"The 'Orfeo' Diaries": Understanding the Trouser Role

Goeldner as Octavian in "Der Rosenkavalier"

I guess it could be a bit confusing for an opera "newbie" to see me up there dressed as a man when I play Orfeo. "Honey, is that supposed to be a man or a woman? I don't get it!" It's an interesting opera tradition, for sure, this "gender-bending." And playing male roles is the bulk of most mezzos' careers, so I've done a lot of them.

The tradition stems from the 16th/17th centuries, when papal edicts forbade women to appear on stage. Instead, male castrati took on those roles. A brief explanation of this rather odd phenomenon: back in the day, in order to preserve a young boy's treble voice, he might be castrated before the onset of puberty, thus preventing his voice from changing. These "castrati" took on female—and later high male—roles in opera and became the rock stars of their day.  But understandably the fashion died out (thank goodness for the boys!), paving the way for women to take over these roles. Now, think of women's fashions at the time—corsets, layers of petticoats, heavy skirts. The female body was pretty much hidden. So a woman appearing as a man, in form-fitting breeches, revealing the shape of her legs and—ahem—posterior, definitely added an air of scandal to the show.

Mozart, Händel, Donizetti, even Verdi—they all continued to write male roles intended to be performed by women. The lower, warmer quality of the mezzo voice is well-suited to the adolescent/young man roles. Why not just use a boy or a young man then, you might ask? It's been done, e.g., Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro. But you never know when a pre-teen boy's voice is going to change, so the houses that have tried this, like the Vienna State Opera, actually had a mezzo on standby every night, just in case. And because vocal cords aren't fully developed until well into your 20's or even later, a young man is simply not going to have the vocal strength to withstand the demands of an opera role.

You might be wondering by now how a woman like me goes about becoming a man on stage. Men of course have a different center of balance, different musculature, different method and speed of moving—all of which I take into account. I think of standing tall, with a lower, broader center of gravity, strong across the back and shoulders and "collecting" the body when I move. Of course, we're not really fooling anyone here—we do have to rely on the audience's willing suspension of disbelief! It's all part of the magic of an evening at the opera. — Mezzo-soprano Katharine Goeldner (Orfeo)