OPERA The Italian Opera Company of Chicago

The next time you watch a good film, imagine that all of the women in the cast are actually men dressed as women. If you have the depth of imagination that allows you to pretend that female movie stars are really disguised men, you might comprehend what theater was like up until the last half of the 18th century. Going as far back as ancient Greece, where Western drama began, women were not allowed to perform on the public stage. This tradition continued throughout European history, including the England of Shakespeare, who created some of the greatest heroines of all. Today it is mind boggling to realize that the likes of Cordelia, Portia, Lady Macbeth, Desdemona, Ophelia, Juliette and Miranda were all initially portrayed by young males. But back then, because of the ages old tradition prohibiting women from performing, no one thought anything of it.

It was the same thing with Italian opera, interestingly invented at the same time as Shakespeare’s early career. There were plenty of female roles in early Italian opera, but these were all portrayed by men that pretended to be women and sounded like women. In the lands most strongly influenced by the Church, the reason for not allowing women to perform was justified by a single line from Corinthians – “Women should be silent in church.” Since the very capable Italian composers of the 16th century found that the upper voices were so important in their melodically dominant approach to vocal scoring, religious and secular ensembles alike required high voices to do justice to the music. Without the services of women, there were but three solutions to this problem. The first was to use young boy sopranos, a device that worked very well as far as the music was concerned. But this solution also caused serious problems for music directors. Boys, of course, will always be boys, and were frequently up to some kind of disruptive mischief. Then just when they began to mature, their voices would change and they were sopranos no longer.

Men using their falsetto was another solution. Falsettists could indeed be effective singing the higher parts, but only in rooms with limited space, because the falsetto voice is not powerful and does not carry that far. The third solution, a radical one to be sure, seems to have been used almost exclusively in Italy, where the demand for vocal prowess was highest. This was the castration of young boys who had the best voices and showed the most talent. The castrati, also called musici, became the dominant singers of Italian opera for almost two centuries. But this dominance was not apparent in the very early years of opera. Major composers like Monteverdi wrote some beautiful music, but in opera their music was subservient to the text. Thus the principal performers were more or less faithful to an opera’s poem and the result was almost like one long recitative. But when the da capo aria became the most important musical unit in an opera, the castrati improvised on the aria’s harmonic progression, just as a modern day jazz musician improvises on a standard tune. And like musicians of any other time they competed for the best jobs – so they were judged and they prospered on basis of the virtuosity of their improvisations. Because the stories of 17th- and 18th-century operas were still mainly based on the myths and legends of ancient Greece and Rome, the texts of these works had little, if any, relevance to their audiences. So it was the incredible improvisational singing skill of the castrati that made Italian opera the most popular form of entertainment of the time. So pleased by the virtuosity of the castrati were the spectators, that they did not miss the participation of women, who were not expected to perform in any case.

As we have noted regarding the heroines of Shakespeare, the literary expression of femininity was very common in dramatic texts. Indeed, the definition of the feminine aspect of humanity and the theme of relations between the sexes, was always popular in theater as it was in painting and sculpture. But with women unable to depict themselves on stage, there just had to be something missing, no matter how great the poets or playwrights wrote or how well the castrati could improvise. Then came the cataclysmic American and French Revolutions. In their wake, one of the most important social changes was the liberation of women from centuries of official (if not always actual) subservience to men. While women had been occasionally appearing on the stages of theaters and opera houses for some time, they were not really an important factor in drama or music. But when the dust had cleared from the revolutions of the 18th century, the era of the castrati in opera was over and the domination of the female singers began.

It is impossible to overstate the impact on Romantic opera by the sheer novelty of women performing on stage. Now, in person as well as in literary representation, the feminine mystique could be observed in the flesh. So popular were women performing in the opera of the early 1800s that many male roles were performed by women in disguise, the so-called “pants roles!" Many of the most popular operas of the Bel Canto period were named after the lead female characters like Rossini’s Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, La cenerentola, and Armida; Bellini’s Norma; and Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda, Lucia di Lammermoor, Lucrezia Borgia and La favorita just to mention a very few. Even if the titles of the operas were of men’ names, the main attractions were still the female performers. Composers were evaluated on how well they could provide vehicles for the vocal artistry of women.

Interestingly, in the prima donna-dominated Bel Canto, the music was still greatly influenced by the improvisational style of the extinct castrati. The coloratura pyrotechnics that dazzled the early 19th century opera goers with the virtuosity of the prima donnas, actually originated with the castrati in the Baroque period. The most important difference between those earlier singers and the Bel Canto prima donnas was that the castrati improvised their coloratura, while the prima donnas performed music that was more or less completely provided by the composer. Starting with Mozart, opera composers did not want their singers to improvise, or to become compositional rivals. Yet Mozart and his Bel Canto successors knew that their audiences expected to be thrilled by florid vocal passages, and that the singers wanted to show off their technique. So the composers wrote out coloratura parts for the singers, thus satisfying everyone. Thus when you hear Bel Canto prima donnas singing coloratura, in a way you are hearing the ghosts of the castrati.

Even after the Bel Canto period, the dramatic and musical focus of opera is mainly on the female characters. After the first act of La traviata, Verdi never again composed a true coloratura part for his heroines, yet the principal female roles of most of his operas are by far the most important in these works – Elena in I vespri siciliana, Maria in Simon Boccanegra, Amelia in Un ballo in maschera, Leonora in La forza del destino and Aida. This tradition obviously continues in Puccini with Manon, Mimi, Tosca, Cio-cio-san, Minnie, Magda, the entire cast of Suor Angelica and Turandot. French Romantic opera also focuses on its leading women like Marguerite of Gounod’s Faust and Bizet’s Carmen.

There something special, a unique kind of excitement stimulated by a woman singing in public, baring her soul to an audience of unknown spectators. Not to take note of this phenomenon is to miss the point of modern opera.