ransvestia

Now the problem with this was that as the years rolled by and the use of castrati became less and less acceptable it eventually became impossible to produce these operas (many of which are of great musical value) since there were no longer any male singers capable of filling the roles. The apparent alternative solution of transposing the high voice line downwards for a tenor to sing was not usually desirable since it destroyed the fabric and balance of the music.

The answer lay, as it so often does, with women. Opera is an ex- ceedingly artificial art form which involves the wholesale suspension of disbelief by the audience as the price of hearing marvelous music and, one hopes, glorious singing. And it takes very little of this suspension of disbelief to ignore the fact that a singer who is dressed as a man and is singing a vigorous masculine role is not in fact a man at all but a women-possibly a quite beautiful one. And that's really how it all began.

Of course only a small proportion of "breeches roles"-that is, roles for women singing as men-actually stems originally from the 17th century. In fact, one of the most glorious of all such parts (Octavian in Richard Strauss Der Rosenkavalier) was composed as recently as 1910. But the tradition then formed has continued-after all male opera lovers are no different from other males and a pretty girl's legs are always attractive—and opera has greatly benefited from it. The use of a soprano or contralto voice instead of a tenor can produce ravishing sounds and may be essential to the work's musical pattern. The trio of sopranos-the masculine Octavian and the feminine Marschalin and Sophie-at the end of the last act of Der Rosen- kavalier is incredibly beautiful and justly famous.

So on the world's opera stages today the presence of women acting as men, of male roles needing soprano or contralto voices, is accepted without comment or question. Women are in any case fre- quently cast for non-singing male roles of various kinds-boys, youths, court pages and so on—but they also play and sing almost every other type of male character imaginable whether it calls for only a few notes and a minute or two on stage or is one of the prin- cipal roles of the whole work.

The reverse situation, however, is not nearly so happy. There was no tradition (or, I would imagine, any possibility) of a female tenor, baritone or bass, and so no need nowadays for a male to sing such

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