Gender-flipping? Opera has done it for centuries
Boy meets girl, loses girl, finds girl again and pairs off with her happily ever after: Cinderella is as familiar as stories come. Except that’s not quite how it goes once transformed into an opera in Belle Époque Paris. Yes, Jules Massenet’s Cendrillon (1899) follows the usual Cinders narrative and its title role is a soprano, the most unambiguously female voice. But Prince Charming is another matter. By the 1890s, operatic heroes were tenors or, at a stretch, baritones: men singing at a “naturally” lower pitch than women, even if they also had powerful high notes to show off. But not in Cendrillon. Massenet’s Prince Charming is another soprano – one dressed in male attire but sounding unmistakably like a woman.
If you think that sounds odd in a plot celebrating heterosexual romantic love, there’s more. Opera may have a reputation as the ultimate Establishment art form, but it has incorporated what we now call drag throughout its history. Initially, legal prohibitions or general objections to putting women on stage needed to be sidestepped. The very first public operatic performance, in Venice in 1637, cast male singers in all the female roles – except one taken by the composer’s sister. This was, famously, the age of the castrato: male singers castrated before puberty to preserve their high voices. Early opera made enthusiastic use of these burly male
sopranos and altos, who were crossdressed as mythological icons, queens and goddesses, as well as playing their heroic male counterparts.
But as women gradually gained access to the stage, they didn’t simply replace the castrati. Quite the opposite: composers and impresarios now had options. Centuries before either the occasional gender-bending of modern productions or the 21st-century language of gender fluidity, opera in the late 17th and 18th centuries revelled in cross-gender casting.
There were limits. Watching castrati – famed for their unusual height – perform as operatic heroines rapidly became unfashionable, although audiences still prized their unearthly sound. But opera’s leading men, its heroes and warriors, remained high-voiced.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that when Handel wrote Giulio Cesare in 1724, he wanted his Julius Caesar sung by a castrato and Cleopatra by a female soprano. But he also wanted Pompey’s son Sextus to be a female soprano en travesti. Thus the so-called trouser role was born, destined to be a standard feature of opera for the next 100 years – its lasting appeal undoubtedly connected with the pleasures of seeing women on stage in revealing male attire. The playwright Beaumarchais even specified that the lusty pageboy Chérubin in his Le Mariage de Figaro (soon to be Cherubino in Mozart’s opera) “can only be played by a young and very pretty woman”.
Yet having fun with gender didn’t last. A new ideal of strong, robust masculinity emerged during the 19th century, and with it a newly rigid gender binary separating women from men. The castrato fell from grace: “One must be only half a man to sing like that,” Napoleon declared after hearing the last of the great castrati, Velluti, in 1810. The tenor replaced the soprano as the archetypal Romantic hero; the soprano-tenor-baritone love triangle became the norm.
The trouser role hung on, providing a steady supply of pages and young boys. As the century continued, though, new anxieties emerged. The novelist George Gissing diagnosed “sexual anarchy” as gender roles shifted again. Homosexuality was medicalised by figures such as psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who warned in 1889 that one should suspect lesbianism in “females wearing their hair short, or who dress in the fashion of men; and in opera singers and actresses who appear in male attire on the stage by preference”. No wonder the management at Covent Garden insisted there could be no bed in the opening
scene of Strauss’s 1911 opera Der Rosenkavalier, which begins with pillow talk between an older woman, the Marschallin, and her younger lover, Octavian – who, in the raunchiest of the piece’s knowing gestures to older traditions, is a trouser role.
Massenet’s Prince Charming didn’t shock his early audiences. He was seen as innocent and sweetly melancholic, described (like Cinderella herself) as a child rather than a sexualised adolescent. Such play-acting was a safety catch for an era undergoing something like wholesale gender panic.
Well over a century later, we’re now having a new set of conversations about gender identities: about their boundaries, their fixity, their relationship to sexuality. The stakes are high. But it’s worth remembering that opera – in its playful, flexible representations of gender, its celebration of boundary-crossings, its noisy insistence that we accommodate unexpected couplings of minds, bodies and voices – has been here before.