Music Quote by Maria Jeritza

Jeritza is quietly puncturing the romantic myth of the opera singer as a stationary, disembodied voice. Her line shifts the prestige from sheer vocal horsepower to total performance labor: the sweat, the athletic staging, the psychological inhabiting of a character while doing something physiologically unnatural (projecting over an orchestra without amplification). It reads like a corrective aimed at audiences who applaud the high note but overlook the bruises that often come with it.

The subtext is also a defense of professionalism in an era when opera was becoming more theatrically ambitious. Early 20th-century production trends pushed singers out of the old “park and bark” tradition toward modern realism: more credible acting, more movement, more directorial concept. Jeritza isn’t diminishing singing; she’s reframing “exertion” as a composite skill, where the body is an instrument under duress. The word “nearly” is telling - she leaves room for exceptions while still making an industry-wide critique.

Context matters: Jeritza was a major star in the Met and Vienna orbit, coming of age as opera straddled late-Romantic spectacle and a modern appetite for dramatic truth. Her observation anticipates today’s conversations about invisible labor in performance, especially for women, whose credibility has often been policed as much by physical presence as by sound. It’s a warning and a brag: the job is harder than you think, and that’s the point.