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- Permanent Link:
- https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UFE0021796/00001
Material Information
- Title:
- The More Mischievous the Better Octavian and Queer Opera Performance in Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Der Rosenkavalier
- Creator:
- D'Ettore, Peter A, Jr
- Place of Publication:
- [Gainesville, Fla.]
- Publisher:
- University of Florida
- Publication Date:
- 2007
- Language:
- english
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (52 p.)
Thesis/Dissertation Information
- Degree:
- Master's ( M.A.)
- Degree Grantor:
- University of Florida
- Degree Disciplines:
- English
- Committee Chair:
- Mennel, Barbara
- Committee Members:
- Offerle, Frank Anthony
- Graduation Date:
- 12/14/2007
Subjects
- Subjects / Keywords:
- Composers ( jstor )
Femininity ( jstor ) Gender performativity ( jstor ) Gender roles ( jstor ) Grammatical gender ( jstor ) Librettos ( jstor ) Masculinity ( jstor ) Opera ( jstor ) Swords ( jstor ) Women ( jstor ) English -- Dissertations, Academic -- UF gender, german, hofmannsthal, opera, performance, queer, rosenkavalier, sexuality, strauss
- Genre:
- Electronic Thesis or Dissertation
born-digital ( sobekcm ) English thesis, M.A.
Notes
- Abstract:
- Despite the thriving gay fanbase opera has developed over the years, this art form continues to cater to conservative ideologies and traditions--especially concerning matters of gender and sexuality. As discussed in studies such as Catherine Clement's 1979 Opera, or the Undoing of Women, opera has built its enduring popularity on traditional, heterosexual narratives that conclude with the dramatic demise of their heroines. In this thesis, I argue that composer Richard Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal subvert these established notions of gender and sexuality in the opera Der Rosenkavalier through the character of the young Count Octavian Rofrano. Utilizing the operatic practice of casting a female singer as a male character (commonly known as a trouser role), Strauss and Hofmannsthal prevent Octavian from inhabiting a strictly masculine or feminine, heterosexual or homosexual identity. This unique, non-heteronormative characterization endows Octavian with a fluid, non-static gendering that helps to destabilize gender binarity. After offering an historical analysis of the trouser role, paying especial attention to the figure of the castrato and the pageboy archetype, I contend that Strauss and Hofmannsthal--through cues in the opera's libretto, musical score, and staging--endeavor to mold a character that refuses the boundaries of male or female, heterosexual or homosexual labeling. By permitting Octavian to exist within this 'queer,' nongendered space, Strauss and Hofmannsthal force viewers of Der Rosenkavalier to reassess traditional gender and sexual roles--both when the opera was premiered in 1911 as well as today. Thus, my thesis offers an analysis that not only situates the opera in the context of the early twentieth century but also outlines the opera's commentary on gender and sexual roles that are still valuable for contemporary culture, particularly discussions of queer theory. ( en )
- General Note:
- In the series University of Florida Digital Collections.
- General Note:
- Includes vita.
- Bibliography:
- Includes bibliographical references.
- Source of Description:
- Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page.
- Source of Description:
- This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The University of Florida Libraries, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.
- Thesis:
- Thesis (M.A.)--University of Florida, 2007.
- Local:
- Adviser: Mennel, Barbara.
- Statement of Responsibility:
- by Peter A D'Ettore.
Record Information
- Source Institution:
- University of Florida
- Holding Location:
- University of Florida
- Rights Management:
- Copyright D'Ettore, Peter A, Jr. Permission granted to the University of Florida to digitize, archive and distribute this item for non-profit research and educational purposes. Any reuse of this item in excess of fair use or other copyright exemptions requires permission of the copyright holder.
- Classification:
- LD1780 2007 ( lcc )
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tableau at the premiere of the opera in 1911, and, as if willfully ignorant of the staging of what
appeared to be a blatant sexual transgression, the opera went on to become an instant success
with the public. Overlooking or excusing this elephant in the room, the audience at the
premiere-as well as audiences since-seemed to dismiss this subverted heterosexuality as a
mere operatic sleight of hand. While this practice of women performing the roles that had been
left vacant after the demise of the male-bodied, soprano-voiced castrati stretches back through
historical operatic performance-from Handel and Rossini to Mozart and Bellini-only very
recently has opera and gender scholarship finally begun to unpack the multifarious and often
unquestioned gender-bending of these trouser roles.
Not content simply to use the trouser role in their historic purpose as surrogates for the
obsolete castrati, Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, composer and librettist of the
aforementioned Der Rosenkavalier, utilized this operatic trickery as a means of destabilizing and
reassessing the gender roles of the early twentieth century. As Sam Abel asserts in Opera in the
Flesh: Sexuality in Opera Performance, the "female-to-male cross-dresser ... always poses a
threat. Women dressed as men violate male hegemony by attempting to reject their secondary
social role and to assume male power or, more powerfully, to reject the whole concept of binary
gender division" (151). In this thesis, I would like to refine Abel's discussion of the subversive
quality of drag. Rather than arguing that Octavian is apriori subversive simply because the
character is in actuality a woman in man's clothing (i.e., a woman who has attained male power),
I would like to posit that Octavian's malleable gender prevents the character from identifying
completely as either male or female, placing Octavian at a site of subversive power that fosters a
critique of dyadic, heteronormative gender roles. Indeed, the presence of this central trouser role
in Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Der Rosenkavalier does more than provide audiences with lesbian
ACT III
MUSICAL ANALYSIS OF OCTAVIAN AND THE TROUSER ROLE
While the more literary aspects of Der Rosenkavalier's libretto point to a multigendered
characterization of Octavian, the most recognized feature of opera tends not to be the text but the
music. German composer Richard Strauss gained fame (and notoriety) by writing operas that
explored complex and oftentimes disturbing portrayals of gender and sexuality. As I mentioned
before, Strauss' first triumph as an opera composer came after the premiere of Salome in 1905.
Adapted from Oscar Wilde's dramatic treatment of the biblical story, the opera recounts the
young Salome's obsession and lust after Jokanaan (John the Baptist) and closes with an extended
scene where she sings a fascinating and horrific song of desire to his severed head. Even
Strauss' follow-up opera, 1909's Elektra, focuses on the Greek tragedy where the eponymous
heroine plots the death of her mother, Klytemnastra, who has murdered Elektra's father. Aside
from their psychosexual subject matter, both of these operas were also marked by Strauss' use of
harsh and unnerving dissonance in order to convey the equally unsettling narratives of sexual
deviance (Plaut 268). While the later Der Rosenkavalier has been criticized as a retreat from the
more adventurous compositions in the darker Salome and Elektra, the composer by no means
balks from musically molding yet another character who explores non-normative gender and
sexuality. Indeed, Strauss not only endows Octavian with both masculine and feminine motifs in
his musical signatures but also orchestrally shapes Octavian's scenes in order to draw the
audience's attention to the character's queered presence.
In her landmark text on feminism and opera, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, Catherine
Clement devotes a section to the discussion of Der Rosenkavalier, describing Octavian, in
particular, as "the young count Octavian, [who] is distinctly unruly, scatterbrained enough and
with a good enough start under ladies' skirts to be known tenderly as Quinquin. And Richard
In the concluding act, readers can finally begin to envision Octavian's full character arc
as well as the non-normative sexuality with which Hofmannsthal has provided him. When the
Marschallin finally arrives at the inn, subsequently ending the convoluted plot Octavian had
devised to thwart Baron Ochs' plans of marrying Sophie, she informs the police commissioner
that "the whole thing was a charade and nothing more" ["das Ganze war halt eine Farce und
weiter nichts"] (189) and "'Tis a Viennese masquerade nothing more" ["Is eine wienerische
Maskerad' und weiter nichts"] (190). Ostensibly, the Marschallin is referring to the ploy
concocted by Octavian involving numberless characters now dressed as widows, children, and
ghosts, but the pointed use of the words "charade" and "masquerade" echo the notion of fantasy
and alternative sexualities exemplified in the Presentation of the Rose scene. But this leaves the
audience wondering, "Was all of this, then, a hoax? An operatic sleight of hand?"
If so, the return to the triangle of lovers at the opera's denouement and the deservedly
famous final trio seem to silence any suspicion of the opera's continuing insincerity. The
moving, even if melodramatic, display of emotions in the Marschallin's relinquishment of
Octavian and the charming, even if ephemeral, pairing of the young lovers in the final duet
contradict any arguments that may claim that the manygendered Octavian is merely a charade or
inassimilable other. At the end of the opera, whether or not Sophie and Octavian remain together
long after the curtain's close, Hofmannsthal allows this symbol of non-heteronormative sexuality
to exist and to merit affording a happy ending.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Barbara Mennel for her generous support and
guidance in a project that refused to be defined by any one academic discipline. Her
intradepartmental studies proved to be an invaluable resource for an equally intradepartmental
thesis. I would also like to thank Dr. Anthony Offerle, whose unique knowledge of opera and
constant enthusiasm aided in refining and strengthening my musical scholarship. I must also
offer my thanks to Dr. Maureen Turim, whose patience and kindness during the early stages of
this project were absolutely vital in helping it to become the thesis that it is now. Lastly, I cannot
forget the limitless love and encouragement of my parents, Peter and Marie D'Ettore, to whom I
owe more than I could possibly hope to enumerate here.
difficult to separate which voice belongs to Octavian and which voice belongs to Sophie. In the
climatic measure especially (beginning at the section labeled 36 in figure 2), the two singers'
melodies synch up perfectly, remaining only a third apart from one another on the musical scale,
emphasizing the transvocality of Octavian who, through the course of the duet, sings as both
male and female:
ae.. C T57 .-36 _
em nem s' gen An ea-bick, denwillKb h ne ver.
a.- tcr -'rWyfts ho y
OPa
gehnl daa itin ma 1e ger Au ge-n-bick, deAanl ie -
an,; Ay to ___ a 0 t&r i ,y, er Sty y
K cre4 b- a .... 7
-a-- 5
IPtA4)
179
ankl b
Got.
Figure III-2. Der Rosenkavalier; Act II (Source: Strauss 175-76)
Thus, through his composition and orchestration in the Presentation of the Rose duet,
Strauss adds an additional dimension to Hofmannsthal's textual description of the scene,
with the objects of his affection other than as comedic (and ultimately ineffectual) playacting.
Indeed, in David J. Levin's discussion of Cherubino in Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi,
Wagner, and Zemlinsky, the author notes that, unlike the focal relationships in Le nozze di Figaro
(e.g., Figaro and Susanna, the Count and Countess, and Bartolo and Marcellina), Cherubino and
Barbarina's relationship remains narratively unresolved because their marriage is still
"unscheduled when the opera comes to a close" (78). Levin goes on to claim that this thwarted
resolution is a result of Cherubino's gender confusion: "To the extent that Cherubino embodies
something that would resist being tied down, we might describe that 'something' as the fact or
problem of the figure's peculiar embodiment itself, a kind of erratic traffic in and between
gender" (79). This trope of the fervently sexual, but ultimately sexless, pageboy (what Levin
refers to as Cherubino's libidinall surplus" [78]) continues throughout the nineteenth century
until the emergence of the character of Octavian in Richard Strauss and Hugo von
Hofmannsthal's Der Rosenkavalier in the early twentieth century who manages to transcend the
obstacles of rigid gender and sexual representation that had thwarted the pageboy tradition
before him.
