Little-Known Operas
Patrick Donnelly
The lush, lexically gorgeous and emotionally complex poems of Little-Known Operas guide us through the terrain of love, sex, same-sex marriage, illness, death, and art.
“MARIA CALLAS WENT TO HAMBURG” from Little-Known Operas
In 1959 when Maria Callas went to Hamburg her hair
was still neoclassical. In the film she emerges at 0 minutes:
7 seconds, silk legs the clapper of an underwater bell.
But the moment I need to tell about is at 42:30, prelude
of the Pirata aria, when resting her left hand
on the conductor’s cage, head down eyes closed, cloistered,
thirty seconds forty fifty, she doesn’t know us, we are nowhere and no one,
descending figure, strings distressed, dissonant, trembling, swelling,
(remember Mom in the ‘60s? her door closed sometimes till noon—)