RADVANOVSKY'S "MEDEA" AT THE LYRIC OPERA REHABILITATES A TRUE ANTI-HERO

In Madeline Miller’s novel Circe, the famous title witch has occasion to speak to her niece, Medea. Circe, who turns many of Odysseus’ men into pigs before he persuades her to change them back and she gets in bed with him, warns Medea that her husband Jason is waning in his feelings for her. Medea will not listen. “They will never take Jason from me,” Medea says in the novel. “I have my powers, and I will use them.” Circe, whom Miller turns from a villain to a feminist anti-hero by empathizing with her where males have not over centuries of representations, fears the worst will happen in Medea’s case. Miller can rehabilitate Circe, but she can’t quite rehabilitate Medea. The bloody conclusion of Medea’s story is well known to most people with a passing knowledge of Greek myth. She kills both of her children to get back at her ex-husband as he marries a new bride, kills that new bride and sets fire to the temple. A hard character to rehabilitate.

But then, Miller didn’t have Sondra Radvanovsky in the role, as did the Lyric Opera in last night’s season opening production of Luigi Cherubini’s 1797 Medea. Radvanovsky’s torrid, spot-on performance as the blood-soaked Medea manages to get both sides of the character: her humanity and her evil. The result is that the Lyric’s Medea, a production that was originated by New York's Metropolitan Opera three years ago, contributes to the trend toward revisions of the classics that empathize with powerful women characters who have otherwise been viewed as a menace. As stories were largely told by men through the bulk of the many centuries of storytelling, a powerful woman was a fearsome thing in myth after myth, play after play, story after story. Examples besides Medea and Circe include, as I pointed out last month, opera anti-heroines Armida and Alcina.

The effort to empathize with Medea was conscious in this production, as the Lyric’s web page for Medea makes clear. “I find that in any opera I do, not just with the wicked women or the dark women, but with any woman that I play, I try to understand the character’s background and find what makes them human,” Radvanovsky says in an interview on the Lyric web site. “The easy route to go is to lean into her darkness and the ‘I'm going to kill you and I hate you’ side of her. And the more interesting way to play her is to explore her changing feelings and how her emotions change at the drop of a dime. I think the audience can relate to that more because it's more human.”

I also pointed out in last month’s post on the new opera season that I had been disappointed that the Lyric was leading off with Medea simply because many Chicagoans saw it on movie screens in a live broadcast from the Met of a nearly identical production in 2023. Perhaps the familiarity of this production might help account for the fact that Saturday night’s crowd was somewhat undersold, with roughly half of the usually mostly full upper balcony empty. It sapped some energy from the (literal) red carpet event, which is usually packed with excited patrons in their most elegant attire. (Though any outfit is OK.) I tossed around a few theories in my head about why sales were down. The Cubs were playing what proved to be their final game of the postseason (no one knew until late Thursday night, so that wasn’t it); the news about the national guard and ICE patrolling the streets had scared off opera patrons (possible, though the streets were quiet and safe Saturday night as a judge had prevented the national guard’s immediate deployment). But those who stayed home to watch the Cubs or were scared of a government occupation missed a great show.

Medea is an underperformed opera but not a perfect one. Director David McVicar had to overcome the problem that most of the action in the story takes place off the stage, both before the opera starts and in its wrenching conclusion. McVicar, who has directed more productions at the Met than anyone, having just edged out Met Opera legend Franco Zefferelli a few years ago, oversaw one of his most beautifully designed productions. I tend to find his work somewhat dark and dull, but this one created enough visual interest to carry what otherwise can play as sort of a concert performance as the singers tend to stand on stage and sing rather than act. In the first act, a mirror at the back of the set gives us an overhead view of the well-dressed crowd at Jason's wedding, seemingly doubling the size of the festivities and thus also their import. In the last act, a swirl of flame created by projection shows us without question the results of Medea's ire even as her violent acts are kept off stage as called for in the libretto.