Octavian, the Knight of the Silver Rose
By the close of the nineteenth century, Victorian notions of sexuality had been brought to
the fore of European social consciousness by Richard von Krafft-Ebing's P%~yL /i qu Ithiia sexualis
andfin de sikcle decadence epitomized by writers such as Joris-Karl Huysmans and Oscar
Wilde-not to mention the latter's infamous sodomy trial. Richard Strauss, certainly no stranger
to these cultural developments, had recently completed two operas that explored the darker
realms of sexuality: 1905's Salome, adapted from Wilde's play, and 1909's Elektra, Strauss' first
collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal. While Strauss experimented with modernist
orchestration in these two pieces, employing chromaticism, dissonance, and atonality to reflect
Strauss gives him a disturbing woman's voice" (108). I find that Clement's choice of words in
referring to Octavian as having a "disturbing ... voice" robs the character of its powerful position
of gender reevaluation as a figure which overlaps genders. Clement's comment also seems to
dismiss that this very particular voice allows Octavian to maneuver more fluidly between the
genders represented by the other characters in the opera. For example, in the first act, Strauss
often features horn fanfares to represent Octavian's arrogant and specifically-masculine behavior
when he attempts to overpower the Marschallin's doubts of his fidelity. Indeed, in his article,
"Kitsch, Camp, and Opera: Der Rosenkavalier," Gary Le Tourneau describes the use of brass as
ejaculatoryry' horn calls" (93). While, in this quotation, Le Tourneau assigns a masculine
vocality to the character of Octavian, he continues on to argue that "Octavian is made a member
of both genders by the music" (93, emphasis mine). Certainly, despite Octavian's musical and
verbal ejaculations, he can often revert to a more lyrical and feminine line that mirrors the
musical characterization of his female lover, the Marschallin. In the selection provided in figure
1, as Octavian and the Marschallin intimately coo over one another, their alternating pet names
become repeated musical phrases that produce the effect that the two female voices echo or
answer one another:
Erte's costume designs for the 1980 Glyndebourne Festival similarly straddle depictions
of masculinity and femininity:
-j
Figure IV-4. Octavian at the end of Act I Figure IV-5. Octavian's runners
(Source: Erte 19) (Source: Erte 25)
Unlike the more ambiguous genders of the figures in Roller's sketches, the image of
Octavian in figure 4 at first may appear to be an unquestionable female in men's clothing, as if
designer Erte makes no attempt to hide the gender of the actor playing Octavian; however, when
compared to the accompanying paintings of Octavian's retinue (figure 5)-male characters,
especially those associated with the fantastical Presentation of the Rose scene, who would
actually be performed onstage by male actors-they appear similarly effeminate. Thus, the
fashion-oriented Erte displays Octavian's fluid gender not through the same androgyny of
imagines challenging the Marschallin's husband to a duel and light and lyrical when he comforts
and woos his older lover, Octavian and his vocal characterization, even in the span of the first
scene, swing wildly from the masculine to the feminine. This multigendered vocal line that
Strauss attributes to Octavian (Strauss himself was no stranger to Mozart, and it is believed that
Octavian's character and name are drawn from the character of Don Ottavio from Don Giovanni
[Abel 159]) reinforces the complex gender construction of the character, allowing Octavian to
transcend the limiting label of a lesbian "sameness" and represent an even more universal,
ungendered figure.
The female ensembles also especially emphasize this tricky destabilizing of gender in
Octavian's character. Like the previous examination of Hofmannsthal's libretto during the
Presentation of the Rose scene and duet, Strauss' orchestration highlights the mystical,
otherworldly quality of this scene which undermines traditional concepts of time and sexuality.
Strauss' prominent usage of celesta, harp, and flute in the descending theme of the duet creates a
shimmering, glossy effect which enhances the un-/surreality of the moment.
To the fore of Strauss' orchestration during this scene, however, are the twin female
voices of Octavian and Sophie. As the duet begins, Octavian sings in a low, almost monotone
voice, even dipping down to a C sharp below the staff to sing the word "Jungfer." While Sophie
begins in a similar monotone, she soon soars up to a B above the staff when extolling the beauty
of the silver rose ("Wie himmelische..."). This marked contrast between the lower-lying
passages of Octavian's more masculine voice and Sophie's high, feminine tones present the
listener with very separately-gendered voices-aural signifiers of Octavian's masculinity versus
Sophie's femininity; however, when Octavian and Sophie begin singing together, the yearning
triplet pattern of their shared musical line becomes almost identical, and the audience finds it
TABLE OF CONTENTS
page
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S ..............................................................................................................4
LIST OF FIGURES .................................. .. ..... ..... ................. .6
A B S T R A C T ........... ................... .................. .......................... ................ 7
HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF OCTAVIAN AND THE TROUSER ROLE.............................13
T he R ise and F all of the C astrato ................................................................ ..................... 13
The Trouser R ole and the Pageboy ........................................... ........ ..... ............... .15
Octavian, the Knight of the Silver Rose .................................................... .................. 17
TEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF OCTAVIAN AND THE TROUSER ROLE.................................22
MUSICAL ANALYSIS OF OCTAVIAN AND THE TROUSER ROLE............................... 30
VISUAL ANALYSIS OF OCTAVIAN AND THE TROUSER ROLE.................. ............38
Silver Roses, Swords, and the Gendered Props ofDer Rosenkavalier ................................38
Alfred Roller, Erte, and the Costuming of Octavian ...................... ........................ ....40
Fassbaender, Kirchschlager, and the Filmed Performances of Der Rosenkavalier ...............44
P O S T L U D E ...............................................................................................................4 8
L IST O F R E F E R E N C E S .............................................................................. ...........................50
B IO G R A PH IC A L SK E T C H .............................................................................. .....................52
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Peter D'Ettore is a native of Florida, born and raised in Pembroke Pines. He earned his
bachelor's degree in English literature with a minor in women's studies from Florida State
University in December 2004. Over the course of his graduate study, he has developed interests
in 20th century women's poetry, gender and queer studies, and opera studies. After receiving his
master's degree from the University of Florida in December 2007, he plans to pursue a career as
a junior college literature and writing instructor.
queerness, when viewed in conjunction with a number of purposefully non-masculine references,
Hofmannsthal complicates and problematizes Octavian's seemingly "straight"-forward role as a
man in the context of the opera.
While Octavian physically flirts with a more feminine sexuality (most prominently, when
he dresses as the handmaid Mariandl in order to escape Baron Ochs' notice as he's leaving the
Marschallin's room after a night of lovemaking), this more feminine characterization of Octavian
also translates to Hofmannsthal's textual treatment of the character. Probably the most
consistent example of this is Hofmannsthal's use of a thematic sexual sameness in the dialogue
between Octavian and the other two female leads, the Marschallin and Sophie. Beth Hart
explores this mirroring motif between the opera's all-"female" love triangle in "Strauss and
Hofmannsthal's Accidental Heroine: The Psychohistorical Meaning of the Marschallin." In her
examination of the opening scene between Octavian and the Marschallin, Hart rhetorically asks
her reader, "We wonder what need Octavian fulfills in the Marschallin as she mirrors him in
voice and gaze, calling him her boy, her darling boy" (421). As Hart suggests, despite the
difference in their characters' genders, the female actors portraying the Marschallin and Octavian
reflect one another vocally and visually. Even Octavian's effusive tendresse manifests itself in
poetic waxings that begin to blur the boundaries between the Marschallin and Octavian, the
feminine and masculine: "You, you-what does it mean, this 'you'? This 'you' and 'I'? ... but
this 'I' is lost in this 'you'" ["Du, du, du-was heilt das >Du? Was >du und ich? ... aber das
Ich vergeht in dem Du"] (61). Octavian's emphatic lapsing of the two pronouns carries a
significant added weight when considering the similar lapse that occurs between the genders of
both Octavian and the Marschallin: like the actor portraying the Marschallin, the supposedly
male Octavian actually possesses the body of a woman (the actor who plays him). To rearrange
For my Mother, to whom each of my accomplishments are dedicated, whether or not I remember
to say so.
Le Tourneau, Gary. "Kitsch, Camp, and Opera: Der Rosenkavalier." Canadian University
Music Review. 14 (1994): 77-97.
Leonardi, Susan J. and Rebecca A. Pope. The Diva's Mouth: Body, Voice, and Prima Donna
Politics. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1996.
Levin, David J. Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 2007.
Oosterhuis, Harry. Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual
Identity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.
Plaut, Eric A. Grand Opera: Mirror of the Western Mind. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993.
Reynolds, Margaret. "Ruggiero's Deceptions, Cherubino's Distractions." Blackmer and Smith
132-51.
Roller, Alfred. "Octavian Rofrano: Drittes Kostim, Erster Aufzug." Blumer 17.
S"Octavian Rofrano: Viertes Kostim, Zweiter Aufzug." Blumer 25.
S"Octavian Rofrano Genannt Quinquin: Erstes Kostim, Erster Aufzug." Blumer 5.
Der Rosenkavalier. Dir. Otto Schenk. Perf. Dame Gwyneth Jones, Brigitte Fassbaender, Lucia
Popp, Manfred Jungwirth, Carlos Kleiber. 1979. DVD. Deutsche Grammophon, 2005.
Dir. Robert Carsen. Perf. Adrianne Pieczonka, Angelika Kirchschlager, Miah Persson,
Franz Hawlata, Semyon Bychkov. DVD. TDK, 2004.
Smart, Mary Ann, ed. Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.
Strauss, Richard. "Dear Herr von Hofmannsthal." 9 July 1909. Opera: A History in Documents.
Ed. Piero Weiss. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. 266-68.
Der Rosenkavalier. Vocal Score. New York: Boosey & Hawkes, 1943.
Tambling, Jeremy. Opera and the Culture ofFascism. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.
The silver rose [...] carr[ies] the charge of an unspeakable and chronology-stopping love
because a connection arose in the late nineteenth century between itmit 11' ig ii th time
and it mle' ii, i i ith gender.
Disturb gender, and you disturb temporality; accept the androgyne, and you
accept the abyss. (218)
Here Koestenbaum asserts that the artificiality and unreality of the ceremony-as well as the
silver rose around which it revolves-opens a site for reassessing concepts of time and gender
which appear equally fantastic. Indeed, Hofmannsthal's libretto reflects this notion that the
Presentation of the Rose ceremony represents something queer and other that has ripped the
fabric of conventional understandings of time, beauty, and gender. When Sophie first smells the
silver rose, she notes that it smells not only like an actual rose but also like "roses of heaven, not
of earth like roses of holy paradise" ["Wie himmelische, nicht irdische, wie Rosen vom
hochheiligen Paradies"] (115). Sophie's recognition (or failed recognition) of what is the fantasy
and what is the reality of the rose parallels the audience's own recognition of the meshing of
fantasy and reality in the performed gender of the character of Octavian. Hofmannsthal's clever
use of the metaphorical silver rose in the libretto (as a symbol of the unreal) thus comments upon
his and Strauss' purposeful decision to cast the character of Octavian as similarly illusory, by
using a female soprano or mezzo soprano to portray the male knight of the rose.
Even the simultaneously spoken words of Octavian and Sophie's duet during this scene
further the idea that the opera has suspended reality, allowing the queer and the other to emerge
in this fantastical staged world disconnected from the more realistic and typical ideas and
traditions of the early twentieth century. Calling to mind Koestenbaum's aforementioned
discussion of temporality and sexuality, Sophie exclaims, "There's Time and Eternity in this
moment of bliss" ["Ist Zeit und Ewigkeit in einem sel'gen Augenblick"] (116), while Octavian
speaks of the tenuousness of his own gender: "I was a boy and did not know her yet. Who am I
Roller's images, but through an almost effeminized masculinity, which endows the male
characters in the opera, whether being performed by male or female actors, with a beauty
typically associated with females. So, both Roller and Erte maintain a multigendered portrayal
of Octavian through their respective costume sketches by recognizing both the masculine and
feminine qualities of the character.
Even more so than two-dimensional images and sketches, though, the three-dimensional
costuming of Octavian plays an integral role in the comprehension ofDer Rosenkavalier's queer
performativity. Over the course ofDer Rosenkavalier, Octavian dons women's clothes and
disguises himself as Mariandl-first to escape notice when leaving the Marschallin's boudoir
and secondly to entrap Baron Ochs in order to thwart his marriage arrangement to Sophie. This
double cross-dressing by the actor playing Octavian draws even more attention to the genderplay
at work in the opera. For example, when the Marschallin kisses Octavian dressed as a woman
("You darling! And I can give you no more than a kiss" ["Du Schatz! Und nicht einmal mehr
als ein Busserl kann ich dir geben."] [69]) and calls after him, "And come back, darling, but in
man's clothing and by the front door, if you please" ["Und komm' Er wieder, Schatz, aber in
Mannskleidern und durch die vordre Ttir, wenn's Ihm beliebt"] (69), she makes known her
preference that Octavian return to her in the drag costuming of his male clothes. Thus, the
Marschallin doesn't desire Octavian as a lesbian (as many modern scholars have interpreted the
Marschallin-Octavian affair) or as a heterosexual woman, but instead desires the other-gendered
Octavian who inhabits both realms of sexuality.
