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.”

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show runs through 1 July and includes some fifty paintings and drawings by Pasolini (a true polymath!), manuscripts, unpublished correspondence, and a continuous projection of eight of his films.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.

Callas on television.

• Faye Dunaway’s film of Terrence McNally’s Master Class is reportedly in post-production.
• On 17 and 18 March, Great Performers at Lincoln Center will present a three-part series, “Callas on Film.” The Callas Effect (2011) is the first offering, and I think it’s a pretty sorry one. Here’s hoping that the other screenings are more substantial.
• An exhibit is on in Egypt of photographs by Philipe Koudjina, who shot Maria Callas and Pier Paolo Pasolini during their travels in Africa. (The article says that he did so in 1965, but I’m fairly certain it was five or six years later.)
• In a Qobuz interview, Juliette Gréco recalls Callas. “[She] often came to hear me sing and would tape me in concert with a little recorder. She was very kind to me. For me she was the greatest… Today I love Cecilia Bartoli for her joie de vivre. She is an angel blessed with happiness, the opposite of Maria Callas, who was a character from Greek tragedy.” The article includes a photo of Callas and Gréco.
• A new book of interviews with Janine Reiss has been published in France. It includes a chapter on Maria Callas.
• An exhibit is on in Casarsa (Friuli-Venezia Giulia) for the ninetieth anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s birth: Organizar il trasumanar. Pier Paolo Pasolini cristiano delle origini o gnostico moderno. It includes portraits he made of Callas (one in shown in the article). According to the exhibit’s curator, “With his great sensitivity, Pasolini intuits that Callas will die soon. His passion is for the drama she carries within her.”

Callas and Pasolini in Naples.

Pasolini directed Maria Callas in her only film, Medea (1969), which was recently released on DVD and Blu-ray. He also dedicated poems to her and even made paintings or collages of her.

(Incidentally, the Maria Callas International Archive is looking for the French-language version of Medea, which Callas may have made for the film’s gala première at the Paris Opéra. Can anyone help?)

Here and in the blog archives you will find many posts about Pasolini, including one showing Callas in blue jeans.

Dacia Maraini, a marvelous writer herself, travelled with Callas and Pasolini to Africa. She believes that Callas fell in love with Pasolini and was convinced that she could “cure” him of his homosexuality. It’s hard to tell whether this is yet another way of portraying Callas as “doomed,” forever unhappy in love, or whether Callas in a first moment may have had feelings for Pasolini but then moved on and accepted him as he was. (Forty years ago is a geological era in terms of understanding of queers and queer culture.)

There are many tributes to Pasolini, some worthy and most not, in the Italian press.

Maria Callas as Medea for Pasolini.

La Stampa reports that the tradition of opening the La Scala season on 7 December, the feast day of Saint Ambrose (Milan’s patron), goes back only to 1951, when Callas opened the season in Verdi’s I vespri siciliani. Who knew?

Dacia Maraini reports (again) that Callas wanted to marry Pier Paolo Pasolini. “Maria wanted to ‘cure’ him of his homosexuality. Her idea was rather childish. People don’t change their sexual tendencies at fifty years of age. Pier Paolo loved her a great deal, but platonically. His relationship with Maria wasn’t based on sexuality, only on sentiment.” More on Callas and Maraini here.

Pasolini’s film of Medea starring Maria Callas has just been released in the British Film Institute’s restoration in a dual-format (DVD and Blu-ray) edition in the UK and in separate editions here in the States. (Please correct me if I’m wrong: I don’t own a television set and don’t know from DVDs. That said, I would welcome a big flat-panel monitor as a Jewsmas gift.)

Callas on the beach.

Happy birthday to Maria Callas, who was born on 2 December 1923.

To celebrate, I offer her and you the online equivalent of a dozen red roses: a dozen favorite blog posts about Callas!

• Martha Graham on Callas
• Callas sings Boito
• Callas de cire, Callas de son
• Callas and Isolde
• Video of Callas as Cherubini’s Medea
• Callas in Bellini’s Il pirata
• Rufus Wainwright and Callas
• Callas in Mozart and Verdi
• Dacia Maraini and Callas
• Armen Ra and Callas
• Callas sings Berlioz
• Callas in the Norma finale

If you are looking for words, try my essay, my 2007 tribute to Callas, or the chock-full-of-Rossini birthday post.

Maria Callas in jeans, with Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Okay, so it seems that Maria Callas wore blue jeans more or less as well as President Obama, and less well (sorry, incorrigibles) than Jackie O.

The photo is from a Vogue.it post about the new book by Dacia Maraini, La seduzione dell’altrove. I believe it was taken in Sénégal or Côte d’Ivoire.

Read more about Callas and Dacia Maraini.

P.S. I didn’t even feel the earthquake. Having lived through the quake of ’89 in San Francisco, may I say to my fellow New Yorkers: You’re all sissies.

In this 1971 interview, Pier Paolo Pasolini speaks a little of Callas (towards 6:11). The conversation is wide-ranging, but the immediate context is a question about the people Pasolini most likes—uneducated, illiterate people, he says. The interviewer then asks, “What fascinated you in Maria Callas?”

I’m fascinated by the total violence of her feelings. When she feels something, it’s never a little, mediocre feeling, something understated; when she feels something, she feels it totally, without restraint. It’s this richness of feeling, above all, that I like in her.

The clip is entitled and makes reference to “Timor di me?”, one of the poems that Pasolini wrote about Callas, which takes its title from the scena in Verdi’s Il trovatore.

Read more (lots more, in fact) about Callas and Pasolini. The clip in today’s post includes Callas’s 1958 Paris performance of the Trovatore scene; hear it, as well, in her magnificent 1956 recording of Trovatore conducted by Herbert von Karajan.