As any opera lover knows, calling a given operatic work 'amazing' is not necessarily meant to be taken as a compliment. Operas are know for their bizarre, contorted, and sometimes downright delusional plot-lines. Very few people go to the opera in order to see a good story, and even fewer people go there to see brilliant acting. Historically, what people went to the opera for were stunning stage-sets, coupled with brilliant musical performances.
Unlike other performing arts, by its very nature opera requires story lines that are specifically concocted to accommodate the singers. Since the quality of the voice is paramount, it is the voice that shapes the structure of the character's role in the story. In order to understand how this plays out, you need to focus on one of the most challenging characters in the operatic repertoire: the adolescent male.
How does someone convincingly cast the light, higher-range tones of a youth? A tenor or a baritone won't do, and most definitely not a bass. Picture a lithe, youthful young male. He opens his mouth, and out comes a booming big voice. No. That would most certainly ruin the mood, as well as whatever story-line there is.
The answer to the dilemma is to cast a contralto, alto, or even soprano in the role. Yes, that means having a woman sing it.
There is also a secondary benefit to having a woman sing the role of a youth. In addition to having a lighter voice, women also have slighter builds that more closely resemble those of a boy or young male. On a visual level, it provides a more convincing character representation than having a big, hairy adult male performing the role.
Of course, this is opera, where being built like a tank used to be common, and delicate princesses were often sung by three-hundred pound matrons, while the sprightly, athletic heroes were even more massive. Still, the intent was there.
These roles, where women played young men, came to be known as 'hosenrollen', or 'trouser rolls', because the women singing the parts wore men's clothing for at least a portion of the time that they spent onstage. However, there is another common occurrence in virtually all 'hosenrolle' story lines: the young male character will be forced to go into disguise as a woman at some point or another in the opera. These interludes were specifically built into the operas, regardless of who the composer was, in order to make the women singing these roles more comfortable during the performance. It enabled the women who performed in these rolls to spend some of their onstage time in women's clothes, and to act as a woman would. The composers considered it necessary to provide them with some sort of respite from dressing in male drag during the performance of these types of operas.
There is one opera, however, that turns the function of the hosenrolle completely upside down. It is Beethoven's opera, 'Fidelio'.
Fidelio is an amazing opera, in the positive sense of 'amazing'. It also happens to be the only opera that Beethoven ever composed. What makes it truly remarkable, however, is that the central character of the opera is a woman. What is more, Lenore, the heroine of Beethoven's opera, has all the characteristics usually found exclusively in male heroes. She is the one who sets out on a mission to find and rescue her husband. She is the one who is steadfastly loyal, and determined. She is the one who overcomes all obstacles and eventually secures their joyous reunion. Beethoven was so fond of his female-hero, that he even named the opera 'Leonore', after her.
You would think that a musician of his caliber and reputation would be able to get away with it.
He didn't. Naming an opera after a female character met with resistance, and Beethoven ended up changing it. Instead of calling it 'Leonore', after the opera's female central character, he named it 'Fidelio', after Leonore in her male disguise. In the end, Beethoven still had it his way, albeit in a round-about, slightly underhanded manner.
In the role of Leonore we see a 'hosenrolle' that is both a typical and atypical. For the bulk of the opera, Leonore presents herself in male disguise. Pretending to be a prison guard named Fidelio, she sneaks into a fortress where she has heard a mysterious prisoner is being held. She is convinced that the prisoner is her missing husband, and is determined to rescue him. Along the way, she encounters the warden's daughter who falls for Fidelio, not realizing that he is actually a woman. While Leonore/Fidelio is having her adventures above ground, the mysterious prisoner is about to breath his last breath in a cell below ground. Just as he is about to expire, he falls into a delirium and has a vision of an angel coming down from heaven to take him to the freedom through his own death. The angel looks just like his wife, Leonore. Unknown to him, Leonore is at that moment getting ready to descend into his cell and rescue him.
The opera ends happily with Florestan and Leonore reunited. Florestan is finally free, and his faithful wife is once more wearing women's attire.
This is definitely not a typical hosenrolle for the simple fact that Leonore is a woman who disguises herself as a man, whereas in traditional hosenrollen, the character is usually a young man who, for some reason, has to disguise himself as a woman. But, there is also something else going on with this opera that Leonore's hosenrolle hides. This in an opera where the hero is undeniably the woman. However, by dressing Leonore up as Fidelio, the opera becomes a story with a male hero. Or, a male hero of sorts. It's an intentional misdirection, and it is designed to trick the audience into accepting Leonore as the hero of the story.
With Fidelio, Beethoven broke new ground, even as he cleverly disguised the fact that he was doing it. Sadly, the creation of the opera was so plagued by problems and rewrites, that the frustration it created for Beethoven is quite likely the reason he never wrote a second opera. That is really too bad, because, with Fidelio, he proved himself to be just as innovative an opera composer as he was a symphonic one.
image: pixabay