Fassbaender, Kirchschlager, and the Filmed Performances of Der Rosenkavalier
Lastly, I would like to examine briefly two performances of Der Rosenkavalier available
on DVD and how their respective actors' portrayals of Octavian enhance (or fail to enhance) the
notion of gender mutability I have espoused throughout this project. The first filmization is a
ACT II
TEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF OCTAVIAN AND THE TROUSER ROLE
In examining the opera Der Rosenkavalier, Octavian's multifarious gender and sexuality
can been seen in virtually each facet of operatic performance: from the musical to the visual;
however, I would like to begin my examination of the opera with a textual analysis of the
libretto, because it is often this literary aspect of opera that is overlooked in current scholarship.
Indeed, while opera layperson and fanatic alike may often attribute authorship of Der
Rosenkavalier to Richard Strauss solely, the work finds a great deal of its shape and narration
through the libretto of Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Like the famous collaboration between Mozart
and Lorenzo da Ponte, Strauss and Hofmannsthal's professional partnership has been, and still is,
touted as one of opera's greatest composer-librettist pairings (an extra-textual homosocial
relationship linked to Der Rosenkavalier that has not gone unnoticed by opera scholars and queer
theorists alike), and their extensive correspondence helped to shape the convoluted birth of the
opera. Also, in Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual
Identity, Harry Oosterhuis asserts that for Hugo von Hofmannsthal "sexuality was an intriguing
subject that could be deployed to unveil bourgeois society's sense of security as a facade, full of
empty conventions" (260). Thus, I propose that Hofmannsthal, via his textual cues throughout
the opera's libretto, knowingly endows the character of Octavian with a manyheaded and fluid
sexuality. This non-static gendering present in Der Rosenkavalier not only prevents the lesbian-
coded relationships in the opera from being read as merely pornographic, functioning solely to
excite sexually and sensationally, but also presents audiences with an indefinable sexuality that
helps to liberate gender and sexual representations from the male/female, hetero-/homosexual
dyad, both in our current cultural conceptions as well as the microcosmic realm of the operatic
mise-en-scene.
or ceremonial outfits while also introducing "feminine" and ornate touches to complicate the
character's masculinity:
AF
CHRflS IOVTUM
fRSItHAUFZUC
Figure IV-1. Octavian Rofrano: Figure IV-2. Octavian Rofrano:
Drittes Kostum, Erster Aufzug Viertes Kostum, Zweiter Aufzug
(Source: Roller 17) (Source: Roller 25)
In these original 1910 costume sketches for the opera's premiere in Dresden, Alfred
Roller portrays Octavian with a lithe, boyish figure stripped of any marker of the femaleness
underneath (except, perhaps, for the more pronounced hips of the figure in the second image).
The faces, however, are certainly more androgynous. In figure 1, Octavian's colored cheeks and
feline eyes make him more pretty and feminine, while the cherubic face in figure 2 seems to defy
5TO (TMI M-7 : ?-
female mezzo soprano or contralto in lieu of the castrato. Perhaps most famously, George
Frideric Handel often employed both male castrato and female mezzo sopranos-vocal ranges
that sonically overlap-for the same roles in his operas, simply depending upon the availability
of the artists. Margaret Reynolds describes this blurring of the lines between voice and gender in
her essay, "Ruggiero's Deceptions, Cherubino's Distractions":
In Handel's day there was sexual anarchy on stage. Men (or ex-men) played the parts of
heroes in high voices. Women, dressed up as men, sang heroes in high voices. Men,
dressed up as women, played their consorts with high or low voices. And if you couldn't
hire the singer of the sex required, you settled for the voice and didn't worry. (138)
As apparent in Reynolds' reading of the opera stage during the eighteenth century, opera served
as a site for gender deconstruction where feminine-sounding men stood alongside armor-clad
women. Indeed, Handel wrote operas where high, almost feminine, voices could be either male
or female and could evoke a number of vocal qualities that ran the gamut from heroism and
seduction to virginity and villainy. In his most famous opera, Giulio Cesare, the voice types of
the lead roles-Giulio Cesare, Cleopatra, Sesto, Tolomeo, and Cornelia-all fall into similarly
high-voiced tessituras that could be sung by both male castrati and women regardless of whether
the character was male or female; however, as opera edged further away from the opera seria
realm of the castrati to the class struggles and 'battle of the (heterosexual) sexes' subject matter
of opera buffa, the newly-established trouser role began to signify a new type of sexuality.
The Trouser Role and the Pageboy
After the cessation of the practice of castration, as well as the moral clash of the eerily-
juxtaposed masculine body and feminine voice of the castrato with the sexual mores of the late
eighteenth century, castrati became virtually obsolete outside of the church. The sidelining of
the complicated sexual embodiment of the castrato did not, however, stop composers from
writing music for their voice type; now, these composers began to write specifically for the
singing the role of the Marschallin, that the first five minutes ofDer Rosenkavalier are "the most
awkward to perform in any opera" (Castle 46), and "[o]nce you get past these first few minutes
when you are in bed with another woman, you can get on with the role" (Castle 56). As these
examples show, the subversiveness of Octavian's characterization is not simply a theoretical
performativity that can only be identified and teased out through academic scholarship; it is an
unsettling representation of non-normativity recognizable to both the performers and viewers of
the opera as well.
What specifically seems to be so frightening to these performers about the sexuality
inherent in the role of Octavian? For one, at the very beginning of the post-coital tableau that
opens the opera, the audience is privy to the fact that Octavian, unlike Cherubino, actually
experiences the sexual consummation all the other pageboys spend so much time longingly
wishing for in song. Or, as succinctly written by Sam Abel in Opera in the Flesh, "Cherubino
fantasizes about sex, but Octavian actually has sex" (159). Thus, the playful sexual threat posed
by the pageboy and his indiscernible gender finally becomes realized in the character of
Octavian.
While Strauss and Hofmannsthal's characterization of Octavian as sexually active
certainly touches upon emerging notions of early-twentieth-century sexual sensibility, I would
argue that Octavian offers audiences even more complexity than that. In concluding her
examination of the Cherubino figure, Heather Hadlock remarks that twentieth-century composers
and librettists
no longer treat female travesty as a problem or a challenge, and [Strauss and
Hofmannsthal's] (excessively) frank staging of the relationship between Octavian and the
Marschallin puts the female lovers in a spotlight, clearly intended to titillate. Their
"Cherubino" no longer undresses behind a screen, and this very shamelessness, this
abandonment of over a century of shadows and veils over the page's body and desire,
leaves less to "read." (92)
51 Marsehllwin,
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Ma ife rt rer?:' A cAst s!
mA sso assai
Eanco.
N L
A~ I. L
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S I (l/?to nsprnei&ro
Figure III-I. Der Rosenkavalier; Act I (Source: Strauss 24-5)
This androgynous vocalizing in the first act also resembles the vocal and gender leaps of
Octavian's pageboy predecessor, Cherubino. Naomi Andre explores this notion of Cherubino's
two voices in Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early-Nineteenth-
Century Italian Opera:
As for Cherubino, the aria ["Non so piu"] illustrates the tug and pull he experiences
between his "two voices."... [I]t is as though he is trying to tame his voice and push it
down to a lower tessitura, yet it keeps popping up to a higher range, almost beyond his
control.... Split between his higher and lower voices, his "I am" encompasses the two
simultaneous aspects of the childlike boy and the budding adult male personalities he
embodies. (109)
Much like this doubled voice that exists inside the character of Cherubino, Octavian experiences
a similar multivocality. With a vocal line that alternates between violent and bombastic as he
have graduated through or swapped the female roles over the course of their careers. Since
Strauss composed all three characters for the soprano voice (although Octavian is most often
performed by a mezzo soprano), many singers have found the transition between these
differently-gendered characters to be surprisingly smooth and natural. Christa Ludwig and
Gwyneth Jones both essayed the role of the Marschallin after successful portrayals of Octavian,
and Swiss soprano Lisa della Casa has the distinction of having performed as each of the three
lead roles at different stages in her operatic career. This fascinating mobility that performers
have found shifting between the roles of the male Octavian and the female Marschallin and
Sophie speaks to the same textual/sexual ambiguity that Hofmannsthal gives to the character of
Octavian throughout his libretto.
Hofmannsthal likewise imbues Der Rosenkavalier's operatic mise-en-scene (especially
during the love scenes) with a whimsical surreality that hints at the queerness at work in the
character of Octavian. In what is perhaps the opera's most famous set piece, the second act's
Presentation of the Rose scene, Octavian bears a silver rose to Sophie in recognition of her
betrothal to Baron Ochs. When staged, this scene is quite often visually resplendent, with a
silver-clad Octavian arriving at his musical cue with a train of similarly clad officers amidst the
filigreed architecture of Faninal's opulent home; however, while the visual markers of the
scene's fantastic qualities are no doubt in plain view, even the opera's libretto iterates the
otherworldliness of this realm where roses smell celestial and a woman playing a man can be
both and neither genders. In The Queen's Throat, Wayne Koestenbaum elaborates upon the
ways in which this scene arrests the flow of time and how that chronological topsy-turvydom
corresponds to the opera's queer sexuality:
trouser role-a female singer (usually mezzo soprano) who performs as a man in men's clothing.
The most famous archetype to emerge from this newfound operatic role was the pageboy. The
quintessential young man on the verge of sexual awakening, the pageboy is a figure caught
between adulthood and childhood, man and not-man, making the androgynous female drag
performance functional as well as aesthetic. While the stock character of the pageboy recurs in
operas such as Verdi's Un ball in maschera and Wagner's Tannhduser, the most prominent and
popular of these characters is certainly Cherubino from Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro. A
secondary character that nevertheless sends Mozart's buffa plot careening into motion,
Cherubino is a sexually-volatile page who falls in love with virtually every female character in
the opera's cast. In her discussion of the pageboy figure of Cherubino in "The Career of
Cherubino, or the Trouser Role Grows Up," Heather Hadlock explains that the
variety of names for the practice [of female-to-male cross-dressing in opera], variously
known as the "trouser role," "breeches part," or "pants part," Hosenrolle or travesti,
testifies both to its international appeal and to the necessity of the singer's having slim,
boyish legs. Equally essential ... is a light and clear voice [and the] page's "talk of love"
is typically translated into melancholy or flirtatious staged songs, directly or indirectly
addressed to an inaccessible beloved, of which Cherubino's "Voi che sapete" remains the
archetype. (68)
Indeed, the figure of the pageboy is part erotic spectacle (the sight of women's legs, even clothed
in men's stockings, was a novelty for the stage at that time) and a true example of form fitting
function-the singer's androgynous voice, much like the voice of a boy experiencing the
hormonal rushes of puberty, is at times lovely and light while at others plummy and deep.
Yet, the character of the pageboy is a limited one. While beloved, the pageboy is often a
minor character in the opera's drama, rarely eclipsing the traditional heterosexual coupling of the
lead soprano and tenor/baritone. Also, despite the pageboy's zealous sexual appetite, the opera
composer and librettist rarely allow this nontraditionally-gendered character to interact sexually
POSTLUDE
So, in examining the extraordinarily vital textual, musical, and visual features ofDer
Rosenkavalier, modem operagoers and scholars can begin to see how Strauss and Hofmannsthal
as well as subsequent opera directors, producers, costume designers, and performers have each
attempted to preserve the fascinating sexual and gender mores of the opera and its eponymous
hero(ine). As I bring this project to a close, I would like to draw your attention to a
correspondence written by composer Richard Strauss to librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal on the
ninth of July, 1909. Replying to a draft of the second act that Hofmannsthal had recently sent,
Strauss discusses the character of Octavian and his elaborate plot to foil Baron Ochs' plans of
marrying Sophie: "The more mischievous Octavian is the better" (267). Whether or not Strauss
intended this comment to refer specifically to Octavian's complicated cross-dressing as Mariandl
or simply the convoluted scheme in general, I feel that this quotation helps us to grasp the very
purposeful intent behind the character of Octavian: to function as a contrary to
heteronormativity. Not simply a lesbian or homosexual figure, Octavian is a powerfully-
ungendered other that opens a site for questioning accepted genders and sexualities and
challenging the status quo. As we look over the long lineage of the trouser role and its
multifaceted methods of commenting on gender and sexuality, from the onstage gender anarchy
of Handel to Mozart's lusty pageboy, arriving at Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's
Der Rosenkavalier brings us to a point in operatic history where the queer sensibilities currently
so synonymous with opera truly began to emerge and, even to this day, flourish.
