2023-11-08 15:25:22
The wet nurse Arnalta is almost as old as opera. Already in Claudio Monteverdi’s juicy sex comedy “The Wedding of Poppea” about the Romans who are having a great time, the motherly friend incites the title heroine to ever new sensual intrigues with a fistful tenor voice. A man as a comical old woman goes back to the ancient comedy that Renaissance artists believed they were reviving.
Even the popes in baroque Rome later kept women silent on the opera stage for supposedly religious reasons, but enjoyed the spectacular singing of the castrati, who were supported by entire armies of cardinals as protectors and librettists. Their fascination was readily taken up by countertenors in our time, which has again turned to the androgynous. We now even see male sopranos in women’s clothing again.
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“I don’t know what I am, what I do.” This is how Mozart lets the page Cherubino sigh about his juvenile chaos of hormones. And to this day, “The Marriage of Figaro” is one of the most popular musical theater works of all as a “great day” of amorous adventures and sexual confusion. Cherubino cannot and does not want to decide between countess, maid and gardener’s maid. He himself often runs around in women’s clothes, and in more recent productions even the music teacher stalks the boy.
Cherubino, a pubescent philanderer between child and man, is usually sung by a woman, usually a mezzo-soprano. So there is someone in the “wrong” voice box. But the audience is very familiar with this convention, right up to Richard Strauss’s “Rosenkavalier” or Siegfried Matthus’s “Wise of Love and Death by Cornet Christoph Rilke,” which premiered in 1984.
Don’t fulfill any clichés
But what does it mean when a singer today identifies as transgender in a field in which playing with the genders has been part of the established repertoire for centuries? In 2019, New York transgender artist Justin Vivian Bond even cooed at the Vienna State Opera in the Olga Neuwirth premiere of “Orlando,” Virginia Woolf’s classic gender-fluid literary icon, as Orlando’s androgynous child as a madame nightclub singer. And even at various supposedly conservative Italian opera houses, transgender artists have already performed in the comically rowdy speaking role of the Duchess of Krakentorp in Donizetti’s buffa “The Regiment’s Daughter”.
All supporting roles, to be sure. But stage actresses with deep voices who are read as women in real life and also want their place in the opera include the baritones Lucia Lucas and Sam Taskinen. The American Lucas says combatively: “I am trans. I don’t want to fulfill any clichés, I just want to be taken seriously as an artist.” On stage, she still sings male roles with delight; she has even played the greatest of all lechers, Don Giovanni, in the USA – of all places in redneck-infected Oklahoma, as evidenced by the documentary “The Sound of Identity”.
In the documentary “The Sound of Identity” Lucia Lucas tells her life
Quelle: picture alliance / Everett Collection
Lucas, whose new first name alludes to Donizetti’s mad heroine and now calls herself a “hero baritone”, already played the Offenbach neuter Public Opinion in “Orpheus in the Underworld” and the head priest in “Samson and Dalila” as a woman. Lucia Lucas has also long since made her Metropolitan Opera debut.
Are the queer parameters changing in America, of all places, which is otherwise so puritanical? The genders are blurring: Does the man on stage with the female voice go through real life as a trans man, or does the baritone, who has just given masculine roles, go through life as a trans woman? Openly trans singing stars are still exceptions; European opera stages seem to be only just discovering them. With “Lili Elbe” and “Strella” there are currently two new, very different operas about transgender title characters in St. Gallen and Athens.
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In eastern Switzerland, artistic director Jan Hendrik Bogen, who is open to such topics, sent what is probably the world’s first major opera about a transgender person across the pink carpet at the opening of the house, which was renovated in the most beautiful concrete brutalism, and under the season’s motto “Identities” between rainbow balloons.
“Lili Elbe” is the name of the new work by Grammy-winning American composer Tobias Picker. It is his seventh opera, the first to be released in Europe. The 67-year-old Picker’s librettist is his husband Aryeh Lev Stollman, and Lucia Lucas, with whom he has been friends for a long time and whom he helped to make her Don Giovanni debut as artistic advisor to the Tulsa Opera, also acts as dramaturg.
The desire to compose something specifically for Lucas is already that old. Tobias Picker initially thought of an opera about the Stonewall Riots in front of a New York gay bar, which were very important for queer emancipation in 1968. But in the end he, who stands for a moderately atonal, dramatically gripping and colorful sound language, decided on the fate of Lili Elbe.
Scene from Tobias Picker’s transgender opera in St. Gallen
Quelle: Edyta Dufaj
She was born in Denmark in 1862 and grew up as Einar Wegener, although she was probably equipped with both male and female sexual organs. “He” became a painter, as did his wife Gerda. In Paris, bisexual Gerda painted her husband as a female model, Lili, whose true identity was concealed. In 1930, Wegener was one of the first transgender people to decide to have his body reassimilated to his perceived gender.
Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin carried out the operations. As a result, the marriage was specifically annulled by the Danish King Christian X, and Elbe received papers in her new name. In 1931, a few months after a fourth operation, complications arose and Lili Elbe died. She is buried in Dresden-Johannstadt.
“The Danish Girl”, the film biography from 2015, is also based on Lili Elbe’s life report “From Man to Woman”, published in 1931, in which – today criticized by activists – Eddie Redmayne played Einar/Lili very convincingly. Lucia Lucas is particularly convincing in St. Gallen, especially her vocals; visually it has little in common with the historical Lili Elbe.
Felt, actual womanhood
But in Picker’s delicately flowing musical theater in two acts, which at the end becomes a melodramatically gripping apotheosis of death, she not only makes their fate her own, she also allows hers to shine through. In two hours, this is told in a straightforward manner as an Art Nouveau-expressionist picture arc in the abstract, narrative direction of Krystian Lada, who is also responsible for the bright, symbolist stage.
She herself overlaps with the Orpheus figure of a singer friend when, after her failed uterus transplant (at the age of 49!), she disappears into another world without looking back. And despite all obstacles, she always remains connected to the newly married Gerda (nice: Sylvia D’Eramo).
Tobias Pickers “Lily Elbe” in St. Gallen
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Tobias Picker’s audible, multi-stylistically skilful dance theme, which jumps from Stravinsky to the present, in “Downtown Abbeys” as well as in cabaret music, and which Modestas Pitrenas has realized almost too richly in sound, focuses on people and fates, the people singing are touching; In the dancers of the ballet company, Lili Elbe’s perceived and actual womanhood is reflected like Gerda’s painting.
The opposing and friendly voices of society are strong, but also her sister and mother who reject them so much. The siding of the enlightened Danish King Christian
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“Lili Elbe” is an opera that is relevant today and definitely worth reenacting, even though Tobias Picker initially linked its performance to the participation of a trans or at least non-binary person. Because of course this piece is also the story of a great love that overcomes all obstacles and is therefore one of the most common works in the repertoire.
In addition to Lucia Lucas as Lili, the Finnish baritone Sam Taskinen sings as her brother. In the Greek opera “Strella” there are three trans people in the ensemble of twelve performers. This chamber play by Michalis Parakakis, which premiered last season by the Greek National Opera and is now being revived on the experimental alternative stage of the spectacular Stavros Niarchos Foundation Culture Center in the port of Piraeus, shimmers between spoken piece, melodrama and musical theater. So it is just as fluid as its title character, in which the ancient Oedipus myth is refracted.
Dream of happiness at any cost
“Strella” is also the name of a film by the “Alexis Sorbas” director Michael Cacoyannis that is famous in Greece and which the direct opera source refers to, also a film that premiered 14 years ago at the Berlinale. And “Strella”, that means a little crazy, just like the prostitute and nightclub singer (Letta Kappa embodies her with sober harshness) who turns out to be the former son of the murderer Yorgos (Michael Psyrras), who left his village 15 years ago disappeared and has now consciously entered into a relationship with his ignorant father.
Unlike the tragedy, “Strella” ends well after all the outrageous realizations between love, acceptance and the madness of dreaming and demanding happiness at all costs. Maybe also because Maria Callas (Anastasia Kotsali), whom she admires and whose 100th birthday on December 3rd not only the whole of opera Greece is preparing for, acts as a somewhat shrill guardian angel? The strange but exciting story comes across as shrill and crude, captivating with its simple, sophisticated visualization in the confident direction of George Koutlis in an open space.
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Conductor Konstantinos Terzakis and his ten musicians are repeatedly involved in the action, in the drag club, in cinematic cutscenes, the colorful score works with contrasting harsh cuts and painful operatic verism. A squirrel dances, a child trips by, and in the end everyone celebrates a mixture of Christmas and polyamorous carnival between gold garlands.
Hermaphroditos, the bisexual son of Aphrodite and Hermes, also goes back to Greek mythology. Incidentally, “Lili Elbe” is currently being danced as a ballet in Salzburg, and a musical about her is in development. And somehow Beethoven’s “Fidelio”, which incidentally opened the St. Gallen Theater for the first time in 1968, is a bit trans with a soprano-singing cross-dresser title character…
Just opera. Or as Tobias Picker says, who composed the perfume production concept of “enfleurage”, the continued life of flowers through their extracted scent, as a key leitmotif for “Lili Elbe”: “I want the audience to take away that we are all siblings. “
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