rôle.)

If, however, one is determined to depict Callas as a pathetic mess at the end of her life, then I suppose it is the ideal choice. (Sigh!)

Hear Maria Callas in other music by Puccini here and in the blog archives.

Bon week-end à tous !

A self-portrait by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Hello, darlings! I’m sort of back—“sort of” because there is something wrong with the server on which this blog is hosted, and I sometimes cannot upload or save files. My dear and heroic webmaster is hard at work making things right.

From ViviMilano comes news of a Pasolini exhibit at Casa Testori. The show runs through 1 July and includes some fifty paintings and drawings by Pasolini (a true polymath!), manuscripts, unpublished correspondence, and a continuous projection of eight of his films.

According to ViviMilano, the exhibition will include readings and other events and “focusses on professional relationships, affinities, and friendships, ranging from Carlo Emilio Gadda to Maria Callas and Roberto Longhi.”

P.S. I also covered New York City Opera’s 2012–2013 season announcement for The Classical Review.

A modern Icon of the Resurrection.

For Maria Callas, a Greek Orthodox Christian, Easter (“real” Easter, as my Orthodox friends never fail to say) would have been the most important holy day of the year.

I may have this all wrong, but I believe that here you can find a homily read every year at Πάσχα, and here an explanation of the Icon of the Resurrection.

Handel performed by the Gabrieli Consort & Players has nothing at all to do with Orthodox Easter, and I suspect that Callas would have despised more or less everything about HIP. All the same, I don’t see why any of that should stop us from enjoying it.

Χριστός ἀνέστη!

Alessandro Manzoni.

In the meantime, my latest article for Capital New York concerns a performance of the Manzoni Requiem by a wonderful New York group, the Choral Society.

Back at you soon!

VIVA VERDI!

Verdi in an odd hat.

Darlings, I am on vacation, and I wish you all Chag Pesach Sameach, Happy Easter, or just “Have a nice day” if you celebrate neither of the above.

I did, however, head uptown to review the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of La traviata for The Classical Review.

Hei-Kyung Hong was a marvelous Violetta, and Dmitri Hvorostovsky was in sensational form.

Back at you soon!

Maria Callas took up Odabella’s aria “O nel fuggente nuvolo” from Verdi’s Attila for a handful of recording sessions in 1964 and 1969.

If the YouTube information is to be believed, this recording is from 1969, possibly with material from 1964 spliced in. (I don’t often revisit Callas’s very late recordings, so I cannot say for sure.) Her sound is raw at certain moments, yet how splendidly she shapes Verdi’s music and makes it into a living, breathing thing.

Consider that Philips recorded a complete Attila with Ruggero Raimondi and Cristina Deutekom a scant four years later. If only Callas had taken part in that project!