So, as opera continues to build an even larger gay and lesbian following, queer scholars
and fans alike can continue to expand and refine the discourse of gender rebellion that occurs on
the operatic stage. By viewing opera through the lens of queer and gender studies, we can
unlock perceptions and interpretations long obscured by the more conservative ideologies that
Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School
of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts
THE MORE MISCHIEVOUS THE BETTER:
OCTAVIAN AND QUEER OPERA PERFORMANCE
IN RICHARD STRAUSS AND HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL' S DER ROSENKAVALIER
By
Peter D'Ettore
December 2007
Chair: Barbara Mennel
Major: English
Despite the thriving gay fanbase opera has developed over the years, this art form
continues to cater to conservative ideologies and traditions-especially concerning matters of
gender and sexuality. As discussed in studies such as Catherine Clement's 1979 Opera, or the
Undoing of Women, opera has built its enduring popularity on traditional, heterosexual narratives
that conclude with the dramatic demise of their heroines. In this thesis, I argue that composer
Richard Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal subvert these established notions of
gender and sexuality in the opera Der Rosenkavalier through the character of the young Count
Octavian Rofrano. Utilizing the operatic practice of casting a female singer as a male character
(commonly known as a trouser role), Strauss and Hofmannsthal prevent Octavian from
inhabiting a strictly masculine or feminine, heterosexual or homosexual identity. This unique,
non-heteronormative characterization endows Octavian with a fluid, non-static gendering that
helps to destabilize gender binarity.
After offering an historical analysis of the trouser role, paying especial attention to the
figure of the castrato and the pageboy archetype, I contend that Strauss and Hofmannsthal-
through cues in the opera's libretto, musical score, and staging-endeavor to mold a character
In the final act, Ochs brings Mariandl (Octavian dressed as a chambermaid) to an inn
where he plans to bed her. Unbeknownst to the Baron, Octavian has devised an elaborate plot
involving masked men and a woman disguised as the Baron's supposedly-abandoned widow in
order to expose the Baron's infidelities. As the evening progresses and an outraged Faninal and
Sophie eventually arrive at the inn to witness the Baron with the "chambermaid," Ochs can no
longer hold Sophie to her marital obligation. Just as Ochs begins to realize the trick that has
been played on him, the Marschallin arrives, sending the Baron away in shame and, despite her
own love for Octavian, uniting the young lovers at the opera's denouement.
Certainly, whether operagoers chose to ignore or dismiss the non-normative gender
depictions in Strauss' opera, they could no longer passively assume that this operatic genderplay
was a simple smoke-and-mirrors illusion meant to stealthily place a women's voice in the body
of a man. From the moment the curtain rises on Der Rosenkavalier, the opera immediately
confronts its audience with the image of two female actresses in bed together. The homoerotic
sexual tension of this first scene was so dangerous to some that the opera was censored and even
banned shortly after its premiere.2 From the opera's inception to its more recent productions, the
complex tinderbox of sexuality also did not go unnoticed on its performers. As recounted in
Philip Brett and Elizabeth Wood's collaborative essay, "Lesbian and Gay Music," famous opera
singer Mary Garden refused to "create the role of Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier because of its
lesbian implications" (353-54). Similarly, New Zealand soprano Kiri te Kanawa has stated, on
2 In "Ruggiero's Deceptions, Cherubino's Distractions," Margaret Reynolds recounts an example
of the censorship Der Rosenkavalier faced in England:
The first act bed caused trouble in London where the Lord Chamberlain intervened when
Thomas Beecham declared his intention to stage the opera in 1912: either the bed had to
go from the scene or there was to be no reference to it in the text sung by the performers.
Beecham decided that the former was preferable, so the Marschallin and Octavian
conducted themselves with upright propriety. (144)
underpinning the break from gender tradition and convention captured in the duet's otherworldly
atmosphere and Octavian's fluctuating musical line that at times embodies both masculine and
feminine characteristics.
Strauss' attention to the gendered vocality of Octavian becomes even more focused in the
final trio and duet. In the celebrated trio ("Hab' mir's gelobt"), the composer layers the voices of
his female performers to create an almost impenetrable mesh of feminine sound. In Opera and
the Culture ofFascism, Jeremy Tambling describes this ensemble, explaining that "the voices
soar, and it is not clear which voice is being heard, whether that of the stage women or the
putative male-that is, Octavian" (190). Surely, in composing this piece, Strauss was aware of
this inevitable aural confusion-a confusion that, in obscuring the gender of the male Octavian
among the female voices of Sophie and the Marschallin, undermines gender binaries, giving
form to a character without tangible or definite male- or femaleness. Even more so than its role
in the Presentation of the Rose scene, Octavian's voice alternates between its masculine and
feminine colorations, at times providing the supportive moving line while the voices of Sophie
and the Marschallin draw out their high notes and then suddenly soaring higher than both the
other voices (as seen when Octavian sings "Ist den nein groBes Unrecht..." in figure 3):
1979 performance of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester, conducted by Carlos Kleiber; Brigitte
Fassbaender performs the role of Octavian. The second is a 2004 Salzburg Festival performance
by the Wiener Philharmoniker conducted by Semyon Bychkov; the Octavian is Angelika
Kirchschlager. Although the 1979 performance is more traditional and typical in its production
and staging choices, I feel that this filmic representation conveys more successfully than the
avant-garde and controversial Salzburg Festival entry the plastic and fluid gender of Octavian's
character.
In her justly-famous assumption of the role of Octavian, Brigitte Fassbaender creates a
character whose complicated web of genders and cross-dressings are always utterly believable.
Never betraying discomfort in her intimate interactions with Gwyneth Jones or Lucia Popp (the
actors who portray the Marschallin and Sophie, respectively), Fassbaender and her ease of
performance naturalizes the non-heteronormativity of her drag character; however, despite her
studied mimicry of masculinity, Fassbaender is never satisfied to simply perform as a man. In
her essay, "In Praise of Brigitte Fassbaender: Reflections on Diva Worship," Terry Castle
explains just how Fassbaender's complex performance as Octavian avoids a seamless illusion of
maleness:
Precisely to the degree that Fassbaender seems to enter "into" her male roles, precisely as
I watch her approach (though without ever reaching) a kind of "zero degree masculinity,"
I find myself becoming more and more acutely aware of, and aroused by, her femininity.
The very butchness with which she tackles, say, a role like Octavian-the sheer,
absolutist bravado of the impersonation-infuses it with a dizzying homosexual charge.
(43)
Indeed, while Fassbaender certainly makes her masculinity believable (seen particularly
convincingly when an uncomfortable, almost homophobic, tension builds at the prospect of
Octavian, in the double-drag as Mariandl, kissing Baron Ochs-though, in reality, a heterosexual
kiss between a male and female actor), as Castle notes, the singer never achieves a perfect
2007 Peter D'Ettore
argue that, through composer Richard Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal's use of
libretto, musical score, and staging, Octavian functions as a purposefully queeredd" character
whose successful existence without definable gender reflects the emergence of non-normative
sexualities in the social consciousness of the early twentieth century that are still relevant today.
ACT I
HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF OCTAVIAN AND THE TROUSER ROLE
The Rise and Fall of the Castrato
Before embarking on my discussion of the breeches role in Der Rosenkavalier, it is
necessary to provide a brief background of these roles in opera's performance history. Before
women were universally permitted to grace the stage, whether theatrical or operatic, the castrato
sang the high-voiced alto and soprano roles most commonly associated nowadays with women.
Susan J. Leonardi and Rebecca A. Pope, whose study on diva politics and worship discusses the
rise and fall of the castrato at length, trace the practice of castration in The Diva'sMouth: Body,
Voice, Prima Donna Politics:
Castration was, perhaps, the price patriarchy paid to keep women silent and its authority
intact. "As in all congregations of God's people, women should keep silent at the
meeting," St. Paul advised the Corinthians (I Cor. 14.33-34), and his namesake Pope Paul
IV (1555-1559) codified Paul's advice by officially banning women from singing in St.
Peter's. Church choirs depended on boys and adult male falsettists to sing soprano and
alto parts, but as monody gave way to increasingly complicated polyphony, more
powerful voices and mature musicians (especially singers who would not be lost once
their voices changed) were needed for upper-register parts. (25)
In order to fulfill this need for a voice as light as a child's, while also as strong as an adult's, the
custom of castrating young boys to preserve their young, high voices, in what is known as an
orchiectomy, was born. Although practiced by the Roman Catholic Church, the Church itself
publicly shunned the act, and thus, it is uncertain exactly when the practice began; however,
documentation exists of castrati performing as early as 1562 (Leonardi and Pope 25). On the
other hand, the appearance of women on the stage, even outside the Catholic Church, was often
looked upon as an act of gross impropriety. This is not to say that women did not perform
publicly; however, because they were often prohibited from appearing and singing onstage, the
figure of the castrato began to serve as a proxy for the female performer and the staged female
body of the era.
While Hadlock's reading of the pageboy trope via the character of Cherubino is insightful
in its investigation of what is often obscured from view, I believe that the author oversimplifies
the characterization of Octavian when she claims that his lesbian visibility (the "female lovers")
automatically de-problematizes his gender travesty, as if the characters in Der Rosenkavalier
become transparently and unproblematically homosexual. Surely, the more sexually suggestive
aspects in the "lesbian" relationship between Octavian and the Marschallin (and later Octavian
and Sophie) cannot be completely swept under the rug, but I would argue that Octavian's
characterization is far too mercurial to be labeled as simply homosexual. By blending together
the seemingly binary genders embodied in the character of Octavian, merging the feminine and
girlish with the masculine and boyish, Strauss and Hofmannsthal not only move Octavian
beyond the limited depiction of the operatic pageboy, but reify emergent non-heteronormative
sexualities that are still surprisingly relevant in contemporary society.
gender categorization completely. Even the costumes themselves, especially the silver outfit in
figure 2, are almost feminine in their sartorial opulence and finery.
Figure IV-3. Octavian Rofrano Genannt
Quinquin: Erstes Kostum, Erster Aufzug
(Source: Roller 5)
The Octavian in figure 3, also by Alfred Roller, brings the actor's femaleness even more
to the fore as the jacketless figure's feminine hips and backside are now visible (even though,
surprisingly, the face appears more masculine than the previous two images). Thus, in each of
these sketches, Roller emphasizes both the masculine and feminine qualities of the Octavian
character, creating a figure that balances between, rather than resolving into, a strict male or
female gender identity.
11Q1 ;LlI 1. 9-1111 I
THE MORE MISCHIEVOUS THE BETTER:
OCTAVIAN AND QUEER OPERA PERFORMANCE
IN RICHARD STRAUSS AND HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL' S DER ROSENKAVALIER
By
PETER D'ETTORE
A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
2007
semblance of masculinity. Fassbaender, I believe, is even aware of this disjuncture, and often, in
her characterization of the multigendered Octavian, fondles his sword, sheathing and
unsheathing it, in symbolic recognition of her own-and, by extension, the character's-ultimate
phallic lack. Thus, I feel that Fassbaender succeeds in providing an interpretation of Octavian
that truly explores the character's ungendered qualities, rather than simply assigning Octavian
either a masculine or even subversively lesbian identity.
Angelika Kirchschlager, on the other hand, for all her many musical talents, fails to
succeed in providing the wholly complex characterization so evident in Fassbaender's
interpretation. The problems with Kirchschlager's performance surface most prominently when
her Octavian is dressed as Mariandl. In the first act, when she's attempting to escape Baron
Ochs, no amount of playacting can disguise the fact that Kirchschlager has now reverted back to
being a woman. Wearing red lipstick and her breasts unbound, it becomes obvious to the
audience that the actor playing Octavian is, in reality, female. It is almost as if director Robert
Carsen had wanted to divulge the theatrical secret of Octavian's character by having the actress
dress in female clothing in order to reveal her "true" identity. Unlike the aforementioned 1979
performance, which never tips its hand either way about Fassbaender's true gender (even during
the curtain calls, Fassbaender chivalrously leads Jones and Popp out in front of her), this more
recent performance breaks the operatic conceit and, even more detrimentally, explains the
previously unexplainable gender of the Octavian character.
In the final scene of the Salzburg performance, when Octavian dresses as Mariandl in
order to seduce Baron Ochs, Kirchschlager is costumed in layered lingerie and comes sashaying
campily through a circle of women in her new disguise. Almost completely antithetical to her
previous double cross-dressing, Kirchschlager now treats femininity not as Octavian's true
As the opera begins, the viewer is automatically provided with visual clues that suggest
Octavian's sexual otherness. Immediately, the audience is confronted with the image of a
woman in man's clothing; however, even the listener (or reader, if the opera house employs
surtitles) can recognize the unique space that Octavian inhabits through the words of the opera.
