{"id":9195,"date":"2026-09-25T18:06:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T16:06:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/?p=9195"},"modified":"2026-09-25T18:07:36","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T16:07:36","slug":"callas-argerich-du-pre-quando-il-corpo-diventa-lo-strumento","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/en\/callas-argerich-du-pre-quando-il-corpo-diventa-lo-strumento\/","title":{"rendered":"Callas, Argerich, du Pr\u00e9. When the body becomes the instrument"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Beatrice Venezi's BLOG \u2013 The Mozart Sisters \u2014 Episode 4<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Anna Maria Cecilia Sofia. Four names in a row, for a girl born in New York on a day in early December 1923 \u2014 the 2nd or the 3rd? We don\u2019t even know that, so much so that she herself, as an adult, will choose her own birthday: the 4th, the day of Saint Barbara, a strong and willful saint. Her mother, that year, had lost a son to an epidemic of typhus, and she would have wanted to replace him with another just like him. For this reason, it is said, she refused to look at her for four days. Thus begins, from the very beginning, the story of Maria Callas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the previous episodes, I promised to continue exploring this book. Tonight I change the genre of the stories: no longer just composers, but performers \u2014 women who did not write the music, but have it written by others.&nbsp;<em>incarnated<\/em>. With the voice, with the hands, with the entire body.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Maria\u2019s Greek surname is Kalogeropoulos: angular, complicated, like her. She will become Kalos, beautiful, and then Callas \u2014 which the world will translate into a single word: divine.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">She studies singing using an abnormal method and technique that forces her to vary her voice between different registers; it is precisely this abnormal effort that will determine her timbre. The \u201c<em>\u201dvocalizing\u201d&nbsp;<\/em>According to Toscanini; such a recognizable, unique and iconic timbre makes her \u201cLa Callas\u201d according to history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He arrived in Italy in 1947. He performed in Verona&nbsp;<em>La Gioconda<\/em>, ,\u00abthe first role that she hears,\u00bb she says, \"under the skin, in the bones, in the flesh.\" She doesn't sing; she understands that at that moment. She becomes what she sings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It is a principle that will lead to extreme consequences. When her own body no longer seems suitable for the roles she plays, Maria imposes a ruthless diet, and loses thirty-six pounds. She keeps a diary in which, for each role, she notes her own weight \u2014 from the ninety-two kilograms of&nbsp;<em>Norma<\/em>&nbsp;from Trieste to the sixty-four of&nbsp;<em>Don Carlo<\/em>, Until the absurd goal of the forty-five. As if the body were a final score to be corrected, before going on stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At the peak of his artistic brilliance, in 1957 in Venice, he met the Greek shipowner Aristotele Onassis. They were married; he was also married. They dated for years, waiting for that love to become official, until Onassis, when he finally left his wife, married another woman: Jacqueline Kennedy.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Always wrong, never enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">From there, Maria's voice begins to crack, fading year after year. Her own explanation for this is the simplest and most accurate:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>\u00abAnd the voice comes from the heart, so if the heart breaks, the voice does the same thing.\u00bb<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He performed for the last time in Sapporo on November 11, 1973. He died in Paris in 1977, at the age of fifty-three.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We remain for a moment in the mystery of a body that becomes music, but we completely change the scene: Buenos Aires, 1949, under the piano of an unknown house; two children have hidden themselves while their respective mothers are chatting outside. They are safe and happy. Her name is Martha Argerich; she is eight years old, and that same year she gives her first real concert. He is Daniel Barenboim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Martha started playing at the age of two and eight months. At nine, before performing a Mozart concerto, she thought:&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>\u00abIf I make even one mistake, I will die.\u00bb.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&nbsp;Here she is already, the little perfectionist whom the world would later call \u00abthe lioness\u00bb. She makes her debut at the Teatro Col\u00f3n in Buenos Aires at the age of eleven \u2014 the same Teatro Col\u00f3n where, many years later, I will have the fortune to conduct \u2014 and at the age of sixteen she wins both the Busoni competition in Bolzano and the one in Geneva that same year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But success, for Martha, does not bring serenity: it brings an irrational panic on the stage, which grows along with fame. At seventeen, in Florence, in order not to play a concert she does not want to face, she cuts off a finger with a knife: in that way, at least, the excuse would have been true. She disappears from the scene for three years. She returns, always, because music \u00abnails her to the easel, to the score, hypnotizes her, and always wins\u00bb. Her mantra, which she will repeat for her entire life, is simple and definitive:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>\u00abYou can't play if you don't live.\u00bb<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">She lives intensely: three daughters from three different men \u2014 a composer, an orchestra conductor, a pianist. Martha has a complicated relationship with motherhood. Her first daughter, Lyda, spends her first months of life in an orphanage: Martha is not ready to be a mother at that time, and it is a wound that will take a lifetime for her to heal.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>\u00abI don't know if I was a good mother\u00bb<\/em>, He will say of himself, decades later.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then she reinterprets motherhood from scratch: for fifteen years, in Lugano, she hosts dozens of young musicians in the Progetto Argerich, sharing with them her own genius, her own experience, her own discipline \u2014 becoming, in effect, the mother of an entire generation of pianists, in a way that she had not succeeded in doing with her own daughters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But now let\u2019s return to that child that Martha hid under the piano with, Daniel Barenboim. Daniel, one day, will meet another musician who will become the other half of this story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Her name is Jacqueline du Pr\u00e9. At the age of four she heard a cello playing on the radio and she told her mother: \u00ab<em>I want one of those!