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parts. There is (alas) no way of dressing a man on the stage in women's clothes to give the same attraction to women in the audience (even if women would be allowed to enjoy such attraction in the face of the inevitable male prejudice) as a pretty girl in breeches and tights gives to men. And so on the whole man to woman transvestism in opera tends to be the same as in other stage presenta- tions-grotesque and played for laughs. Because of the voice problem -a soprano "man" is acceptable but a baritone "woman" is not the number of instances of which I am aware is very limited and the number I have personally seen produced on the stage is even less.

There are, it is true, a number of operas in which a youth is re- quired to dress as a girl but inevitably in these cases the youth's is a part which is being played by a girl already. This happens in, for instance, Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and the already mentioned Der Rosenkavalier of Richard Strauss, both of which I have seen a number of times. And it is only with a very clever actress indeed that one can get the feeling that here is a boy dressing as a girl (and the clear female voice doesn't help) and all too often one is presented with a performance of most un-boy-like movements by an actress who gets by on her singing rather than on her acting ability.

Another situation is that in which the action is influenced by the dressing of a man as a woman but one doesn't actually see it happen. In Puccini's Tosca, for instance, the sister of an escaped political prisoner has hidden for him an outfit of women's clothes in a church. He finds and takes the bundle but in his haste drops the fan (the date is the year 1800) and this is found and identified by the chief of the State Police. From this moment the plot develops-ending, inci- dentally, in the death of the escaped prisoner, the police chief, a friend of the prisoner implicated for helping the escape, and the friend's girlfriend, the Tosca of the title-but one does not in fact see the man actually dressed in his women's clothes.

A very unusual situation faces the producer of La Calisto by Cavalli. This is one of the earliest of operas still in production-it was composed over 300 years ago and deals with mythological characters. Jupiter, the king of the gods, wants to seduce Venus but she's far too aware of his nature to let him get within a mile of her. In a crafty move to outwit her, he transforms himself into an exact double (wish I lived in those days) of the goddess Diana, arguing that Venus will never suspect another woman and anyway Diana is well known to be chaste. From there on he is on stage, somtimes as himself

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