This liminal space is often seen when the audience, recognizing the femaleness of the actor
portraying the male character of Octavian, is continuously reminded by the libretto, through
gendered names or pronouns for example, of Octavian's maleness. In order to reinforce the
theatrical illusion of Octavian's male gender within the diegesis of the narrative, Hofmannsthal
saturates the libretto with various references to Octavian's maleness and masculinity. For
instance, the Marschallin constantly refers to Octavian as "mein Bub'," a term of affection
typically translated as "my boy" (61, 64). Even this simple pet name between lovers signifies
with a very specific male gender. Also, on two separate occasions, the Marschallin remarks how
the queerly-gendered Octavian behaves much like other men do. When Octavian reacts
petulantly and possessively to the Marschallin's fear of abandonment in the first act, she pleads,
"No, please, do not be as all men are" ["Nein bitt' sch6n, sei Er nur nicht, wie alle Manner
sind!"] (104). Then, near the end of the last act, the Marschallin relinquishes Octavian to his
new love, Sophie, both chiding his fickle heart and his sex as a whole when she bittersweetly
comments, "You are so like a man-go to her!" ["Er ist ein rechtes Mannsbild, geh' Er hin"]
(196). Not only do these purposeful references to Octavian's maleness and masculine behavior
keep the femaleness of the actor performing the role textually hidden, but the juxtaposition of
these remarks with the actor's true gender also provide for a sly undercurrent of self-referential
humor at the genderplay involved in the opera. Although these purposes may strike the reader as
both expected and even necessary in reinforcing a more conservative masking of Octavian's
Hart's rhetorical inquiry, perhaps the more fitting question to ask is "What does the Marschallin
fulfill in Octavian," because it is when Octavian conflates his own self and gender with the
Marschallin's that his role moves beyond the simple woman-as-man transvestite performance to
a more complex, ungendered one.
Even Octavian's interaction with Sophie reveals a similar mirroring trend. After Sophie
meets the loutish Baron Ochs, she confides her dissatisfaction to the dashing young Octavian.
When Octavian promises to oppose the marriage arrangement on her behalf, he makes her a
request: "All alone, you must now stand for us both!" ["Nun mu3 Sie ganz allein fiur uns zwei
einstehn!"] (132). The provided translation reinforces the doubleness of the Octavian and Sophie
figures as Octavian not only asks that Sophie "stand" up for both of their honor but also that she
"stand for" (i.e., "represent") both characters. Again, these textual choices made by librettist
Hofmannsthal muddy what initially appears to be a conventionally-masculine characterization of
Octavian.
Still more convincingly, only minutes after their pact, the frightened Sophie insists that
Octavian stand up for her: "No, no! I can't open my mouth. You speak for me!" ["Nein! Nein!
Ich bring' den Mund nicht auf Sprech' Er fiur mich!"] (137). At the textual level, Sophie's
request speaks to the similarity between the gender of the two characters insomuch as the one
can stand in for the other; however, at this moment, Octavian's mercurial gender even transcends
the confines of the libretto, as the audience will recognize that the female actor playing the male
Octavian, when speaking her next lines, actually does speak for Sophie with an almost identical
female voice.
This sexual sameness between Octavian and both the Marschallin and Sophie located
within the libretto can also be seen in the flesh, so to speak, in the ways in which varying artists
identity, but as full-blown parody. Instead of fleshing out the varying genders and sexualities
that comprise Octavian's identity, this parodic portrayal of Octavian's double drag performance
turns the character's sexual slippage into a humorous-but meaningless-joke, rather than a
source of gender exploration and examination.
Then again, some viewers and scholars may argue that the subversive sexuality absent in
Kirchschlager's performance can be seen more openly in the vivid and unabashed sexual
displays throughout the 2004 production. Certainly, the opera's bookending scenes feature
Octavian and the Marschallin (Adrianne Pieczonka)-and Sophie (Miah Persson) in the finale-
in various stages of undress, passionately kissing, embracing, and rolling around on beds.
Unfortunately, I see this seeming celebration of Der Rosenkavalier's queer sensibilities as
ultimately limited. Rather than truly exploring the sexual complexities of Octavian's character,
these scenes simply exploit the more prurient and sensationalist homosexual aspects of the
opera's casting, as evidenced by the remainder of the pre-World War II Regietheater production,
which sets the final scene in a brothel where numerous couples simulate intercourse in the
background. In contrast to the Presentation of the Rose scene, where the otherworldly
atmosphere queers gender and sexuality, the scenes of sexuality in Carsen's production ofDer
Rosenkavalier simply serve to shock and titillate.
LIST OF REFERENCES
Abel, Sam. Opera in the Flesh: Sexuality in Operatic Performance. Boulder: Westview, 1996.
Andre, Naomi. Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early-Nineteenth-
Century Italian Opera. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006.
Bashant, Wendy. "Singing in Greek Drag: Gluck, Berlioz, George Eliot." Blackmer and Smith
216-41.
Blackmer, Corinne E. and Patricia Juliana Smith, eds. En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion,
Opera. New York: Columbia UP, 1995.
Blumer, Rodney, ed. Der Rosenkavalier. LP Booklet. London: Decca, 1969.
Brett, Philip and Elizabeth Wood. "Lesbian and Gay Music." Queering the Pitch: The New Gay
andLesbian Musicology. Eds. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas. New
York: Routledge, 2006. 351-89.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge,
1993.
Castle, Terry. "In Praise of Brigitte Fassbaender: Reflections on Diva-Worship." Blackmer and
Smith 20-58.
Clement, Catherine. Opera, or the Undoing of Women. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1988.
Erte. Erte 's Costumes and Sets for Der Rosenkavalier in Full Color. New York: Dover, 1980.
Hadlock, Heather. "The Career of Cherubino, or the Trouser Role Grows Up." Smart 67-92.
Hart, Beth. "Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Accidental Heroine: The Psychohistorical Meaning of
the Marschallin." Opera Quarterly. 15.3 (Summer 1999): 414-34.
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. Der Rosenkavalier. Libretto. London: Decca, 1984.
Hunter, Mary. The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna: A Poetics of Entertainment.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999.
Hutcheon, Linda and Michael Hutcheon. "Staging the Female Body: Richard Strauss's
Salome." Smart 204-21.
Koestenbaum, Wayne. The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery ofDesire.
New York: Poseidon, 1993.
almost performs a role of its own in propelling the narrative to its finale. In Opera in the Flesh,
Sam Abel explains the use of Octavian's sword in Der Rosenkavalier against the more blatant
psychosexual dramas of Salome and Elektra, claiming that "Strauss carries over the fetish-laden
atmosphere of his first two successes and transforms it into a much more subtle use of the
sexually obsessive symbol" (124). This "visual objectification of Octavian's elusive
masculinity" (124), as Abel calls it, often comes into play in the opera's plot in order to clarify
Octavian's maleness. In the first act, for example, Octavian accidentally leaves his sword in the
Marschallin's room as he runs to hide from Baron Ochs. Not only does the phallic sword, in this
instance, allude to the post-coital scene that opens the opera, but the Marschallin also chides
Octavian's masculinity for his misplacement of the weapon, stating, "You scatterbrain, how
careless of you! Is it the thing to leave one's sword lying around in a lady's bedroom? Have you
no manners?" ["Er Katzenkopf, Er Unvorsichtiger! La3t man in einer Dame Schlafzimmer
seinen Degen herumliegen? Hat Er keine besseren Gepflogenheiten?"] (63) This utilization of
the sword as a prop in this scene and the Marschallin's subsequent chastisement of Octavian's
maleness reinforce once again that Octavian is a character who has been gendered in multiple
ways by the staging of Der Rosenkavalier. Not only does the sword metaphorically signify
Octavian's masculinity, but his improper placement of it (i.e., his misuse of the phallus) labels
him as unmasculine and distinctly non-heteronormative.
In the second act, the sword takes on an even more significant role as the scuffle that
ensues between Baron Ochs and Octavian climatically sets into motion the conflict that will
bring about the opera's deus ex machine resolution. When Octavian initially confronts Ochs on
behalf of Sophie, Ochs is dismissive and condescending toward the young boy. Octavian rashly
challenges Ochs to a duel, brandishing his sword, which results in Ochs accidentally wounding
"Rabin has described the progression as moving 'from independent statements for the two
participants, through dialogue, to a closing tutti in parallel thirds and sixths.' The 'independent
statements' often repeat the same melody" (162). By extension, this same structure applies to
Strauss' Mozartian "Ist ein Traum"-"Sptr' nur dich." Indeed, even though Sophie and
Octavian's duet begins with the tutti, after the first unison section, Octavian and Sophie trade off
the melody as mentioned above. Just like Don Giovanni's heterosexual seduction of Zerlina in
"La ci darem la mano," the male and female figures of Octavian and Sophie alternate the
melodic line of the duet until closing the opera with their shared reprise of the duet's main
theme. In composing this duet, whose format and content would be familiar to operagoers,
Strauss places Octavian and Sophie in the longstanding tradition of heteronormative gender roles
in opera; however, at the same time, the conscious choice to use the androgynous voice of
Octavian as a participant in the duet works against a strictly "straight" reading of the scene. The
similarity of the two female voices when swapping identical melodic lines or even when singing
in harmony enhances the sexual sameness of these supposed differently-gendered characters.
Also, the recurrence of celesta, harp, and flute echoes their same thematic uses in the queered
Presentation of the Rose scene. So, not only does Strauss present his audience with a non-static
character that constantly maneuvers between genders, but his is a character more fully-formed
than the pageboys of operatic past, for while Cherubino sings love songs to the world's women
in "Non so piu" and "Voi che sapete," these arias are sung alone; Octavian, on the other hand, is
permitted to function in a romantic relationship-to sing a love song to another character and
have that character reciprocate his desire.
PRELUDE
Nowadays, opera is gay. Twenty-first century audiences tend to associate the exquisite
excesses of opera with homosexuality. The phrase "opera queen"-usually used to describe a
white, upper middle class, effeminate gay man who frequents the opera-has become a
commonly-recognized entry in the ever-growing gay lexicon, and, with the advent of twentieth-
century technology, the gay interest has spread to the internet in the form of websites and blogs,
such as the self-proclaimed "queer opera zine" Parterre Box (http://www.parterre.com/).
Despite opera's close association with queerness, many opera houses still play to conservative
audiences and ideologies. Even though operatic "divas," epitomized by Maria Callas, have
become synonymous with homosexual sensibilities, the operatic stage still caters to the elaborate
fetishization of female demise; as Catherine Clement famously and poetically remarks in her
groundbreaking 1979 Opera, or the Undoing of Women, "[O]n the opera stage women
perpetually sing their eternal undoing" (5).
It is precisely because of this atmosphere of conservative, even patriarchal, interest in
opera that its queer transgressions become so powerful. In the mid-1990s critics from academic
realms as varied as literature, psychology, and musicology, lead by Wayne Koestenbaum's
seminal text on homosexuality and opera, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the
Mystery ofDesire, began to explore opera's undeniably queer leanings. Take, for example, the
opening scene of Richard Strauss' popular opera, Der Rosenkavalier. The curtain rises: it is
morning. As woodwinds alternate the chirpings of a morningbird song, two women sleepily
rouse from their passionate embrace. One of these women is the aging princess known only by
her title, the Marschallin; the other woman, however, is the young Count Octavian Rofrano-a
male character portrayed by a female actor. Dresden audiences witnessed this very operatic
have dominated this multimedia art form. Thus, if we truly recognize and embrace the queerness
of opera-from its travesti to its divadom to its still untapped realms of non-heteronormativity-
lovers of opera can begin to mine the rich depths of subversion inherent in these extravagant,
melodramatic, campy-and fabulously gay-works of art.
then? ... Were I not a man, I should lose my senses" ["Ich war ein Bub' da hab' ich die noch
nicht gekannt. Wer bin denn ich? ... War' ich kein Mann, die Sinne mochten mir vergehn"]
(116). Indeed, even Octavian himself draws attention to his complex gender characterization by
voicing his own confusion about his identity in this surreal and chimerical scene; however,
Hofmannsthal does not intend for this glimpse of an indefinable, non-normative sexuality to
remain encapsulated inside the hermetically-sealed world of the opera. As mentioned earlier, the
sodomy trial of Oscar Wilde (on whose play Strauss had based his 1905 opera Salome) had
occurred less than twenty years before the premiere ofDer Rosenkavalier, and Richard von
Krafft-Ebing wrote his psychiatric study of sexual deviance, Psychopathia sexualis, which
catalogued and medicalized homosexuality in the nineteenth century,3 only ten years prior to
that. Wendy Bashant provides a link between Hofmannsthal's world of opera and the then-
emerging understandings of sexuality in her essay, "Singing in Greek Drag: Gluck, Berlioz,
George Eliot." Bashant explains that the "[u]nbridled, gender-bending women like Salome were
created by men after Krafft-Ebing's theories linking athletes, feminists, and 'opera singers and
actresses who appear in male attire on the stage by preference' were published in 1889. They
were meant to be viewed as monstrous women" (222-23). Certainly Octavian can be included in
this discussion of "gender-bending women"; however, even with his knowledge of these cultural
happenings, Hofmannsthal uses the character of Octavian not as a symbol of fear, mutation, or
disease, but, moving beyond the moral decay of nineteenth century decadence, creates a
character who is complexly-gendered and yet still endowed with a sympathetic humanity.
