‘Medea’ Review: A Mother’s Operatic Malevolence

The Metropolitan Opera is mounting this diva vehicle (in Italian) for the first time in a new David McVicar starring Sondra Radvanovsky.

Sondra Radvanovsky as Medea

PHOTO: MARTY SOHL/THE METROPOLITAN OPERA

By Heidi Waleson

Updated Sept. 28, 2022 5:11 pm

Luigi Cherubini’s “Medea” (1797) is a diva vehicle, which should have made it a perfect choice for the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera season on Tuesday. Originally written in French with spoken dialogue and subsequently translated into Italian with recitatives, it was embraced by Maria Callas, the consummate diva, in 1953. The Met is mounting it (in Italian) for the first time to showcase soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who has the vocal goods and stage presence for the role of the revenge-crazed sorceress. However, the opera itself, even in this eye-catching new production directed and designed by David McVicar, is a creaky thing. Midway through Act 2, during Giasone and Medea’s heated exchange about their children, I started wondering idly if a good divorce lawyer could have solved their problem. That’s not the desired reaction; rather, one should be transfixed by Medea and the extreme exaggeration of her character. She wants Giasone back. If she can’t have him, there will be hell to pay.

Medea

The Metropolitan Opera, 30 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York 
$32.50-$302.50, 212-362-600, closes Oct. 28 

As you may recall from Greek myth, Medea helped Giasone (Jason in the original) acquire the Golden Fleece, murdering several of her own family members in the process. Giasone has now abandoned her, taking their two sons, and is planning to marry Glauce, daughter of Creonte, King of Corinth. At the start of the opera, wedding preparations are in progress and Glauce is understandably concerned that Medea will turn up and cause trouble. She does. When we first see her, she’s lurking in a tattered black dress, with smeared eye makeup and snaky hair, outside the palace, a hulking fortress-like wall whose bronze patinaed doors slide open to reveal life going on without her. To ensure that we get the full view, Mr. McVicar made the rear interior wall a giant, tilted mirror that reflects the stage picture, disorientingly, from above and in reverse. 

Once Medea finally arrives—there’s half an hour of introductory material—it’s all about her. Ms. Radvanovsky started off well, demonstrating Medea’s cunning: her slow, incisive vocal delivery and movement were deliberate contrasts with the hysteria provoked by her appearance in all the other characters. Even her pleading with Giasone (a forthright, self-important Matthew Polenzani) had a duplicitous edge, and when she dropped her pretense to call on hell to punish him, her tone narrowed tellingly. However, the metallic character of Ms. Radvanovsky’s potent, disciplined soprano became monochromatic after a while, so by the middle of Act 2—and certainly Act 3, when Medea is in full cry—there wasn’t enough variety in it to sustain interest, let alone sympathy. Even her vacillations about whether to kill the children in order to punish her perfidious husband were not very convincing. She’s nuts, and we know where this is going.

That was a problem since the opera’s drama is all internal. Cherubini and his librettist—François-Benoît Hoffman; Italian translation by Carlo Zangarini—supplied only flimsy antagonists and background action. Glauce (delicately sung by Janai Brugger) basically disappeared after her opening scene and aria. Creonte (a bluff Michele Pertusi) and Giasone made brief, unsuccessful attempts to bully, corral and patronize Medea; chorus scenes like the plodding wedding march and the lengthy act preludes had little musical profile despite the efforts of conductor Carlo Rizzi. Only mezzo Ekaterina Gubanova as Neris, Medea’s confidante, stood out with her lyrical lament “Solo un pianto,” gorgeously accompanied by a solo bassoon. The aria is about how Neris feels Medea’s grief and for a moment, we had a visceral sense of where all the fury began. 

Janai Brugger and Michele Pertusi

PHOTO: MARTY SOHL/THE METROPOLITAN OPERA

Yet even during Neris’s aria, Mr. McVicar made sure that the fury was still present: During its final section, Medea opened a trunk and examined the poisoned robe and diadem that she will give to Glauce as a wedding gift. There were many such directorial touches. Giasone’s crew, the Argonauts, were dressed as pirates and did a jaunty dance as they presented Creonte with the Golden Fleece and a chest full of treasure. This outlaw garb, like Medea’s, differentiated them from the Corinth courtiers, who were elegantly dressed in French neoclassical style. (Doey Lüthi designed the costumes; Jo Meredith the movement; Paule Constable the lighting). 

The tilted mirror’s best function was to visually amplify certain staging elements at different moments. The image of the banquet table stuffed with glowing candelabra in Act 1, and the bride’s enormous veil, covering much of the floor in Act 2 were combined to grisly effect in Act 3, when Glauce, in her poisoned robe, writhed in mortal agony on her belly atop the blood-stained tablecloth. The murder of the children, thankfully, took place offstage. The final mirrored image of Medea lying with her sons in a ring of fire (the projections were designed by S. Katy Tucker) was oddly serene, since her final words to Giasone are basically, “See you in hell!” It seemed like a last-ditch plea for sympathy, like the lovers’ suicide tableau in the movie of “Sophie’s Choice.” Something closer to the original 1797 staging, in which Medea flew off in a fiery chariot, would probably have been more suited to this performance. 

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).