.
Glad to be gay
From its very beginnings, says Tim Ashley, opera has explored gender and sexuality in a way rarely matched by spoken theatre
The poet WH Auden once claimed that Tristan and Isolde, the iconic heterosexuals of 19th-century opera, were really lesbians, a remark usually dismissed as camp quippery. Few, after all, looking for a gay subtext in Wagner's masterpiece would locate it in the relationship between the central couple.
Yet ironically Auden's comment is perceptive - a pointer to the complex relationship between music, gender and sexual orientation that we find in opera. Integral to Wagnerian ideology is a belief that all sense of individual identity vanishes during sexual activity. Near the climax of their love duet, Tristan and Isolde both lose their selves in the experience, each, quite literally, becoming the other, as the boundaries of gender - and with them sexual orientation - are obliterated. Wagner (who was no homophobe, despite his other prejudices) was well aware that music makes no distinctions between male and female, gay and straight. Tristan and Isolde could quite easily be lesbians after all.
Gay and lesbian subtexts frequently hover beneath the surface of opera. The singer's sex may not be the same as the sex of the character he or she is playing, while cross-dressing within plots can lead to erotic mayhem. Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier opens with two sexually sated women in bed. One of them, however, is meant to be a man, the young Count Octavian, who is later pursued, disguised as a chambermaid, by the randy Baron Ochs. A man gives chase to another man, who is both disguised as and played by a woman. These ambiguities allow the composer to investigate the complex fluidity of sexuality in ways that spoken theatre rarely does.
Strauss, at the start of the 20th century, made a self-conscious demand for the resumption of the traditions and sexual perspectives of a more liberal age. Octavian was modelled on Cherubino, The Marriage of Figaro's cross-dressing pageboy played by a soprano; Mozart reveals a comparable fascination with gender and sexual orientation. Don Giovanni has serial one-night stands with women, but his only close relationship is with his serving man Leporello. More than one interpreter has suggested the Don should be played as bisexual.
La Clemenza di Tito, meanwhile, meditates on the relationships between love, sex and politics. "Love" is the word used throughout by the hero Sesto to describe his feelings for the Emperor Tito. What characterises his desire for Vitellia - who wants Sesto to murder Tito - is altogether something more nameless and driven. In this opera's world, unusually, it is heterosexual desire that cannot speak its name.
Mozart, however, stands at the apex of a tradition of sexual openness that harks back to opera's origins. Early operas were often informed by Renaissance humanism, which drew on Platonist ideas that same-sex love afforded insights into the divine. Francesco Cavalli's La Calisto, premiered in 1651, depicts the eponymous nymph of classical mythology, who abjured the company of men, yet who had a lesbian relationship with Jupiter, who had taken on Diana's form for the purpose. Jupiter-Diana grants Calis a culminating vision of the Empyrean - the realm beyond time and space - while Cavalli allows her, and us, to hear the music of the spheres turning beneath her.
Handel, in many respects Cavalli's successor, keeps his sexual tangles joyously centred on earth. Calisto's Empyrean is replaced by the multisexual jamboree of Alcina's magic garden, where Alcina's sister Morgana falls for Bradamante, a woman disguised as a man, and where Alcina herself dallies with the warrior Ruggiero. Alcina's role was written for a castrato, his voice, though barbarically created, hovering beyond gender, its sound deemed intensely sexual by men and women alike. Gluck equated the castrato voice with the divinity of music itself in Orfeo ed Euridice.
Yet around the turn of the 19th century, illiberalism crept in. In Beethoven's Fidelio there is a narrowing of sexual range. Beethoven was not the only composer to write an opera based on this particular storyline, but he omitted a scene, found in rival versions, in which Leonore, disguised as a man, feigns passion for the jailer's daughter Marzelline. As the century progressed, ambiguous sexual references were slowly removed. Operatic transvestism became infrequent. In 1828, Rossini was still able to revel in the bisexual troilism of Le Comte Ory, in which the count, dressed as a nun, makes love to his pageboy, believing him to be a woman, while the pageboy makes love to the Countess Adèle, whom Ory fancies. But by the middle of the century gay subtexts became few and far between.
Strauss's return to sexual ambivalence in Der Rosenkavalier was consequently revolutionary, though it also raises another, hugely important issue: the relationship between the creative imagination and individual sexuality. Strauss was straight, as were all of the composers mentioned so far with the possible exception of Handel, whose sexuality remains a subject of controversy. Their works form a remarkable acknowledgement of sexual diversity, though given that lesbianism frequently forms a part of straight male fantasy, it's not surprising many operatic depictions of sexual ambivalence centre on women.
