Callas and Pasolini

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.