\u00bb<\/em>. From that moment on, she will play with her whole body: the head swinging, the torso rotating along with the instrument, every part of herself designed to intertwine with the cello. At the age of sixteen, she makes her debut at the Wigmore Hall in London. In 1965, she records Elgar\u2019s Cello Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra: an performance that will become, in itself, a milestone in the history of music; her swan song, even though she still doesn\u2019t know it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On New Year's Eve 1966, Daniel Barenboim obtained his own phone number \u2014&nbsp;<em>\u00abthe least romantic way of all\u00bb<\/em>, He will then say \u2014 and she calls him. They get married the following year, in Jerusalem, in front of the Wailing Wall. When they play together, he will remember who saw them, and life seems to become perfect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Only that life, as we know, is not perfect. In 1973, at the age of twenty-eight, a diagnosis confirmed what Jacqueline\u2019s body had already begun to tell on its own: multiple sclerosis. The same hands that had made the cello an extension of their own flesh gradually lose the ability to feel it. They can no longer bear the weight of the bow, nor open the instrument\u2019s case. One of her last students confides to her:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>\u00abThe cello is angry with me. I haven\u2019t played it for years, now.\u00bb<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Jacqueline died in 1987, at the age of forty-two. Barenboim would choose silence about her for years, before breaking that silence with words that remain, even today, the most accurate portrait of an artist like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>\u00abHe had a completely contagious abandon, and I loved him.\u00bb<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Three women who did not have to fight to sign their own music; their battle was another, perhaps even more intimate: to become, with their entire body, the very instrument. And when that body broke down, or had to be divided between the music and everything else \u2014 Maria\u2019s heart, Martha\u2019s panic attacks, Jacqueline\u2019s hands \u2014 the music had to learn to deal with that fracture, or to heal it, as Martha did repeatedly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And here, at the very end of this book made of closed cabinets, of scores taken away secretly, of bodies that become music, there remains one door that I have not yet opened. I promised you this at the very first episode of this series, when I spoke about a nun from the High Middle Ages to whom the Church forbade singing:&nbsp;<em>\u00abIldegarda, I\u2019ll talk to you again, because she deserves her own episode\u00bb<\/em>. I haven\u2019t forgotten it. Next time, we\u2019ll close the loop: we\u2019ll return to the beginning of everything, to the first musician that history remembers, and we\u2019ll finally give her the space she deserves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For today, I leave you with this thought, which will also apply to the next episode: perhaps motherhood is not just about children. It is giving life to a note that no one had ever heard before. It is passing it on to those who will come after us. It is, at its core, accepting another person\u2019s music as if it were our own. Generating, in the end, can be done in many ways, and next time we will discover that a nun from the High Middle Ages already understood this, in her own way, many centuries before all of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Beatrice Venezi<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading has-text-align-center has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-1\" style=\"color:#093969\"><em><mark style=\"background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0);color:#093969\" class=\"has-inline-color\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/en\/il-blog-di-beatrice-venezi\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/il-blog-di-beatrice-venezi\/\">Back to the Blog<\/a><\/mark><\/em><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Il BLOG di Beatrice Venezi &#8211; Le\u00a0Sorelle\u00a0di Mozart \u2014 Episodio\u00a04. Anna Maria Cecilia Sofia. Quattro nomi in fila, per una bambina nata a New York in un giorno di inizio dicembre del 1923 \u2014 il 2, il 3? Non si sa nemmeno questo, tanto che sar\u00e0&nbsp;lei stessa, da grande, a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9199,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpzoom_pinterest_image_url":"","_wpzoom_pinterest_hidden_image":"0","_wpzoom_pinterest_description":"","_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[110],"tags":[133,111,132,134,131],"class_list":["post-9195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-beatrice-venezi-blog","tag-argerich","tag-blogbeatricevenezi","tag-callas","tag-dupre","tag-sorelledimozart"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"featured_media_urls":{"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover-300x178.jpg",300,178,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover-768x455.jpg",768,455,true],"large":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover.jpg",810,480,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover.jpg",810,480,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover.jpg",810,480,false],"trp-custom-language-flag":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover-18x12.jpg",18,12,true],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover.jpg",810,480,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover.jpg",810,480,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover-600x480.jpg",600,480,true],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover-600x480.jpg",600,480,true],"loop":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover-810x320.jpg",810,320,true],"featured":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover-431x255.jpg",431,255,true],"featured@2x":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover.jpg",810,480,false],"featured-fixed":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover-431x265.jpg",431,265,true],"featured-fixed@2x":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover.jpg",810,480,false],"featured-wide":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover.jpg",810,480,false],"featured-cat":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover-256x167.jpg",256,167,true],"featured-cat@2x":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover-512x334.jpg",512,334,true],"single-featured":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover.jpg",810,480,false],"single-featured@2x":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover.jpg",810,480,false],"carousel":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover-276x180.jpg",276,180,true],"portfolio_item-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover.jpg",600,356,false],"portfolio_item-thumbnail@2x":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover.jpg",810,480,false],"portfolio_item-masonry":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover.jpg",600,356,false],"portfolio_item-masonry@2x":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bv_BLOG_2026.09.25-Le-sorelle-di-Mozart-4-cover.jpg",810,480,false],"portfolio_item-thumbnail_cinema":["https:\/\/www.beatricevenezi.it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