Who Wears the Pants? - Part 2
In my Oxford dictinary, one definition of "Dame" -- note the capital D -- is "comic female pantomime character played by a man." Though historically such plays were mimed in silence, English "pantos" are alive and if not exactly well, still crowd-pleasers in our own times particularly at Christmas, and we see a trickle-down effect of the "Dame" character in the casting of Everett Quinton as the Queen in Broadway's current production of Cinderella (which could launch us on a whole other set of definitions of "queen", but let's not go there, shall we?)
What does this wordplay to do with opera? Plenty, and not just those written in the UK. Crossculturally, there has been a stage, and certainly comic, tradition of portraying...let us say post-menopausal women, to come to the point -- as men in skirts. Such depiction infers that mature women are no longer feminine, an attitude may well date back to Neanderthal days, when Og discovered he could get a laugh out of the boys by plopping a piece of grizzled fur on his head and imitating his granny.
Earliest opera certainly had its senior transvestite moments. Let's start with a real oldie, the opera and the character, both: In Cavalli's L'Ormindo, which premiered in Venice in 1644, Erisbe, who is married to an elderly King for whom she feels much too frisky a bride, has two suitors, Ormindo and Amida, the latter of whom has been seeing another woman, Sicle, on the sly. Erisbe also has an old nurse, Erice, vocally scored for a tenor. When it comes down to proving which young man is the more faithful, Erice emerges as rather how Despina would be at sixty –- sage but with plenty of snap. She has a marvelously saucy aria in Act II that anticipates Mephistopheles' rude serenade by more than 200 years, in which she sings that in the new law of lovers, courtly romantic gestures are all for naught -- only he who has gold will gain entry (and she means it exactly as crudely as this reads).
Though not overtly a comedy, this opera has its comic scenes in which the characters tweak the audience's perceptions of gender-behavior -– early in Act I, the page Nerillo –- sung by a mezzo -- has an aria in which he roundly derides women for their avarice. No way were the listeners expected to believe Erice was really female nor Nerillo male; the fun was in their playing devil's advocate, as it were, to their performer's genuine sex. If the title doesn't tip you off as to with whom Erisbe sarabandes into the sunset, let me not leave you hanging as to how this is accomplished: by virtue of a Romeo and Juliet fake death that works out correctly, the old King, Ariadeno, is fooled into believing Erisbe and Ormindo are dead, and then when they are revived gives them not only permission to marry but turns over his kingdom to them! Is that a happy ending, or what?
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