“O cuore dono fatale Retaggio di dolore, Il mio destino è questo:

O morte, O morte, O Amore! O Heart, fatal gift, legacy of pain, my destiny is death: Death or Love!” Night after night, Maria Callas, the diva assoluta, lent an unforgettably powerful voice of equal beauty and vulnerability to female characters who would die for love in Tosca, La Traviata, Norma, Medea or in the opera quoted here, La Gioconda. Every night, she died an operatic death on stage until 1977, when she died of a coronary at the age of 53, alone, addicted to pills and broken-voiced. Her death was a deeply-felt shock. The obsequies took place at Saint Stéphane, the Greek-Orthodox cathedral of Paris; her urn was buried at the famous cemetery Père Lachaise.Two years later, the singer posthumously returned to the land of her ancestors when her ashes were transported to Greece and scattered over the Ionian Sea in a symbolic act, off the coast of the island Skorpios, where Aristoteles Onassis, the love of her life, was buried. She was admired for her unsurpassed vocal mastery, the repertoire of abysses that she reached with her voice and for her existential embodiment. Her death became the signum of a declining era of emotional culture, transcendence and veracity. She embodied the romantic soul like no other. In a chilly bourgeois culture that generated serial aesthetics and normative parameters in art, Maria Callas seemed like a relic from a long-forgotten time. After her death, she became a myth, an immortal icon.

The diva as a disruptive incident

According to cultural critic Elisabeth Bronfen, there is something divine inherent in the diva and at the same time something fragile, fatal and damaged. It is her charisma that elevates her above the normal star and renders her an “accident” in the industrial machinery of the star system. For Elisabeth Bronfen, divas continually operate on the limits, turning them into martyrs who burn themselves out mentally and physically to the point of self-abandonment, crushed by their extreme creativity. Their twin nature of being both a figure of identification and redemption is the reason why they are admired. There is something “sacred” about them, something that opposes the “pure reason” of our everyday culture like a disruption. In a disenchanted world, the diva represents a brief recapture of charm and magic, a compensation for our discordant everyday world, because she herself is damaged. According to Bronfen, her magical charisma warms our present day by bringing her fervour into our sad, cold routine life with its shortcomings and defects. 

Grotesque displacement of reality

In Federico Fellini’s 1983 masterpiece E la nave va (And the Ship sails on), there is a similar waft of grief over the loss of a diva and the longing for her reincarnation. In his films, Fellini brought the unknown fears, longings and oppressed emotions of an otherwise hidden world to the surface. The portentous death of Maria Callas had evidently served as inspiration for this film. And so And the Ship sails on begins with the death of the most famous opera singer of all times: Edmea Tetua. In her last will and testament, she had postulated that her ashes be scattered on her native island in the middle of the ocean. On the eve of the First World War, a bourgeois community of mourners sets out on the luxury liner Gloria N. to show their last respects to the singer.

The crème de la créme of the opera world are on board. On the lower decks, there are enthusiastic stokers, a rhinoceros that is malodorous with love-sickness, and Serbian refugees who have taken sanctuary on the ship after the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Fellini’s images are grotesque displacements of reality, for instance when there is a singing competition in front of the sweating working-classes in the burning-hot furnace room, a blind princess is able to see the colours of music, the spirit of Edmea Tetua is invoked to appear from the realm of the dead, a Russian bass-baritone hypnotizes a chicken in the kitchen and Italian arias are blithely sung to conciliate the classes and cultures. 

A danse macabre between life and death

And the Ship sails on reveals how Fellini’s early experiences in the world of circus and music-hall, his admiration of clowns and his work as a cartoon artist were refined by the poetry of film over the years. Fellini’s burlesque cast of characters oscillates between clowning, circus-games and comic figuration

His tableaus have something of the Baroque about them and inform his inherent style, masterfully uniting the carnival’s spectacle, the cruelty of our proximity to death, the Kafkaesque horror of incomprehensibility and the infernal nature of a Dantesque purgatory. Sebastian Brant’s satirical Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools) – written at a time of epochal change in the late 15^th century – may well have been an inspiration. In Brant’s work, a community of fools set out on a mindless journey across the sea to Narragonia as an allegory for human life, a journey with an uncertain outcome, ultimately leading to catastrophe due to human vices and wantonness.

Fellini’s cinematic masterpiece is an oratorio of the dead for the diva whose return is longed for in a world that bears the stamp of capitalism, globalization, war and declining values. But Fellini’s community is ambivalent: On the one hand, the Bohemians are desperate for the return of the diva, of a long-lost era; on the other, they have themselves become agents of the progress of cultural decline. Their actions are no longer held up to the standard of the “sacred” but are motivated by optimist-rationalistic reason. Their folly lies in their blindness to approaching death.

The political catastrophe is not long in coming. An Austrian warship demands the surrender of the foreign passengers. An incident leads to cannon fire on the Gloria N. and the ship sinks in the sea. The harbingers of impending war and downfall are everywhere. As the Grand Duke says in the film, Fellini’s community of mourners celebrate their final festivity “on the volcano’s edge”, in a burlesque spectacle that reveals the internal realm of consciousness of a society on the brink of downfall.

In spite of its tragic plot, the film has a utopian element about it. Fellini reveals a world of misfits behind the stereotypical cast of characters: clowns, acrobats of life, people marginalised by society who glorify failure as the principle of hope and ask us to join a danse macabre between life and death, dream and reality.

Viva la Diva!