kudos: a column of books, living history, and gallimaufry

by Marie J. Kuda

Queer for opera!

In the United States we queers have had an especial fascination with opera since the pre­ electronic days when it (along with theatre) was entertainment for the masses. Opera today is so astronomically priced that only the DINKS among us can afford mainstream productions. Fascination now borders on fanaticism, and has mushroomed into the cult worship of dramatic singers from Callas to Norman to Malfitano. But it was ever thus.

Offstage connections

Pulitzer Prize­ winning novelist Willa Cather took the train from her home in Red Cloud, Nebraska more than 100 years ago, to spend a week in Chicago going to the opera every night. (Crosby´s Opera House was the destination then, the Civic, now home of the Lyric Opera, would not be built until well after Crosby´s burned down.) An occasional performance was held at Louis Sullivan´s architectural triumph, the Auditorium Theatre, in fact, the Chicago Opera Company was born there in the 1920s with legendary Mary Garden singing the lead in Ricard Strauss´ Salome with libretto adapted from Oscar Wilde´s work. It was on one of Cather´s visits to Chicago´s nascent Art Institute that she would see the romantic painting of a young woman, face upraised, in the fields at dawn, listening to "The Song of the Lark." She took that title for her novel about farm girl turned diva, Thea Kronberg. Wagnerian mezzo Olive Fremsted, a popular Seiglinde of her day whom Cather intensely admired, was the inspiration for the heroine. Wagner figured in two of Cather´s short stories as well: "A Wagner Matinee," and "Paul´s Case" in which a young gay employee embezzles from his mundane Midwest job to finance a spree in New York, and after a round of opera, symphonies and disillusionment, commits suicide.

Ernestine Schumann­ Heink (1861­ 1936) is still the standard by whom all contraltos are judged. Her reputation was built around Wagnerian heroines­Erda, Frica and Waltrute in the Ring cycle. The Austrian singer also created the role of Clymenestra in Strauss´ Elektra, sang more than 150 roles and was a popular concert performer. Shortly after she became a U.S. citizen, she was interviewed in 1916 by a young stringer for the Milwaukee Sentinel named Lorena Hickok, a new and ardent opera fan. Impressed and grateful, Schumann­ Heink gave the young woman a ring from her finger­a sapphire surrounded by diamond chips. Hickok would go on to become one of the top reporters for the Associated Press and wore the singer´s ring until the day in early 1933 when she gave it to the woman she loved, Eleanor Roosevelt. It was this ring the First Lady referred to when she wrote in one of the 3,500 letters between them that survive: "Hick darling ... I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it & think she does love me ... ." Come full circle, Hick and Eleanor are now subjects of Marie Coleman´s opera The First Lady´s Lady.

In 1901 when 25­ year­ old Cincinnati timber heiress, Natalie Clifford Barney, was trying to recapture the strayed affections of Parisian poet Renee Vivien, she enlisted the aid of the most famous "Carmen" of her day, Emma Calve. Vivien (actually an Anglo­ American, whose real name was Pauline Tarn), was currently under the thrall of a Baroness in the Rothschild banking family. The Baroness, also a Wagner fan, was nicknamed "the Valkyrie" by Barney after the warrior maidens of Teutonic myth. Calve and Barney disguised themselves as street singers and serenaded under Vivien´s window­first with Orpheus´ lament for his lost Eurydice, from the Gluck opera. Then, when Calve´s beautiful mezzo rang out with the aria from Bizet´s Carmen declaiming love as a gypsy child who knows no law, the neighbors recognized the singer and the gals sprinted to safety. Barney finally succeeded in capturing her beloved alone by exchanging places with Eva Palmer in Renee´s box at the Paris Opera House during a performance of Schumann´s Manfred. Emma Calve was often a guest at Barney´s "at homes" and was there on the legendary night when exotic dancer and alleged spy Mata Hari rode in stark naked on a white horse.

Author Gertrude Stein, also a Paris resident of that period, wrote the librettos for two American operas scored by composer Virgil Thompson. Thompson was only one of the many gay composition students of the great teacher Nadia Boulanger, also one of us. During a visit by Stein and Toklas in 1934 Four Saints in Three Acts had its Chicago premiere at the Auditorium Theatre with an all "Negro" cast and cellophane scenery. I saw The Mother of Us All (written in 1947), when it last played here in a production of the (more reasonably priced) Chicago Opera Theatre at the Atheneum in the 1980s. [Last week I thought I had stumbled on a reading of a rare work by Gertrude Stein when I turned on late­ nite TV and came in the middle of Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss.]