Radvanovsky is from Chicago but is one of the truly elite singers of her generation. An international star, in another day she would have been a household name. Her voice is unique. While Cherubini owes what little fame he has acquired mainly to the fact that Maria Callas revived this little-performed gem in the 1950s, the great Callas had a very pretty voice, a decorous if strident vibrato that emphasized the feminine more than Radvanovsky's voice. Not necessarily what’s called for from Medea. In fact, listening to Callas’s Medea one hardly knows the story is so bloody. The music is beautiful and rarely hints at fury. Radvanovsky’s voice is beautiful too, but its upper range has jagged edges and its lower range guttural growls. Thus the wicked she-animal Medea is an ideal role for Sondra Radvanovsky. I’ve seen Radvanovsky several times, and her distinctive voice fits some roles and arias better than others. In Norma, her performance of “Casta Diva” put her powerful robust voice in an aria that calls for prettiness. I prefer Callas and Renee Fleming on that bit of bel canto. But she does not lack versatility: The New York Times last season crowned her the best of a series of sopranos who sang Tosca at the Met last year, including the more hyped (and equally brilliant) Lise Davidsen. The NYT dubbed Radvanovsky “one of the role’s finest interpreters today.”

While the Met was doing its rotating Toscas last season, my brother and I exchanged quick text messages about Davidsen and Radvanovsky’s competing performances of Tosca’s classic aria, “Vissi d’Arte.” My brother commented that he thought he might prefer Sondra. I replied that “Sondra is very interesting. Her high notes are unique marvels; piercing. But she feels like she’s running to catch up against the orchestra, which actually lends to a certain powerful heft to Tosca’s pain because it’s like she is so affected by emotion that she can almost not keep up. Lise is perfection; beautiful lines of pure ice extending into the rafters. But she isn’t quite as moved by her own words. Either could be better on a given night.” My brother replied, “True. I think it was Sondra’s lack of control that weakened her 'Casta Diva.'” This is the kind of debate such world-class voices inspire, putting the lie to the common claim that today’s opera stars can’t match the power of the stars of yesteryear.

Radvanovsky was not the only major star in the Lyric’s Medea Saturday night, which got rave reviews this afternoon from both the Chicago Tribune and ChicagoClassicalReview.com. Matthew Polenzani, who is also from the Chicago area, has performed many roles at the Met and around the world. His Jason, Medea’s husband, was perfectly unlikable. One can’t help but sympathize with Medea’s husband, but Polenzani played Jason as something of a brute, helping us see the agony in Medea’s situation even more clearly. The rest of the cast, dressed like a colorful crowd at a dinner thrown by Marie Antoinette, provided a powerful counterpoint. Zoie Reams as Medea’s one loyal assistant, Neris, was particularly strong, earning an especially robust cheer during the enthusiastic curtain call. The response was well deserved even though her character could easily have prevented the infamous slaying of Jason's offspring by picking a hiding place for Medea's murder weapon other than the very place where the livid mother usually keeps it.

Cherubini’s score is a find for opera companies looking to stage something rarely done yet full of accessible melodies. Conductor Enrico Mazzoli (who brought brio to the production though his overture lacked the gusto of the Met’s version) on the Lyric’s web site commented that the score has the principals singing bitter, sharp lines of dialogue – horrifying lines – in beautiful, tuneful C major and G major rather than in minor keys. This, he says, is scarier than the typical way of setting horrific dialogue in opera because it’s like having someone smile at you while delivering the worst sentiments possible.

Radvanovsky on the Lyric web site again: “This is a woman who is at the end of her rope because she loves this man so much, and she loves her children so much, she would do anything to keep that family unit together. That, to me, is the heart of the story. It's about love and being scorned in love, and that’s a universal feeling. So many of us can relate to that kind of heartbreak. By the time we meet her in the opera, she has been chased halfway around the world, and across the ocean, to find Jason. And when she does? He's with another woman. And well, you can imagine what happens next.”

What happens next is a blood-bath. The opera runs for five more performances before disappearing from Chicago. Hopefully more people will catch this one before that happens.