#Carmen opera in theaters free
“This is a woman who is free - as she says, ‘Free as the air.’ And that’s not going to change.” “But given the choice between going with Don José or dying, Carmen chooses dying.” “Most of the women I play on stage are the third wheel in a romantic triangle entirely perpetuated and created by the man, and I end up spending all night long with my face in the ‘worried’ position,” Barton jokes. Carmen, of course, pays for that conviction with her life.
31 COT panel: “I’m a straight, cisgender singer with a genderfluid voice.”įor economically independent prima donnas living in a pre-19th Amendment world, the great blessing of their lives was that they did not have to revolve around men. What we can say for certain is that some voices - just as Blythe’s Oratonio is to opera-loving Twitter flocks - were a lifeline to audiences fed up of contorting themselves into something they weren’t. While more and more up-and-coming singers are “out” professionally, as Barton is, what remains tricky is retrofitting contemporary labels on long-gone singers, even if they remained unmarried or cultivated hugely sapphic followings - like Chicago’s own Mary Garden (1874-1967), a superstar soprano who became the first female director of an American opera company while living here. Mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton stars in the title role of "Carmen" by Chicago Opera Theatre.
“Where else but in the plush darkness of Covent Garden, the Met, or the Opéra-Comique, say, might a respectable woman of the nineteenth century have spent two or three hours staring raptly at another through binoculars?” writes critic Terry Castle. Both treatises toe the line between academic assessment and anecdotalism, but collectively, they gesture to a broader culture of escapism that took on deeper meaning for closeted audiences. Wayne Koestenbaum’s book “The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire” (1993) discusses diva worship among gay men, and the collection “En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera” (1995) complies feminine perspectives on queerness in the art form. For years now, savvy choirs, opera companies and vocal coaches have dropped gendered language around the human voice, with some - like ResonaTe, a trans-affirming choir in Chicago - foregoing terms like “soprano” or “bass” altogether in favor of a numbered pitch classification system from 1 to 4.Īlso nothing new is opera’s history of cultivating queer fanbases. The gendered vocal classifications foisted on modern-day singers flout opera’s own fluid history, seeing as castrated men sang what are now soprano or mezzo roles in Italian opera for centuries and women still frequently depict male characters onstage. (Barton is bisexual fans are still reeling from when she swung a giant Pride flag over her head while headlining the closing night of the 2019 BBC Proms, one of the most feted events in classical music.) “Guess this is where we find out whether all of queer opera Twitter can fit into a single theater,” quipped another.Īs for naysayers who think the arrangement somehow debases Bizet’s original, Chicago Opera Theater convened two panels around the production with a message for all those pearl-clutchers (hey, didn’t Bizet write that one, too?): Gender-bending in opera is nothing new. When the company announced the production with the rest of its season in June, opera fans the world over - the vast majority of whom had never been to a COT production, if they were familiar with the midsized company to begin with - went into ecstasies. To me, it’s an expression of a dream that was fed and watered by genderfluid and trans artists who showed me not to be afraid.”īlythe wasn’t the only one for whom COT’s “Carmen” realized a long-held fantasy.
“When I’ve talked to people about (singing Don José), they say, ‘That’s hysterical.’ It’s not hysterical to me. “That’s where my voice is happiest now,” Blythe said during an Aug.
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