In Her Own Words: The Soprano Who Delivers Pain as Performance
In a quiet room of rehearsal, Lithuanian soprano Ausrine Stundyte offers a blunt truth: “I am totally not a feminist.” It’s a line that lands with a paradoxical force, revealing a performer who refuses to be boxed by labels even as she speaks candidly about the politics of art, body, and voice. What follows is a conversation that threads through trauma, adrenaline, and the challenge of embodying a character who is as ancient as a relic and as immediate as a pulse in the room.
Trauma as a Musical Grammar
Stundyte’s career has been marked by roles that demand the vulnerability of the body and the honesty of memory. When she speaks of trauma, she isn’t offering a catalog of experiences but a method of singing and acting: pain is not a state to endure but a grammar to translate. In Janáček’s intricate scores, the voice becomes a map, tracing the tremors of history through sound. For a soprano who excels at Vivaldi clarity and Janáček intensity, trauma is both a personal backstory and a universal language that audiences recognize even when the words escape them.
Adrenaline: The Engine Behind the Performance
Adrenaline isn’t a mere byproduct for Stundyte; it’s the engine that powers her performances. The room’s energy shifts when she steps into a scene, and the adrenaline she channels is not reckless bravado but a precise instrument. She speaks of adrenaline as a companion in the audition room, on tour, and under the stage lights, where a 300-year-old character can still feel startlingly present. It’s this mixture of controlled risk and refined technique that makes her stand out: a soprano who understands that fear can sharpen timing, and timing can bend the audience’s sense of time itself.
The 300-Year-Old Woman: A Portrait Beyond Age
Taking on a role that may physically outlive the actor requires more than impressive vocal stamina. The 300-year-old woman in question is not a costume or a cosmetic idea but a living archive—an embodiment of memory, longing, and the weight of centuries. For Stundyte, the challenge is to keep the character alive in every breath, to ensure that the years are felt coherently in the voice, posture, and temperament. She emphasizes that age in opera isn’t a gimmick; it’s a historical voice speaking through the present tense. Her approach blends rigorous research with an instinctive, almost tactile sense of how time should vibrate in sound.
Technique Meets Truth: The Singing-Acting Hybrid
Opera demands a rare synthesis: the technical precision of a trained singer and the vérité of a stage actor. Stundyte’s method respects both sides. She rehearses not only the notes but the psychology of the character, letting memory, pain, and hope infuse the phrase with legitimacy. This is where the adrenaline-fueled intensity converges with the fragile honesty of trauma: the audience watches a performance that feels inevitable, like a moment the singer has been living in for years, even when it is newly born on the stage.
Beyond the Spotlight: Craft, Choice, and Identity
Her remark about feminism might be shocking at first glance, but it also signals a larger question: how does a performer navigate identity in a world that wants easy labels? For Stundyte, the answer lies in the craft—choosing roles that expand the repertoire, challenging herself with characters that demand unusual emotional and vocal demands, and letting those choices be the true test of who she is as an artist. The result is a career that resists easy categorization, anchored in a seriousness about language, texture, and breath that defines her voice as well as her person.
Conclusion: A Voice That Endures and Revolves
As the interview closes, the sense remains that Ausrine Stundyte is not merely performing music but translating time itself. She is good at doing pain, yes, but she is also astute about how pain becomes memory, memory becomes music, and music becomes a living, breathing presence on stage. In this sense, the 300-year-old woman is not an achievement but a philosophy of connection—between past and present, between body and story, between audience and the night’s performance.