Gay opera composers, however - of whom Tchaikovsky, Poulenc and Britten are usually cited as the "big three" - constantly had to battle with homophobia. The resulting pressure meant that the sexual subtexts of their works are markedly different. Tchaikovsky's tragic sense of guilt led him to project himself vicariously into his female characters to convey the emotions he felt for men. Tatyana breaks with convention and declares her love for Eugene Onegin, only to meet with rejection. Poulenc's La Voix Humaine - in which a woman is dumped by her lover during a phone conversation - is often similarly interpreted as a reflection on the end of one of his own gay relationships. Poulenc, however, always claimed the impetus for the piece came from an episode in the life of Denise Duval, his favourite soprano, for whom the opera was written.
Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, meanwhile, enjoyed a unique creative partnership as composer and interpreter-muse. Yet we should remember that their relationship ran most of its course at a time when gay sex was illegal in the UK. It is difficult to dissociate homophobic pressure from the creation of a figure that assumed an almost archetypal importance in Britten's imagination - the outsider who is in some way damaged. Britten's attitudes towards this figure fluctuate from opera to opera: Peter Grimes, the poetic visionary who is partly responsible for the deaths of his apprentices, is deemed flawed in ways that Owen Wingrave, the pacifist prepared to die for his beliefs, is not.
Explicitly gay subject matter only surfaces twice in Britten's operas - in Billy Budd and Death in Venice - and in each case its outcome is both tragic and beatific. In the all-male world of Billy Budd, Claggart's passion for beautiful, stuttering Billy twists into a sadism that destroys them both, though Captain Vere also recognises in Billy a "divine image" whose shattering he is powerless to prevent. In Death in Venice, the ageing Aschenbach's love for the teenage Tadzio finally speaks its name only to be silenced in the cholera epidemic. Before he dies, however, Aschenbach, like Cavalli's Calisto, is granted a Platonistic vision of divinity in the boy's beauty. Death in Venice consequently returns to the ideology that accompanied opera's creation.
That there should be a disparity in the way gay and straight composers have had to approach erotic subjects is ultimately a sad reflection on the normative proscriptions that have dogged social history and continue to do so. Yet opera also asserts a communality of experience that both contains and bypasses gender and sexual orientation. You don't, after all, have to be gay to be swept away by Billy Budd, or straight in order to be bowled over by Don Giovanni, for both works examine aspects of the human condition that are common to everyone. What we encounter, each time we enter an opera house, is an exploration of the universality of love and desire and a celebration of human sexuality and the myriad possibilities it embraces. And that is cause for celebration indeed.
The poet WH Auden once claimed that Tristan and Isolde, the iconic heterosexuals of 19th-century opera, were really lesbians, a remark usually dismissed as camp quippery. Few, after all, looking for a gay subtext in Wagner's masterpiece would locate it in the relationship between the central couple.
Yet ironically Auden's comment is perceptive - a pointer to the complex relationship between music, gender and sexual orientation that we find in opera. Integral to Wagnerian ideology is a belief that all sense of individual identity vanishes during sexual activity. Near the climax of their love duet, Tristan and Isolde both lose their selves in the experience, each, quite literally, becoming the other, as the boundaries of gender - and with them sexual orientation - are obliterated. Wagner (who was no homophobe, despite his other prejudices) was well aware that music makes no distinctions between male and female, gay and straight. Tristan and Isolde could quite easily be lesbians after all.
Gay and lesbian subtexts frequently hover beneath the surface of opera. The singer's sex may not be the same as the sex of the character he or she is playing, while cross-dressing within plots can lead to erotic mayhem. Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier opens with two sexually sated women in bed. One of them, however, is meant to be a man, the young Count Octavian, who is later pursued, disguised as a chambermaid, by the randy Baron Ochs. A man gives chase to another man, who is both disguised as and played by a woman. These ambiguities allow the composer to investigate the complex fluidity of sexuality in ways that spoken theatre rarely does.
Strauss, at the start of the 20th century, made a self-conscious demand for the resumption of the traditions and sexual perspectives of a more liberal age. Octavian was modelled on Cherubino, The Marriage of Figaro's cross-dressing pageboy played by a soprano; Mozart reveals a comparable fascination with gender and sexual orientation. Don Giovanni has serial one-night stands with women, but his only close relationship is with his serving man Leporello. More than one interpreter has suggested the Don should be played as bisexual.
La Clemenza di Tito, meanwhile, meditates on the relationships between love, sex and politics. "Love" is the word used throughout by the hero Sesto to describe his feelings for the Emperor Tito. What characterises his desire for Vitellia - who wants Sesto to murder Tito - is altogether something more nameless and driven. In this opera's world, unusually, it is heterosexual desire that cannot speak its name.
