In his review of the premiere of Thomas Adès’s second opera, The Tempest (2004), the critic Rupert Christiansen singled out the demands made on the soprano Cyndia Sieden, claiming that ‘such cruelty to singers shouldn't be allowed’. This is just one instance of a longstanding trope in the critical and scholarly reception of Adès’s operas, in which the extremes required of the performers is both celebrated (for its virtuosity) and lamented (for the dangers it poses, and the impact on intelligibility). Considerably less attention has been given, however, to what this means for the operatic experience – the play of representation and presence, the staging of the voice, and the dramatic function of these vocal challenges.

In this paper, I combine insights from music analytical and performance studies methodologies to offer close readings of vocal staging in productions of The Tempest from the Royal Opera House (2004), the New York Metropolitan Opera (2012) and the Wiener Staatsoper (2015). Taking as my cue Adès’s description of opera as a ‘mysterious thing […] when something non-visual like a musical score is acted out by people moving on a stage’, I argue that there is an intimate relationship between vocal staging (and the concomitant risk of vocal failure) and power dynamics in The Tempest, mediated by the particularities of production and performance.