ABSTRACT
The opera stage is a prime locus for study of human disability. The sheer corporeality of opera's medium, fraught with singers' blaring vocal chords, heaving chests, and exaggerated body gestures, lays bare the human body's physicality and vulnerability as in no other performed genre of music. The physical demands of singing, coupled with dramaturgical concerns of staging, blocking, and oftentimes dance, render opera the most bodily of musical arts. Failure of the human body at the task of singing not only endangers the exigencies of live performance but also has been encoded into the genre in unique and profound ways. Hutcheon and Hutcheon (2000: 54–5, 74–9) noted audiences' incredulousness when disabled opera characters such as the hunchback Rigoletto, and the three crippled brothers in Richard Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten, are capable not only of physically commanding the stage but of singing ably and beautifully as well. Clark (2003) commented on the curious role of protagonist for the mute woman Fenella in Daniel Auber's 1828 opera La muette de Portici, despite her character never uttering a word. Her mere physical presence on stage localizes disability within the human body—in this case the vocal chords—as a permanent inability to sing.
