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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2020
The idea of being overwhelmed by musical and visual effects is a recurrent theme in the critical reception of Cherubini’s three Parisian operas of the 1790s. The word ‘sublime’ is frequently employed, and in ways that suggest something more specific than a critical shorthand for excellence: a quality rooted in revolutionary experience. In Médée, it was the talents of the singer Julie-Angelique Scio in the title role that most attracted the term: the vengeful heroine murders her children and leaps into the flames that are consuming the palace. When Médée premiered in 1797, the nation was still recovering from the trauma of the Terror following the fall of Maximilien Robespierre in July 1794: Parisians of all political stripes were coming to terms with this extended period of violence and vengeance. The power and vulnerability apparently conveyed by Scio in the role can be understood as allowing spectators to experience Médée’s sublimation of her fury as the sublimation of their own unresolved emotions following the Terror.
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