389.En travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera.Ed. Corinne Blackmer and
Patricia Juliana Smith. vi, 381p. NewYork: Columbia U.P., 1995. ISBN 0-231-
10269-0. ML2100 .E6.
Essays that attempt to disclose various gender-based oddities in operas and
opera composers. Topics include castrati and their roles, trouser roles, operas
in which women sing duets with each other and those in which they do not,
operas by declared or alleged homosexual composers or librettists, and even
“opera itself” as an art form. The reviewer in OQsaid that “most contribu-
tors... came to opera looking for queerness, and inevitably they found it.”
But another reviewer, in JAMS,was favorably disposed: “Although some may
still want to argue against Reynolds’ statement that ‘everyone knows opera is
about sex,’ through the eloquent confessions in this volume I am convinced.”- Koestenbaum, Wayne.The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the
Mystery of Desire.New York: Poseidon, 1993. 271p. ISBN 0-671-75457-2.
ML429 .K74 A3.
An attempt to establish a “gay way of listening” to opera. The appealing mys-
tery of the form is traced to the separation in puberty of the child and the
mother, creating a “desiring subject who will spend the rest of his life in a quest
for infantile wholeness.” In listening to opera “we are the ideal mother...
and the baby listening to the mother for signs of affection and attention.” Thus
the soprano fixation is accounted for. Includes a “pocket guide to [28] queer
moments in opera,” bibliography, and index. - McClary, Susan A. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minne-
apolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1990. viii, 220p. ISBN 0-8166-1898-4. ML82
.M38.
Seeks out “sexual metaphors” and finds many. The cadential feminine ending
is one, a woman’s mad scene is another. “Excess” is a key concept; it always
means something sexual in the subtext. The music sung by Carmen, for exam-
ple, is marked by “chromatic excesses” and “her musical lines tease and taunt,
forcing the attention to dwell on the...erogenous zones of her inflected
melodies.” Lucia’s music is likewise “always given to excess.” Lengthy consid-
erations of Bluebeard’s Castleand of Monteverdi’s “construction of gender”
are of interest. Backnotes, bibliography of 40p., index. - Hutcheon, Linda, and Michael Hutcheon. Opera: Desire, Disease, Death. Lin-
coln: U. of Nebraska Press, 1996. xvi, 296p. ISBN 0-8032-2367-6. ML1700
.H87.
An intriguing review of illnesses (explicit or implicit) in opera stories and con-
notations of specific diseases that contemporary audiences would have noted.
Tuberculosis, for example, was believed to be caused by mental states and sex-
ual indulgence until its correct infectious source was discovered in 1882.
Syphilis is often in disguise, as in Parsifal. Discussion covers the pox, cholera,
smoking, lesbian and gay elements, and even AIDS, for which no actual oper-
atic specimen was available. Backnotes, expansive index.
Philosophy and Theory of Opera 85