How much body is there in the voice? The comparative analysis of Maria Callas’s and Sondra Radvanovsky’s portrayals of Luigi Cherubini’s Medea

Abstract

Staging Luigi Cherubini’s opera Medea is a venture that has rarely been taken on even by major opera houses. The main reason is an extremely demanding leading role, in terms of its vocal, physical, and psychological aspects. Known for uniting these aspects in her portrayals of tragic opera heroines, it is no surprise that Maria Callas was one of the few ideal exponents of this role. To assess her performance of Medea, we had at our disposal one studio recording, several live audio recordings, some short video excerpts, and photos. However, no integral video of the opera staging is commercially available. Deciding to use a lack of visual trace of Callas’s performance to our advantage, we came to the core idea for this paper. We propose a question: is the body aspect missing in the audio performance or is it even more present? In order to answer this question we explored the relationship between implicit gestures in music and their correspondence with the corporeality of the voice, i.e. gestures in vocal performance. The starting point of our methodological frame is Robert Hatten’s theory of musical gesture and Arnie Cox’s exploration in the field of the embodied experience of music perception. The embodiment of the psychological-archetypal dimension of Medea’s character is analyzed on two levels – that of musical gestures and that of performative gestures, with an additional aim to observe how their synchronicity affects voice corporeality. Missing the complete video leads the research further, posing the question: how does the experience of voice-corporeality change with the visual aspect of the performance? Therefore, we chose Sondra Radvanovsky’s body-engaging performance of Medea in the 2022 production of Metropolitan Opera. We submitted it to the same analytical process, for the purpose of determining how the additional layer of body gestures enhances or diminishes the effect of voice corporeality.