The idea of being mistaken for a member of the opposite sex may be repugnant to some and hilarious to others, but for most operatic singer-actors it’s all in an evening’s work. How strange for the female performer to study the posture, walk, and gestures of the male of the species in order to convince an audience that she actually belongs in those knickers and boots, her hair cropped, bosom bound, and just a trace of a mustache above unpainted lips.
There is no universally accepted label for the theatrical and operatic practice of one sex portraying the other. The French call it en travesti, meaning false or disguised costume. The German term is Hosenrollen (pants roles). The Italians say da uomo (as a man). The British term such a role a “breeches part.”
There has been quite a lot written about the tradition of men portraying women, but not so much about women portraying men. Is it such a foregone conclusion that women play young boys better than young boys themselves that historians simply passed over the topic? Or is it some glaring flaw one is too polite to point out, as in the way audiences often must overlook overweight sopranos dying of consumption, tenors who make love while looking straight at the prompter, or dying baritones who burst into song just before expiring?
The story begins in church, of all places, where women were expected to be seen but not heard singing, having been excluded by Emperor Constantine in 313 AD. The male-musicians-only rule endured for more than a thousand years. In the late Middle Ages, as polyphonic music gained complexity, a florid treble line emerged – and so did the practice of employing castrati, whose breath control and vocal powers far outstripped those of boys and falsettists. But the popular theater of the time frequently featured women onstage. It was also fairly common for actresses to portray young boys’ roles, but the church soon put a stop to it. In 1588, by Papal decree, women were banned from the Roman stage; in Spain soon after, they were forbidden to play travesty roles and eventually banned from the public stage altogether. At the same time, however, in the aristocratic courts of Europe, women were being educated as musicians and even attained professional status, notably in Ferrara in the 16th century. In the1580s, Alphonso II D’Este supported and exported his professional women’s singing ensemble, whose Concerti delle Dame created a nationwide vogue for virtuoso treble singing just prior to the birth of opera.
At the turn of the century, Jacopo Peri’s Euridice — the earliest opera still extant — was produced at the Medici court in Florence. The cast included at least two women: Vittoria Archilei in the title role, and 13-year-old Francesca Caccini, daughter of another early opera composer who later became a composer herself. In 1637, the first opera performed outside the confines of the courts featured Maddalena Manelli in the title role of Andromeda, composed by her brother. Thus opera in its infancy saw women singing on public stages. But how did the idea of cross-sexual casting of women come into the picture?
Before opera went public, the general populace, used to hearing high voices in church, did not necessarily associate the sex of a singer with his or her vocal range. Since both men and women sang treble parts, casting was interchangeable and the goal was simply to hire the best singer available. It is difficult to establish an exact date when female operatic performers took over the portrayal of adolescent boys, since casts were customarily listed by last name only. Yet there is some clear documentation of expressly conceived trouser roles from this period: Alessandro Scarlatti’s Pompeo (1684) had no fewer than four trouser roles. The comic and sexual aspects of the double role of Diana/Jove in Cavalli’s La Calisto (1651-52) would have made no sense unless performed by a woman. In Handel’s Radamisto (1720) two women starred in leading male roles. Some women achieved notoriety for portraying men offstage as well as on. Mademoiselle Maupin (1673-1707?) was an expert sword fighter and master of travesti. She traveled widely in France, frequently challenging men to duels which she usually won. When her money ran out she took a pseudonym and joined an opera troupe, cleverly switching roles to follow a young girl into a cloister after the girl’s parents forbade her to marry the “actor.” Maupin later performed with Lully, debuting under her own name at the Academie Royale in Paris.
By the second half of the century, women increasingly replaced castrati in revivals of earlier works, bringing the trouser role into the mainstream. Handel, having originally composed 26 male roles for women, added another eight in revivals of his own operas, including roles of heroes, generals, and a Roman emperor. Mozart’s creation of the trouser role of Cherubino effectively defined a new genre. The particular blend of charm, mischief, sensitivity, and youthful love that make up Cherubino were so compelling that the character was reincarnated repeatedly in opera thereafter: Anna Bolena’s page Smeton, Siebel in Faust, Tebaldo in Don Carlo, Oscar in Un Ballo in Maschera, and Walther in La Wally.
As the 19th century unfolded, castrati fell from favor entirely. Conservatories opened their doors to women, and concert halls became the domain of the prima donna. At this turning point, another type of trouser role came to the fore: the hero-lover. Obviously inherited from the castrato repertoire, it also represented a new vehicle for the female operatic superstar. Rossini contributed heavily to this repertoire with the title role of Tancredi (1813), and Arsace in Semiramide (1823), while Wagner crafted Adriano in Rienzi (1842) in the same vein. However, it was the role of Romeo in Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi (1830) that launched some of the most sensational singers of the era, including Giuditta Grisi and Maria Malibran. Pauline Viardot, Malibran’s equally celebrated younger sister, helped establish another type of trouser role with her portrayal of Gluck’s Orfeo at the Paris Opera in 1859. Originally, the son of Apollo had been written for the appropriately supernatural timbre of a castrato in the 1762 Vienna premiere. Gluck then refashioned it for tenor in Paris in 1774, where castrati never achieved wide acceptance. With the advent of the Viardot version by Berlioz, the role became a staple of the mezzo-soprano and contralto repertoire. Soon thereafter, Paris saw the creation of another heavenly-being-turned-mortal, namely the Muse in Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann (1881).
The 20th century continued some of these trouser role traditions with the exuberant Cherubin of Massenet and the idealistic Komponist in Ariadne auf Naxos (1916) by Richard Strauss. Other pageboys, like the one in Salomé (1905) or the Student in Berg’s Lulu, (1937) share in darker dramas. Disguise is the hallmark of roles such as Viola in David Amram’s Twelfth Night (1968) and, more recently, the castrato-impostor Bellino in Argento’s Casanova’s Homecoming (1979). For many, however, the impetuous romantic hero embodied in Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier (1911) reigns as the supreme aesthetic creation of the trouser role.
We live in an era of constantly shifting sexual roles and customs. Men are again wearing long hair and earrings; pants are acceptable women’s wear for all occasions; and husbands raise children at home while their spouses work as CEOs. Pop culture exploits sexual ambiguity to the extreme. Male recording artists have been singing in the mezzo-soprano range for decades. And, for the foreseeable future, the “strange custom” of the trouser role will continue to be a great vehicle for the operatic diva.
Editor’s note: This article was re-printed with the kind permission of Stagebill Magazine, in which it first appeared.
