Maria Callas
The Human Voice as a Site
of Intensified Feeling
And there I listened to this magical voice, and in a single phrase I heard love lost and found, hatred and forgiveness, the desire to die and to live.
“Who is that singer?” asked the man.
I said: “Maria Callas! Thank you, thank you. For that, for — everything."
- Fanny Ardant (French Actress, NY Times, 2021)
In every moment of our lives, Whitehead suggests in Process and Reality, we are aiming at satisfying intensity—not simply happiness, but vitality; not merely peace of mind, but, to use Whitehead's phrase in Adventures of Ideas, strength of beauty. This aim is not fulfilled by uniformity or calm alone. Vitality requires contrast.
Such contrast consists in the felt juxtaposition of the many experiences of the past actual world that are given to us in memory, both consciously and unconsciously. Our aim is not to dissolve these differences but to feel them together, so that each remains what it is while standing in relation to the others: love lost and found, hatred and forgiveness, the desire to die and the desire to live.
Moreover, the experiences we inherit are not limited to our own personal histories. The many that become one in the immediacy of a moment include a collective past as well as an individual one. We feel, directly or indirectly, what others have suffered and enjoyed. When these experiences are held together rather than flattened or denied, vitality emerges. The contrasts come alive—and so do we.
This enjoyment of intensity, far removed from mere happiness, is what Callas offered so many listeners. As Fanny Ardant observes, in a single sung phrase we hear contrasts held together—love and loss, tenderness and fury—gathered into one expressive act of feeling. This does not mean that such tensions are thereby resolved or integrated into a life as a whole; listening is only one strand in the ongoing formation of a person. Yet the sung phrase itself, charged with contrast and tension, becomes one more element that enters experience, joining the “many” that are, in that moment, becoming one.
Whitehead’s name for this many-becoming-one in experience is concrescence—a term that points to a becoming concrete, a becoming specific, in the immediacy of the moment. Concrescence involves not only the synthesis of inherited actualities but also an awareness of what Whitehead calls eternal objects. These are not normative ideals imposed from outside experience; they are timeless potentialities—potentialities for how the world’s objective conditions may unfold, and for the emotional tones through which those conditions may be felt.
From this perspective, a sung phrase in Callas—and, indeed, in singers of many genres—can be understood as an ingression of such potentialities: tenderness, fury, longing, resolve. She gives voice to possibilities that have already been ingressed into countless lives, suffered and enjoyed by many experiencers. In this sense, she sings not only of actuality—of what has been—but also of potentiality, of what can be. In her singing, we hear our own lives, and the lives of others, resonating together.
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Needless to say, not all people enjoy or understand opera. Nor need they. The enjoyment of opera requires a certain context—historical, cultural, and experiential—that not everyone shares or wishes to cultivate. Opera is not a universal language in the sense of being immediately accessible to all, and it should not be treated as a moral or aesthetic obligation.
What matters, from a process perspective, is not the particular medium but the possibility of intensity it affords. Different forms of art—music, film, poetry, dance, or even everyday practices—can serve as vehicles through which contrasts are felt together and vitality emerges. What opera makes audible in one register, other arts make available in others. Each offers its own way of gathering multiplicity into a momentary unity of feeling.
Seen this way, opera is one among many possible sites where concrescence becomes perceptible. For some, a sung phrase can hold grief and tenderness in a way that no other medium quite can; for others, the same work remains opaque or uninviting. There is no failure in this. Process thought does not privilege a single cultural form but affirms the plurality of paths through which intensity, beauty, and meaning can be realized.
The deeper claim, then, is not about opera as such, but about the human (and more-than-human) aim toward vivid experience. Wherever contrasts are honestly felt, wherever inherited worlds are gathered into a living present without being reduced or denied, there the strength of beauty can arise—whether in an opera house, a song on the radio, a line of poetry, or the quiet textures of ordinary life.
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Back then, to Callas.
What mattered in her singing was not opera as an institution or even opera as a genre, but the way a voice could become a site of intensified feeling. Callas did not ask listeners to admire beauty from a distance; she drew them into the tension itself. In her voice, contrasts were not smoothed over or sentimentalized. They were exposed, held, and made audible—grief without consolation, tenderness edged with fury, love shadowed by loss.
From a Whiteheadian perspective, this is precisely where intensity arises. Callas’s singing enacted, moment by moment, a concrescence in which inherited worlds—personal and collective, remembered and imagined—were gathered into a single, sharply defined act of feeling. Whether or not one loved opera, one could sense that something real was happening: not decoration, not refinement for its own sake, but the risky holding together of incompatible emotional forces.
This is why Callas continues to matter. She did not offer listeners happiness, reassurance, or escape. She offered vitality—the strength of beauty that comes from allowing contrasts to remain contrasts while still being felt together. In this sense, her voice was not simply expressive of characters on a stage; it became a conduit through which listeners could glimpse their own conflicted depths, briefly unified without being resolved.