3 For more on Krafft-Ebing's influence on homosexuality in the nineteenth century, see
Oosterhuis, who makes the claim that sexual perversion was "recognized, confirmed, and
legitimized" through the dialogue between patient and psychiatric community present in Krafft-
Ebing's numerous case studies (212).
that refuses the boundaries of male or female, heterosexual or homosexual labeling. By
permitting Octavian to exist within this "queer," nongendered space, Strauss and Hofmannsthal
force viewers ofDer Rosenkavalier to reassess traditional gender and sexual roles-both when
the opera was premiered in 1911 as well as today. Thus, my thesis offers an analysis that not
only situates the opera in the context of the early twentieth century but also outlines the opera's
commentary on gender and sexual roles that are still valuable for contemporary culture,
particularly discussions of queer theory.
titillation or reinforce patriarchal constructions by endowing a woman with masculinity; instead,
the character of Octavian captures an image of a queered gender fluidity that destabilizes notions
of gender binarity, refusing to resolve into either masculinity or femininity, male or female.
Before beginning my close examination of the various texts in Der Rosenkavalier, I must
explicate my reading of the word "queer," which becomes an essential descriptor of Octavian's
manygendered characterizationl-rather than strictly hetero- or homosexual, lesbian or gay-in
this project. My usage of the word "queer" draws from the work of Judith Butler in Bodies That
Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex. In her discussion of this multifaceted and recursive
term, Butler states "that queeringg' might signal an inquiry into (a) theformation of
homosexualities (a historical inquiry which cannot take the stability of the term for granted,
despite the political pressure to do so) and (b) the deformative and misappropriative power that
the term currently enjoys" (229, italics in original). Butler goes on to explain that a possible
function of this word is to "resist the more institutionalized and reformist politics sometimes
signified by 'lesbian and gay'" (228). Thus, Butler offers a definition of "queer" that, like my
argued characterization of Octavian, describes a sexual identification that exists constantly in
flux, defying codifiable gender labels. In terms of this paper, I offer it as an alternative to the
more limiting and often static identities of "gay" and "lesbian" in hopes that it will signify an
even more complex and critical theoretical idea.
So, while Octavian has come to be read as a representative or iconographic lesbian figure
in recent gender and opera criticism (see Brett and Wood 359 and Hadlock 265n. 34), I would
' While I understand the possible limitations and complications inherent in a term that suggests
the existence of "many" genders without defining them, I use the term "manygendered" (as well
as "multigendered") as a linguistic shorthand to symbolize a fluid gender characterization that,
rather than representing a character who simply and statically inhabits both masculinity and
femininity, maneuvers freely on the continuum between these socially-constructed gender roles.
ACT IV
VISUAL ANALYSIS OF OCTAVIAN AND THE TROUSER ROLE
Last, but most definitely not least, in reading the queerness ofDer Rosenkavalier
audiences and scholars alike must pay especial attention to the staging and production of the
opera. Although the visual aspect of opera is often its most vivid and striking quality, audiences
are deprived of this crucial tool to understanding opera performance when it is heard as a
recording. Because this visual component is often ignored by scholars in opera analysis, Linda
and Michael Hutcheon argue for the necessity of examining this physical space of opera in their
2000 essay, "Staging the Female Body: Richard Strauss's Salome":
While it may seem obvious that the staged body is central to any form of theatrical
representation, it is the voice-almost a disembodied voice-that has come to dominate
discussions of opera, especially since the technological advances in audio recording and
radio transmissions. In a related move, opera criticism has been dominated by
considerations of the music that voice sings-usually separated from the libretto's verbal
text and the dramatic staged narrative. Musicologists confidently assert: "It is after all
the music that an opera-lover goes to hear." But, speaking for these opera-lovers, at least,
we go to see as well as hear a performance, and that performance includes a verbal text
and a staged dramatic narrative-for which that (admittedly important) music was
especially written. Opera is an embodied art form; it is the performers who give it its
"phenomenal reality." Indeed, opera owes its undeniable affective power to the
overdetermination of the verbal, the visual and the aural-not to the aural alone. And it
is specifically the body-the gendered, sexualized body-that will not be denied in
staged opera. (206)
Indeed, the gendered bodies of the characters in Der Rosenkavalier are extraordinarily vital
means through which audiences may apprehend the complexities of the work, not to mention the
ways in which various aspects of the opera as seemingly inconsequential as props and costumes
further the queer representations of Octavian.
Silver Roses, Swords, and the Gendered Props of Der Rosenkavalier
Aside from the titular silver rose, perhaps the most famous prop that cleverly comments
upon Octavian's sexuality is his sword. Serving as a surrogate phallus for the female actor's
literal lack, Octavian's sword doesn't simply sit at his side for the entirety of the opera but
the tension of this new and troubling sexuality (Plaut 265), the composer returned to more
traditional composition and themes for what would become his most successful and popular
composition, Der Rosenkavalier. Despite what was then viewed as Strauss' musical and
ideological retreat into safer settings and melodic structures, the composer, as well as his
librettist, Hofmannsthal, endowed the work with an even more complex and avant-garde
treatment of gender and sexuality.
Before fully exploring the complicated gender depictions of Octavian in Der
Rosenkavalier, a brief synopsis of the opera is in order. Der Rosenkavalier narrates the story of
the young Count Octavian and his illicit affair with the Marschallin. As mentioned earlier, when
the opera begins, the lovers are in bed together; however, the Marschallin's cousin, the boorish
Baron Ochs, calls on the princess to request a young nobleman to perform the ceremonial
Presentation of the Silver Rose for his fiancee, Sophie. Unable to escape before Ochs' entrance,
Octavian must don the clothes of a chambermaid and soon finds himself dodging the lascivious
advances of the Baron. To appease Ochs, the Marschallin suggests that Octavian bear the silver
rose to Sophie.
In the second act, Octavian arrives at the house of Sophie's father, the nouveau-riche
Faninal, to present his daughter with the silver rose. During the scene, Octavian and Sophie are
entranced by one another's beauty, and, after Sophie repulses Ochs' crass, oversexed
propositions, they pledge their love to one another. Later, while trying to defend Sophie's honor,
Octavian inadvertently wounds the Baron with his sword; however, Ochs is undeterred and still
plans to marry Sophie. At the end of the act, Ochs receives a letter written by the Marchallin's
chambermaid (actually Octavian) requesting a clandestine rendezvous.
himself on the weapon. As Ochs blusters over the slight injury he receives, he remarks, "One is
what one is and has no need to prove it" ["Man ist halt, was man ist, und braucht's nicht zu
beweisen"] (140). Again, Octavian's sword and Ochs' response draw attention to the limitations
of Octavian's maleness. Even the ineffectual wounding of Ochs (other than the tantrum it elicits
from the Baron) reemphasizes Octavian's inability to wield his substitute phallus and to
successfully perform expected male roles. Thus, Strauss and Hofmannsthal's effective use of the
sword as prop and symbol throughout the narrative and staging of Der Rosenkavalier work to
further Octavian's complex characterization as a fluidly-gendered figure that destabilizes
conventional binary gender constructions.
Alfred Roller, Ert6, and the Costuming of Octavian
More so than most operas (the spartan production values and costuming of Wagner and
verismo operas immediately come to mind), Der Rosenkavalier gains a majority of its appeal
from its distinctive, elaborate visual style. This confectioner's sugar coating has garnered the
opera many critiques for being too superficial, but I would argue that this surface sheen serves as
yet another important facet in fleshing out a queered sensitivity of this work. The costuming in
particular functions to both masculinize and feminize the character of Octavian. In his
discussion of Victorian representations of trouser roles in Opera in the Flesh, Sam Abel notes
that artists often made no attempt to hide the femaleness of the travesti performers:
There is no attempt at realistic illusion; the contours of the ideal feminine body are often
more highlighted in drag than in "proper" women's clothes. The male clothes emphasize
the female parts. Images of hourglass figures, wasp waists, and large bosoms recur in
these engravings, clearly evoking the ideal of feminine sexual allure. (211)
In the sketches available from the original 1911 Der Rosenkavalier premiere, however, the
costume designs literally obscure the gender of the actor playing Octavian under men's military
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure page
III-1 D er R osenkavalier; A ct I ......................................................................... ....................32
III-2 D er R osenkavalier; A ct II.......................................................... ..................................34
III-3 D er Rosenkavalier; A ct III .................................. ........................... ............... 36
IV-1 Octavian Rofrano: Drittes Kostim, Erster Aufzug .................................................41
IV-2 Octavian Rofrano: Viertes Kostim, Zweiter Aufzug ....................... ........................... 41
IV-3 Octavian Rofrano Genannt Quinquin: Erstes Kostim, Erster Aufzug ...........................42
IV -4 O ctavian at the end of A ct I ......................................... .. ........................... ...................43
IV-5 Octavian's runners ................................... .. ........... .. ............43
li. |. r J r IL .L m >r m n n
ni der knien dart- vor der Frat nd mkht ihr as
la dyk ftl, L..- 1--j IMwt kLed yt j in WouN I
I f a I
eFur t. er Rse ndr giaavier; Act III (Surc: Straus
atte to te e uroti i l, levin hie nd Otin ne to efo th o a fna
mpie, -rume it- trtwait en ir? nut denies gro listener a rs uet s-
ow rlatil y convntional the piec sounds after the co le wrong a euvin d hora
Figure 111-3. Der Rosenkavalier; Act III (Source: Strauss 439)
This inseparable web of female voices dissipates soon after when the Marschallin exits to
attend to the neurotic Faninal, leaving Sophie and Octavian alone to perform the opera's final
piece, the duet "1st ein Traum"-"Spur' nur dich." What strikes the listener about this duet is
how relatively conventional the piece sounds after the complex vocal maneuverings and chordal
dissonances of the trio. The duet's more typical and familiar structure and delivery stem
specifically from the tradition of the heterosexual love duet that runs throughout operatic
performance history. As Eric A. Plaut recounts in Grand Opera: Mirror of the Western Mind, it
was Hofmannsthal himself who suggested to Strauss that he compose a "Mozartian duet" for the
opera's finale (281). Both structurally and tonally, this closing duet in Der Rosenkavalier
follows the pattern of the Mozartian heterosexual love duet typified by the famous "La ci darem
la mano" from Don Giovanni. In The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna, Mary Hunter
explains the "predictable" duet structure of Mozart's duet via the scholarship of Ronald Rabin:
In the 1740s, however, the popularity of castrati began to wane significantly. In The
Diva's Mouth, Pope and Leonardi offer a number of suggestions as to why the castrato began to
disappear from the public eye: an economic boom in the 1730s which eased dependence upon
the cruel and desperate process of castration in order to secure a son's future, "a decline in the
number of religious orders in Italy ... and the dissolution of others with the coming of the
French," and attempts by Napoleonic governments to outlaw castration (42). Most importantly
for this project, however, is the notion that castrati fell out of favor because of a decline in the
florid vocal stylings synonymous with the castrato and a movement towards more realism in
opera performance (42). Under the guise of making opera more realistic, the complex, non-
heteronormative gender roles embodied in the castrato were shunned by opera composers and
librettists. It is only in the early twentieth century, when Strauss and Hofmannsthal introduced
their more fantastical Octavian and Composer pants roles (the latter appearing in Ariadne auf
Naxos) that opera performance truly regained some of the powerful gender complexity present in
the era of the castrato.
