Prima Donna

In Opera, or the Undoing of Women, Catherine Clément raged against posthumous accounts of Maria Callas, decrying them as necrophiliac and insufficient: ‘When she died, discreetly, lost to a heart attack when no one was looking at her anymore, when she died her real death, the sad phenomenon of posthumous adulation began for her. A few months later, time to dictate and publish a few hurried words, there appeared some pathetic love songs glorifying Maria Callas. They were all men, these eulogist clowns’ (Paris, 1979; trans. Betsy Wing with foreword by Margaret Reynolds, London, 1997, p. 28). Clément’s fury is rooted in what she described as Callas’s double death: her actual death on 16 September 1977 and the death that, Clément implies, was far worse for the diva—when Callas retired from the stage in 1965, fading thereafter from public view and adulation. Since Clément penned this scathing passage in...

Art · Art history · Opera · Psychoanalysis · Undoing · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Theatre and Performance Studies