A sofa with a small gramophone next to it and a bed of red flowers await Monica Bellucci as the GIO Symphonia plays the delicious intermezzo of Cavalleria rusticana. The night promises. The public fills the stalls of the Auditori del Parc at the Peralada Festival. And the wonderful sound that emanates from Francesc Prat's baton at the head of the GIO Symphonia when they start with Pietro Mascagni's opera bodes well for the best.
But what was going to be a montage to discover the truth of Maria Callas in her own handwriting, that Lettres et mémoires in which her letters and private files are recited, tends to become, after the first twenty minutes of the show, a plaintive moan with no solution of continuity. And without a glimpse of the hand of a stage director.
From the letters chosen in this proposal by photographer and filmmaker Tom Volf –who in fact leaves theatrical direction orphaned in the playbill– emanates a woman who basically demands affection and recognition. And Bellucci delves into that litany in a mournful and excessively sweet tone, whatever the stage of life in which the soprano wrote the letter – they go from 1947 to shortly before her death, in 1977 – and whoever it is addressed to: from her husband Meneghini, her teacher, the Spanish Elvira Hidalgo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, whom she asks to mature. It is an option. The Italian actress can take the path she wants, after all, the public comes to see her, with her exquisite manners and her personality.
However, his reading of Callas, not exempt from hieraticism and with small displacements inside the comfortable sofa that presides over the scene, distances the public from the character. Because despite her emotional shortcomings, Callas was also a woman of tears and tears who faced the world alone, just as Bellucci defended her these days before the press: "a brave woman who followed her heart" . And there is no shortage of documentary images in which she is seen using irony to talk about her vital complaints and pleas.
Peralada had chosen French as the language of the show and not English (in which Callas wrote) or Italian (by Monica Bellucci) precisely to welcome the public from the neighboring country, which responded generously to the festival's call. She was also justified by the fact that it was staged in the diva's apartment, in which she died in circumstances never clarified in 1977.
In the first part, letters and memoirs from the 1950s appeared, in which the artist recounted her harsh childhood. Born in New York, she soon moved to Greece, where she encountered war and misery. Years in which she lives a great first love with Meneghini, with whom she ends up marrying. She also sends letters to her great teacher, Elvira de Hidalgo, telling her about her professional achievements and her rise to fame.
One of the letters refers to how the press is fattening her after the terrible night of hoarseness at the Rome Opera that forces her to cancel. "Why, if the only thing that happens is that I have bronchitis?" People wait for you to fail when you are a successful person, she comes to say.
In the sixties she falls in love with Onassis and overwhelms him with letters in which she expresses her devotion to him with absolute sincerity. And in the third part, leaving behind the sixties, Bellucci shows a lost Callas. Approaching the piano and the cello (which plays the solo from Andrea Chénier's “La Mama Morta”), he narrates his separation from Onassis and his professional decline. Years of nostalgia and loneliness in which he can no longer stand the tension and nerves of the stage and wants to stop singing.
The musical moments are beautiful and the alternation of live instruments and the recorded voice of the soprano, as well as the lighting exercise, are very elegant. La gioconda or the introduction of the aria “Casta Diva” by Norma, which made her so famous, were played, here also in the voice of Callas herself. Or the prelude to La traviata, hers, another great role for her, from which she can be heard singing “Amami Alfredo”. She listens to Medea and an instrumental version of Tosca's “E lucevan le stelle” or La sonnambula's “Ah non creata mirati”. Emotions that reach a climax of her hearing her in her Vissi d’Arte de Tosca.