Mozart, however, stands at the apex of a tradition of sexual openness that harks back to opera's origins. Early operas were often informed by Renaissance humanism, which drew on Platonist ideas that same-sex love afforded insights into the divine. Francesco Cavalli's La Calisto, premiered in 1651, depicts the eponymous nymph of classical mythology, who abjured the company of men, yet who had a lesbian relationship with Jupiter, who had taken on Diana's form for the purpose. Jupiter-Diana grants Calis a culminating vision of the Empyrean - the realm beyond time and space - while Cavalli allows her, and us, to hear the music of the spheres turning beneath her.
Handel, in many respects Cavalli's successor, keeps his sexual tangles joyously centred on earth. Calisto's Empyrean is replaced by the multisexual jamboree of Alcina's magic garden, where Alcina's sister Morgana falls for Bradamante, a woman disguised as a man, and where Alcina herself dallies with the warrior Ruggiero. Alcina's role was written for a castrato, his voice, though barbarically created, hovering beyond gender, its sound deemed intensely sexual by men and women alike. Gluck equated the castrato voice with the divinity of music itself in Orfeo ed Euridice.
Yet around the turn of the 19th century, illiberalism crept in. In Beethoven's Fidelio there is a narrowing of sexual range. Beethoven was not the only composer to write an opera based on this particular storyline, but he omitted a scene, found in rival versions, in which Leonore, disguised as a man, feigns passion for the jailer's daughter Marzelline. As the century progressed, ambiguous sexual references were slowly removed. Operatic transvestism became infrequent. In 1828, Rossini was still able to revel in the bisexual troilism of Le Comte Ory, in which the count, dressed as a nun, makes love to his pageboy, believing him to be a woman, while the pageboy makes love to the Countess Adèle, whom Ory fancies. But by the middle of the century gay subtexts became few and far between.
Strauss's return to sexual ambivalence in Der Rosenkavalier was consequently revolutionary, though it also raises another, hugely important issue: the relationship between the creative imagination and individual sexuality. Strauss was straight, as were all of the composers mentioned so far with the possible exception of Handel, whose sexuality remains a subject of controversy. Their works form a remarkable acknowledgement of sexual diversity, though given that lesbianism frequently forms a part of straight male fantasy, it's not surprising many operatic depictions of sexual ambivalence centre on women.
Gay opera composers, however - of whom Tchaikovsky, Poulenc and Britten are usually cited as the "big three" - constantly had to battle with homophobia. The resulting pressure meant that the sexual subtexts of their works are markedly different. Tchaikovsky's tragic sense of guilt led him to project himself vicariously into his female characters to convey the emotions he felt for men. Tatyana breaks with convention and declares her love for Eugene Onegin, only to meet with rejection. Poulenc's La Voix Humaine - in which a woman is dumped by her lover during a phone conversation - is often similarly interpreted as a reflection on the end of one of his own gay relationships. Poulenc, however, always claimed the impetus for the piece came from an episode in the life of Denise Duval, his favourite soprano, for whom the opera was written.
Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, meanwhile, enjoyed a unique creative partnership as composer and interpreter-muse. Yet we should remember that their relationship ran most of its course at a time when gay sex was illegal in the UK. It is difficult to dissociate homophobic pressure from the creation of a figure that assumed an almost archetypal importance in Britten's imagination - the outsider who is in some way damaged. Britten's attitudes towards this figure fluctuate from opera to opera: Peter Grimes, the poetic visionary who is partly responsible for the deaths of his apprentices, is deemed flawed in ways that Owen Wingrave, the pacifist prepared to die for his beliefs, is not.
Explicitly gay subject matter only surfaces twice in Britten's operas - in Billy Budd and Death in Venice - and in each case its outcome is both tragic and beatific. In the all-male world of Billy Budd, Claggart's passion for beautiful, stuttering Billy twists into a sadism that destroys them both, though Captain Vere also recognises in Billy a "divine image" whose shattering he is powerless to prevent. In Death in Venice, the ageing Aschenbach's love for the teenage Tadzio finally speaks its name only to be silenced in the cholera epidemic. Before he dies, however, Aschenbach, like Cavalli's Calisto, is granted a Platonistic vision of divinity in the boy's beauty. Death in Venice consequently returns to the ideology that accompanied opera's creation.
That there should be a disparity in the way gay and straight composers have had to approach erotic subjects is ultimately a sad reflection on the normative proscriptions that have dogged social history and continue to do so. Yet opera also asserts a communality of experience that both contains and bypasses gender and sexual orientation. You don't, after all, have to be gay to be swept away by Billy Budd, or straight in order to be bowled over by Don Giovanni, for both works examine aspects of the human condition that are common to everyone. What we encounter, each time we enter an opera house, is an exploration of the universality of love and desire and a celebration of human sexuality and the myriad possibilities it embraces. And that is cause for celebration indeed.
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(Aναδημοσίευση από την βρετανική εφημερίδα THE GUARDIAN, 23-5-2003)
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