Comparative Study On The Vocal Music Performance Features Of Maria Callas And Angela Gheorghiu

Maria Callas and Angela Gheorghiu are great representatives among the singers in today’s opera and classical music circle due to their great opera singing skills and rich opera literacy. Both of their singings have deep breath, vigorous resonance, clear sound, changeable mood and tone, giving the opera singing the innovation spirit and new meaning. In this thesis, Maria Callas and Angela Gheorghiu’s performance are compared from a number of perspectives. Their vocal styles are compared from their life experience, cultural background and singing skills. Their singing features are compared from their breath and resonance, tone and intensity, role shaping and emotion. Callas and Gheorghiu were capable of singing long musical phrases with as little breath as possible. They merged their own feelings and skills into the musical pieces on the basics of understanding these pieces for deeper understanding and interpretation of the characters in their operas.Maria Callas and Angela Gheorghiu had shown their own vocal music performance features and singing skills even though they had similar timbre in their performances. Callas was good at applying the chest acoustic resonance to interpret the high pitch with her higher resonance position and good at using breath to deal with the trend of melody. She was good at merging appropriately her emotion into the music works according to the playwright and composer’s creative intent. Her handling of the music works was more close to the inner monologue and inner struggle of the characters. Gheorghiu’s voice was rich, beautiful, gentle, and lyrical. Compared with Callas, her sound was more concentrated. In the use of breath, she pursued the coherence of sounds and the breath control and the use of skills. In shaping the roles, she focused on the sound, making full use of the perfect voice to express the opera characters and their emotion.The comparison study on Callas’and Gheorghiu’s performance features indicates that, it needs to take a long time for any singers to lean and practice to form his/her own singing features. Singers could apply freely the vocal performance skills in handling the music works and merge naturally their emotion into their performance of the opera characters by continual learning and training, so as to interpret appropriately music works and obtain stronger artistic appeal.