Trouser roles

Trouser roles, usually sung by a mezzo or contralto, are generally those in which a woman cross dresses as a man either as a disguise in the context of the opera, or plays a male character in a role written for the female voice. The ensuing complications or titillations of the audience­ in­ the­ know are engendered by subsequent soprano infatuations with the disguised males. In other cases, brief costume changes while retaining the character´s original gender identification can have similar effects.

More than a few hearts pounded when Catherine Malifitano appeared onstage at the Lyric a few seasons ago in a Dietrich­ like costume of fedora and camel­ hair coat over a man´s suit in the opening act of The Makropouolis Affair by Leon Janacek. In a subsequent scene her diva gown would have made Tony Midnite or Bob Mackie proud; she later straddled a chair (a la Lola­ Lola of the Dietrich film Blue Angel) and toyed with a whip while beguiling an old flame. Opening night at least one leather man, so attired, was in the audience (maybe he went backstage, because at a subsequent performance she handled the whip with more acumen). Malfitano, a sensational star, has appeared in more­ contemporary operas (this past season´s verboten Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, by Kurt Weill), as well as the old war­ horses (Madama Butterfly last season), and has a growing number of local gay fans.

Several seasons ago at the Lyric, out Tatiana Troyanos sang the male lead (in a purple costume­her choice of color) in Romeo and Juliette. She also sang the role of the Composer to Jessye Norman´s Prima Donna and Kathleen Battle´s Zerbinetta in the Met´s Ariadne auf Naxos by Ricard Strauss.

In more traditional roles­the characters of Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier by Ricard Strauss, and Cherubino in Mozart´s The Marriage of Figaro­the drag is usually military uniforms with lots of braid and epaulets to conceal womanhood; long on femme makeup and short on male mannerisms. Though when done well the audience is convinced the disheveled Octavian leaping from the bed of the aging Marschallin in the opening scene, is a virile young man. Lesbians are frequently more enamoured of women who play the soprano leads in these operas, the Countess in Figaro or the melancholy and beautiful Marschallin (signature roles in other generations for Lotte Lehmann and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf), than the often effeminately portrayed adolescents, Cherubino or Octavian. I was openly infatuated with Rise Stevens when young, less for her Octavian than her Carmen role.

Generally, the theatre has more luck with its drag roles; however, Oscar winner Helen Hunt in the PBS version of Twelfth Night was more reminiscent of early opera trouser roles. Ironically, passing in Shakespeare´s time would have been easier, as men played women´s roles; thus Olivia/Sebastian would have been a man playing a woman disguised as a man!

The character Leonora in Beethoven´s only opera, Fidelio, assumes men´s garb to be near her imprisoned husband. When the jailer´s daughter falls in love with (the generally more believably portrayed) Fidelio, the ensuing entanglements and jealousies culminate in a magnificent quintet. I have mixed memories about this opera having seen it at the 1978­ 79 season at the San Francisco Opera House within weeks of attending the memorial there for Harvey Milk after his assassination.

The only creditable trouser performance I ever witnessed was the early­ 1990s portrayal of Prince Orlovsky in Johann Strauss´ operetta Die Fledermaus. My mind has become clouded as to venue; but I believe, the monocled, bald Prince was sung by Brigitte Fassbaender. (I could be wrong.)

Curtain call

Spear carrying Brunhilde wearing a horned helmet and draped in animal skins is an often parodied and ridiculed image by those who want their musical heroines frail or flirtatious. It isn´t hard to understand why the strong women characters of Wagnerian opera and the trouser roles of Strauss and Mozart have unique appeal for the queer fan. One might even speculate on a preference for performances in the lower registers­mezzo and contralto­as being more sonorous, less shrill, connoting strength. I don´t mean to trivialize, by concentrating only on those facets of opera that would have a dual attraction to a queer spectator. But on stage opera is a unique experience, each performance unlike the next, incapable of encapsulation or generalization. The wedding of theatre and music, the artist and the audience, has an aura of risk, an ability to thrill, on a gut level. There is a gay sensibility in art, "gaydar" if you will, that resonates when both elements are present.

Comments or questions e­ mail Marie Kuda at kudoschgo@aol.com

Copyright Marie J. Kuda 1999

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