Contrary to modern listeners' conceptions of voice and gender, men's heroic operatic
voices before the 1800s were rarely deep and heavy. Instead, the male protagonists in opera
could have high, light voices-voices that are now commonly associated with women and
femininity; however, with the sparse population of castrati available, opera companies were often
forced to seek alternative bodies and voices to reproduce roles that were once the sole domain of
the castrato. While some opera composers transposed their music, dropping the vocal lines to
lower tessituras in order to accommodate male tenors, baritones, and basses (e.g., Gluck rewrote
Orfeo edEuridice so that the once-castrato role of the young poet Orpheus could now be
performed by a male tenor), other opera companies began to substitute the similarly-sounding
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1 THE MORE MISCHIEVOUS THE BETTER: OCTAVIAN AND QUEER OPERA PERFORMANCE IN RICHARD STRAUSS AND HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHALS DER ROSENKAVALIER By PETER DETTORE A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLOR IDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2007
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2 2007 Peter DEttore
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3 For my Mother, to whom each of my accomplishmen ts are dedicated, whether or not I remember to say so.
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4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and forem ost, I would like to thank Dr. Barbara Mennel for her generous support and guidance in a project that refu sed to be defined by any one academic discipline. Her intradepartmental studies proved to be an invaluable resource for an equally intradepartmental thesis. I would also like to thank Dr. Anthony Offerle, whose unique knowledge of opera and constant enthusiasm aided in refining and stre ngthening my musical scholarship. I must also offer my thanks to Dr. Maureen Turim, whose patience and kindness during the early stages of this project were absolutely vital in helping it to become the thesis that it is now. Lastly, I cannot forget the limitless love and encouragement of my parents, Peter and Marie DEttore, to whom I owe more than I could possibly hope to enumerate here.
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5 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...............................................................................................................4 LIST OF FI GURES.........................................................................................................................6 ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................................7 HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF OC TAVIAN AND THE TROUSER ROLE .............................. 13 The Rise and Fall of the Castrato ........................................................................................... 13 The Trouser Role and the Pageboy .........................................................................................15 Octavian, the Knight of the Silver Rose .................................................................................17 TEXTUAL ANAL YSIS OF OCTAVI AN AND THE TROUSER ROLE................................... 22 MUSICAL ANAL YSIS OF OCTAVI AN AND THE TROUSER ROLE.................................... 30 VISUAL ANALYSIS OF OCTA VIAN AND THE TROUSER ROLE ....................................... 38 Silver Roses, Swords, and the Gendered Props of Der Rosenkavalier ..................................38 Alfred Roller, Ert, and th e Costum ing of Octavian.............................................................. 40 Fassbaender, Kirchschlager, and the Film ed Performances of Der Rosenkavalier ................44 POSTLUDE ....................................................................................................................... ............48 LIST OF REFERENCES ...............................................................................................................50 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .........................................................................................................52
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6 LIST OF FIGURES Figure page III-1 Der Rosenkavalier ; Act I ...................................................................................................32 III-2 Der Rosenkavalier ; Act II ..................................................................................................34 III-3 Der Rosenkavalier ; Act III.................................................................................................36 IV-1 Octavian Rofrano: Dritte s Kostm Erster Aufzug............................................................41 IV-2 Octavian Rofrano: Vier tes Kostm Zweiter Aufzug........................................................41 IV-3 Octavian Rofrano Genannt Quinquin: Erstes Kostm Erster Aufzug..............................42 IV-4 Octavian at the end of Act I.............................................................................................. .43 IV-5 Octavians runners........................................................................................................ .....43
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7 Abstract of Thesis Presen ted to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts THE MORE MISCHIEVOUS THE BETTER: OCTAVIAN AND QUEER OPERA PERFORMANCE IN RICHARD STRAUSS AND HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHALS DER ROSENKAVALIER By Peter DEttore December 2007 Chair: Barbara Mennel Major: English Despite the thriving gay fanbase opera has developed over the years, this art form continues to cater to conservati ve ideologies and traditionse specially concerning matters of gender and sexuality. As discussed in studies such as Catherine Clments 1979 Opera, or the Undoing of Women, opera has built its enduring popularity on traditional, heterosexual narratives that conclude with the dramatic demise of their heroines. In this thesis, I argue that composer Richard Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmanns thal subvert these established notions of gender and sexuality in the opera Der Rosenkavalier through the character of the young Count Octavian Rofrano. Utilizing the operatic practice of casting a female singer as a male character (commonly known as a trouser role), Strauss and Hofmannsthal prevent Octavian from inhabiting a strictly masculine or feminine, he terosexual or homosexual identity. This unique, non-heteronormative characteriza tion endows Octavian with a fl uid, non-static gendering that helps to destabilize gender binarity. After offering an historical analysis of the trouser role, paying esp ecial attention to the figure of the castrato and the pageboy archetype I contend that Strauss and Hofmannsthal through cues in the operas libretto, musical sc ore, and stagingendeavor to mold a character
PAGE 8
8 that refuses the boundaries of male or female, heterosexual or homosexual labeling. By permitting Octavian to exist within this qu eer, nongendered space, Strauss and Hofmannsthal force viewers of Der Rosenkavalier to reassess traditional gender and sexual rolesboth when the opera was premiered in 1911 as well as today. Thus, my thesis offers an analysis that not only situates the opera in the context of the early twentieth century but also outlines the operas commentary on gender and sexual roles that are still valuable for contemporary culture, particularly discussi ons of queer theory.
PAGE 9
9 PRELUDE Nowadays, opera is gay. Twenty-first century audiences tend to associate the exquisite excesses of opera with homosexuality. The phras e opera queenusually used to describe a white, upper middle class, effeminate gay ma n who frequents the operahas become a commonly-recognized entry in the ever-growing ga y lexicon, and, with the advent of twentiethcentury technology, the gay interest has spread to the internet in the form of websites and blogs, such as the self-proclaimed queer opera zine Parterre Box ( http://www.parterre.com/). Despite operas close association with queerness, m any opera houses still play to conservative audiences and ideologies. Even though operati c divas, epitomized by Maria Callas, have become synonymous with homosexual sensibilities, the operatic stage still caters to the elaborate fetishization of female demise; as Catherine Clment famously and poetically remarks in her groundbreaking 1979 Opera, or the Undoing of Women [O]n the opera stage women perpetually sing their eternal undoing (5). It is precisely because of this atmosphere of conservative, even patriarchal, interest in opera that its queer transgressions become so powerful. In the mid-1990s critics from academic realms as varied as litera ture, psychology, and musicology, lead by Wayne Koestenbaums seminal text on homosexuality and opera, The Queens Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire began to explore operas undeniably queer leanings. Take, for example, the opening scene of Richard Strauss popular opera, Der Rosenkavalier The curtain rises: it is morning. As woodwinds alternate the chirpi ngs of a morningbird song, two women sleepily rouse from their passionate embrace. One of these women is the aging princess known only by her title, the Marschallin; th e other woman, however, is the young Count Octavian Rofranoa male character portrayed by a female actor. Dr esden audiences witnessed this very operatic
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10 tableau at the premiere of the opera in 1911, and, as if willfully ignorant of the staging of what appeared to be a blatant sexual transgression, th e opera went on to become an instant success with the public. Overlooking or excusing this elephant in the room, the audience at the premiereas well as audiences sinceseemed to dismiss this subverted heterosexuality as a mere operatic sleight of hand. While this practic e of women performing the roles that had been left vacant after the demise of the male-bodie d, soprano-voiced castrati stretches back through historical operatic performancefrom Hande l and Rossini to Mozart and Bellinionly very recently has opera and gender scholarship finally begun to unpack the multifarious and often unquestioned gender-bending of these trouser roles. Not content simply to use the trouser role in their historic purpose as surrogates for the obsolete castrati, Richard Stra uss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, composer and librettist of the aforementioned Der Rosenkavalier utilized this operatic trickery as a means of destabilizing and reassessing the gender roles of the early twentieth century. As Sam Abel asserts in Opera in the Flesh: Sexuality in Opera Performance the female-to-male cross-dresser always poses a threat. Women dressed as men violate male he gemony by attempting to reject their secondary social role and to assume male power or, more powerfully, to reject the whole concept of binary gender division (151). In this thesis, I would like to refine Abels discussion of the subversive quality of drag. Rather th an arguing that Octavian is a priori subversive simply because the character is in actuality a woman in mans clothi ng (i.e., a woman who has attained male power), I would like to posit that Octavians malleable gender prevents the character from identifying completely as either male or female, placing Octavian at a site of subvers ive power that fosters a critique of dyadic, heteronormative gender roles. Indeed, the presence of this central trouser role in Strauss and Hofmannsthals Der Rosenkavalier does more than provide audiences with lesbian
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11 titillation or reinforce patriarchal constructions by endowing a wo man with masculinity; instead, the character of Octavian captures an image of a qu eered gender fluidity that destabilizes notions of gender binarity, refusing to reso lve into either masculinity or femininity, male or female. Before beginning my close examination of the various texts in Der Rosenkavalier I must explicate my reading of the word queer, which becomes an essential descriptor of Octavians manygendered characterization1rather than strictly heteroor homosexual, lesbian or gayin this project. My usage of the word queer draws from the work of Judith Butler in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. In her discussion of this multifaceted and recursive term, Butler states that queering might signal an inquiry into (a) the formation of homosexualities (a historical i nquiry which cannot take the stab ility of the term for granted, despite the political pressure to do so) and (b) the deformative and misappropriative power that the term currently enjoys (229, italics in original ). Butler goes on to explain that a possible function of this word is to resist the more institutionalized and reformist politics sometimes signified by lesbian and gay ( 228). Thus, Butler offers a de finition of queer that, like my argued characterization of Octavian describes a sexual identification that exists constantly in flux, defying codifiable gender labels In terms of this paper, I offer it as an alternative to the more limiting and often static identities of gay and lesbian in hopes that it will signify an even more complex and critical theoretical idea. So, while Octavian has come to be read as a representative or iconogr aphic lesbian figure in recent gender and opera criticism (see Br ett and Wood 359 and Hadlock 265n. 34), I would 1 While I understand the possible limitations and complications inherent in a term that suggests the existence of many genders without defining them, I use the term manygendered (as well as multigendered) as a linguistic shorthand to symbolize a fluid gender characterization that, rather than representing a character who simply and statically inhabits both masculinity and femininity, maneuvers freely on the continuum be tween these socially-con structed gender roles.
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12 argue that, through composer Richard Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthals use of libretto, musical score, and stag ing, Octavian functions as a pur posefully queered character whose successful existence without definable ge nder reflects the emergence of non-normative sexualities in the social conscious ness of the early twentieth century that are still relevant today.
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13 ACT I HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF OCTAVIAN AND THE TROUSER ROLE The Rise and Fall of the Castrato Before em barking on my discussion of the breeches role in Der Rosenkavalier it is necessary to provide a brief background of these roles in operas performance history. Before women were universally permitted to grace the stag e, whether theatrical or operatic, the castrato sang the high-voiced alto and soprano roles most commonly associated nowadays with women. Susan J. Leonardi and Rebecca A. Pope, whose st udy on diva politics and worship discusses the rise and fall of the castrato at lengt h, trace the practice of castration in The Divas Mouth: Body, Voice, Prima Donna Politics : Castration was, perhaps, the price patriarchy pa id to keep women silent and its authority intact. As in all congregations of Gods people, women should keep silent at the meeting, St. Paul advised the Corinthians (I Cor. 14.33-34), and his namesake Pope Paul IV (1555-1559) codified Pauls advice by officially banni ng women from singing in St. Peters. Church choirs depended on boys and adult male falsettists to sing soprano and alto parts, but as monody gave way to increasingly complicated polyphony, more powerful voices and mature musicians (espec ially singers who would not be lost once their voices changed) were needed for upper-register parts. (25) In order to fulfill this need for a voice as light as a childs, while also as strong as an adults, the custom of castrating young boys to preserve their young, high voices, in what is known as an orchiectomy, was born. Although practiced by th e Roman Catholic Church, the Church itself publicly shunned the act, and thus it is uncertain exactly when the practice began; however, documentation exists of castrati performing as early as 1562 (Leonardi and Pope 25). On the other hand, the appearance of wome n on the stage, even outside th e Catholic Church, was often looked upon as an act of gross impropriety. Th is is not to say that women did not perform publicly; however, because they were often prohi bited from appearing and singing onstage, the figure of the castrato began to serve as a proxy fo r the female performer and the staged female body of the era.
