TRANSVESTISM IN OPERA

ARTICLE

Joy-England

As an enthusiast for grand opera and a dedicated (if wholly un- passable) behind-locked-doors FP. I have searched far and wide to find works which satisfy both my interests. And regrettably I have to report that although there is quite a lot of transvestism in opera it is almost entirely, at least from our point of view, of the wrong type.

Surprisingly there is a very good reason for this imbalance between the two types. Opera in the modern sense of the word was born in the 17th century and at that time a remarkable-to our way of thinking— practice existed. It was accepted in those days, mainly in Italy, but also elsewhere, that if a boy had a good singing voice when he was say ten or eleven he could be castrated before he reached puberty— one wonders how much say the boy had in this or if he just woke up one night to find someone leaning over him with a pair of scissors- and thus retain his high voice. Such men were true sopranos or con- traltos since, as with women, their voices had never broken.

The reason for this practice was that while the vocal range of a male true soprano or contralto is similar to that of a female, the voice is, quoting from the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera, " stronger and more flexible, often voluptuous in tone and capable of the utmost delicacy and technical brilliance." The Dictionary, inci- dentally, goes on to say that these men were often as vain as any female prima donna. However since the practice existed, composers naturally wrote parts in their operas for such singers-masculine roles as, for instance, Roman patricians in Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito (1791), or both Orpheus and Amor, the god of love, in Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) and so on. In this latter work, incidentally, there are only four main characters, two masculine and two feminine, but all four are nowadays sung by women.

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