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14 In the 1740s, however, the popularity of castr ati began to wane significantly. In The Divas Mouth Pope and Leonardi offer a number of suggestions as to why the castrato began to disappear from the public eye: an economic boom in the 173 0s which eased dependence upon the cruel and desperate process of castration in order to secure a sons future, a decline in the number of religious orders in Italy and the dissolution of others with the coming of the French, and attempts by Napoleonic governments to outlaw castration (42). Most importantly for this project, however, is the notion that castra ti fell out of favor because of a decline in the florid vocal stylings synonymous with the cast rato and a movement towards more realism in opera performance (42). Under the guise of making opera more realistic, the complex, nonheteronormative gender roles embodied in th e castrato were shunned by opera composers and librettists. It is only in the early twentieth cen tury, when Strauss and Hofmannsthal introduced their more fantastical Octavian and Compos er pants roles (the latter appearing in Ariadne auf Naxos ) that opera performance truly regained some of the powerful gender complexity present in the era of the castrato. Contrary to modern listene rs conceptions of voice and gender, mens heroic operatic voices before the 1800s were rarely deep and he avy. Instead, the male protagonists in opera could have high, light voicesvoices that ar e now commonly associat ed with women and femininity; however, with the spar se population of castrati availabl e, opera companies were often forced to seek alternative bodies and voices to re produce roles that were once the sole domain of the castrato. While some opera composers transp osed their music, dropping the vocal lines to lower tessituras in order to accommodate male te nors, baritones, and basses (e.g., Gluck rewrote Orfeo ed Euridice so that the once-castrato role of the young poet Orpheus could now be performed by a male tenor), other opera compan ies began to substitute the similarly-sounding
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15 female mezzo soprano or contra lto in lieu of the castrato. Perhaps most famously, George Frideric Handel often employed both male cas trato and female mezzo sopranosvocal ranges that sonically overlapfor the same roles in hi s operas, simply depending upon the availability of the artists. Margaret Reynolds describes this blurring of the lines between voice and gender in her essay, Ruggieros Deceptions Cherubinos Distractions: In Handels day there was sexual anarchy on stag e. Men (or ex-men) played the parts of heroes in high voices. Women, dressed up as men, sang heroes in high voices. Men, dressed up as women, played their consorts wi th high or low voices. And if you couldnt hire the singer of the sex required, you se ttled for the voice and didnt worry. (138) As apparent in Reynolds reading of the opera stage during the eighteenth century, opera served as a site for gender deconstruction where feminine-sounding men stood alongside armor-clad women. Indeed, Handel wrote opera s where high, almost feminine, voices could be either male or female and could evoke a number of vocal qualities that ran the gamut from heroism and seduction to virginity and villainy. In his most famous opera, Giulio Cesare, the voice types of the lead rolesGiulio Cesare, Cleopatra, Sesto, Tolomeo, and Corneliaall fall into similarly high-voiced tessituras that could be sung by both male castrati and women regardless of whether the character was male or female; however, as opera edged further away from the opera seria realm of the castrati to the class struggles and b attle of the (heterosexual) sexes subject matter of opera buffa the newly-established trouser role bega n to signify a new type of sexuality. The Trouser Role and the Pageboy After the cessation of the pract ice of castration, as well as the moral clash of the eerilyjuxtaposed masculine body and femi nine voice of the castrato with the sexual mores of the late eighteenth century, castrati became virtually obsole te outside of the chur ch. The sidelining of the complicated sexual embodiment of the castrato did not, however, stop composers from writing music for their voice type; now, these composers began to write specifically for the
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16 trouser rolea female singer (usually mezzo sopr ano) who performs as a man in mens clothing. The most famous archetype to emerge from th is newfound operatic role was the pageboy. The quintessential young man on the verge of sexua l awakening, the pageboy is a figure caught between adulthood and childhood, man and not-m an, making the androgynous female drag performance functional as well as aesthetic. Wh ile the stock character of the pageboy recurs in operas such as Verdis Un ballo in maschera and Wagners Tannhuser, the most prominent and popular of these characters is cer tainly Cherubino from Mozarts Le nozze di Figaro. A secondary character that ne vertheless sends Mozarts buffa plot careening into motion, Cherubino is a sexually-volatile page who falls in love with virtually every female character in the operas cast. In her discussion of the pageboy figure of Cherubino in The Career of Cherubino, or the Trouser Role Grows Up, Heather Hadlock explains that the variety of names for the practice [of female-t o-male cross-dressing in opera], variously known as the trouser role, breeches part, or pants part, Hosenrolle or travesti testifies both to its international appeal and to th e necessity of the singers having slim, boyish legs. Equally essential is a light and clear voice [and the] pages talk of love is typically translated into melancholy or flir tatious staged songs, directly or indirectly addressed to an inaccessible beloved, of which Cherubinos Voi che sapete remains the archetype. (68) Indeed, the figure of the pageboy is part erotic sp ectacle (the sight of wo mens legs, even clothed in mens stockings, was a novelty for the stage at that time) and a true example of form fitting functionthe singers androgynous voice, much like the voice of a boy experiencing the hormonal rushes of puberty, is at times lovely and light while at others plummy and deep. Yet, the character of the pageboy is a limite d one. While beloved, the pageboy is often a minor character in the operas drama, rarely ec lipsing the traditional heterosexual coupling of the lead soprano and tenor/baritone. Also, despite the pageboys zealous sexual appetite, the opera composer and librettist rarely a llow this nontraditionally-gendered character to interact sexually
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17 with the objects of his affection other than as comedic (and ultimately ineffectual) playacting. Indeed, in David J. Levins discussion of Cherubino in Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky, the author notes that, unlike the focal relationships in Le nozze di Figaro (e.g., Figaro and Susanna, the Count and Countess, and Bartolo and Marcellina), Cherubino and Barbarinas relationship remains narratively unresolved because their marriage is still unscheduled when the opera comes to a close ( 78). Levin goes on to claim that this thwarted resolution is a result of Cherubinos gender conf usion: To the extent that Cherubino embodies something that would resist being tied down, we mi ght describe that somet hing as the fact or problem of the figures peculiar embodiment itsel f, a kind of erratic traffic in and between gender (79). This trope of the fervently sexual, but ultimate ly sexless, pageboy (what Levin refers to as Cherubinos libid inal surplus [78]) continues throughout the nineteenth century until the emergence of the ch aracter of Octavian in Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthals Der Rosenkavalier in the early twentieth century who manages to transcend the obstacles of rigid gender and se xual representation that had thwarted the pageboy tradition before him. Octavian, the Knight of the Silver Rose By the close of the nineteenth century, Victor ian notions of sexuality had been brought to the fore of European social cons ciousness by Richard von Krafft-Ebings P sychopathia sexualis and fin de sicle decadence epitomized by writers such as Joris-Karl Huysmans and Oscar Wildenot to mention the latters infamous sodomy trial. Richard Straus s, certainly no stranger to these cultural developments, had recently co mpleted two operas that explored the darker realms of sexuality: 1905s Salome adapted from Wildes play, and 1909s Elektra Strauss first collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Wh ile Strauss experimented with modernist orchestration in these two pieces, employing chromaticism, dissonance, and atonality to reflect
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18 the tension of this new and troubling sexuality (Plaut 265), the compos er returned to more traditional composition and themes for what w ould become his most successful and popular composition, Der Rosenkavalier Despite what was then view ed as Strauss musical and ideological retreat into safer settings and me lodic structures, the composer, as well as his librettist, Hofmannsthal, endowed the work with an even more complex and avant-garde treatment of gender and sexuality. Before fully exploring the complicated gender depictions of Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier, a brief synopsis of the opera is in order. Der Rosenkavalier narrates the story of the young Count Octavian and his illicit affair with the Marschallin. As mentioned earlier, when the opera begins, the lovers are in bed together; however, the Marschallins cousin, the boorish Baron Ochs, calls on the princess to request a young nobleman to perform the ceremonial Presentation of the Silver Rose for his fiance, So phie. Unable to escape before Ochs entrance, Octavian must don the clothes of a chambermai d and soon finds himself dodging the lascivious advances of the Baron. To appease Ochs, the Mars challin suggests that Octa vian bear the silver rose to Sophie. In the second act, Octavian arrives at the house of Sophies father, the nouveau-riche Faninal, to present his daughter with the silver rose. During the scene, Octavian and Sophie are entranced by one anothers beauty, and, after Sophie repuls es Ochs crass, oversexed propositions, they pledge their love to one anothe r. Later, while trying to defend Sophies honor, Octavian inadvertently wounds the Baron with his sword; however, Ochs is undeterred and still plans to marry Sophie. At the end of the act, Oc hs receives a letter wr itten by the Marchallins chambermaid (actually Octavian) requesting a clandestine rendezvous.
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19 In the final act, Ochs brings Mariandl (Oct avian dressed as a chambermaid) to an inn where he plans to bed her. Unbeknownst to the Baron, Octavian has devi sed an elaborate plot involving masked men and a woman disguised as the Barons supposedly-abandoned widow in order to expose the Barons infidelities. As the evening progresses and an outraged Faninal and Sophie eventually arrive at th e inn to witness the Baron with the chambermaid, Ochs can no longer hold Sophie to her marital obligation. Just as Ochs begins to realize the trick that has been played on him, the Marschallin arrives, se nding the Baron away in shame and, despite her own love for Octavian, uniting the yo ung lovers at the operas dnouement. Certainly, whether operagoers chose to ignore or dismiss the non-normative gender depictions in Strauss opera, they could no long er passively assume that this operatic genderplay was a simple smoke-and-mirrors illusion meant to stealthily place a womens voice in the body of a man. From the moment the curtain rises on Der Rosenkavalier the opera immediately confronts its audience with the image of two fema le actresses in bed together. The homoerotic sexual tension of this first scene was so dangerous to some that the opera was censored and even banned shortly after its premiere.2 From the operas inception to its more recent productions, the complex tinderbox of sexuality also did not go u nnoticed on its performers. As recounted in Philip Brett and Elizabeth Woods collaborative essay, Lesbian and Gay Music, famous opera singer Mary Garden refused to c reate the role of Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier because of its lesbian implications (353-54). Similarly, New Zealand soprano Ki ri te Kanawa has stated, on 2 In Ruggieros Deceptions, Cherubinos Distractions, Margaret Reynolds recounts an example of the censorship Der Rosenkavalier faced in England: The first act bed caused trouble in London where the Lord Chamberlain intervened when Thomas Beecham declared his intention to st age the opera in 1912: either the bed had to go from the scene or there was to be no refere nce to it in the text sung by the performers. Beecham decided that the former was pref erable, so the Marschallin and Octavian conducted themselves with upright propriety. (144)
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20 singing the role of the Marschallin, that the first five minutes of Der Rosenkavalier are the most awkward to perform in any opera (Castle 46), and [ o]nce you get past these first few minutes when you are in bed with another woman, you can ge t on with the role (Cas tle 56). As these examples show, the subversiveness of Octavians characterization is no t simply a theoretical performativity that can only be identified and teased out through academic scholarship; it is an unsettling representation of non-normativity rec ognizable to both the performers and viewers of the opera as well. What specifically seems to be so frighteni ng to these performers about the sexuality inherent in the role of Octavian? For one, at the very beginning of th e post-coital tableau that opens the opera, the audience is privy to the fact that Octavian, un like Cherubino, actually experiences the sexual consummation all the other pageboys spend so much time longingly wishing for in song. Or, as succinctly written by Sam Abel in Opera in the Flesh Cherubino fantasizes about sex, but Octavian actually has se x (159). Thus, the playful sexual threat posed by the pageboy and his indiscernible gender fina lly becomes realized in the character of Octavian. While Strauss and Hofmannsthals characte rization of Octavian as sexually active certainly touches upon emerging notions of early-t wentieth-century sexual sensibility, I would argue that Octavian offers audiences even mo re complexity than that. In concluding her examination of the Cherubino figure, Heather Hadl ock remarks that twentieth-century composers and librettists no longer treat female travesty as a pr oblem or a challenge, and [Strauss and Hofmannsthals] (excessively) frank staging of the relations hip between Octavian and the Marschallin puts the female love rs in a spotlight, cl early intended to titillate. Their Cherubino no longer undresses behind a screen, and this very shamelessness, this abandonment of over a century of shadows a nd veils over the pages body and desire, leaves less to read. (92)
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21 While Hadlocks reading of the pageboy trope vi a the character of Cherubino is insightful in its investigation of what is often obscured from view, I believe that the author oversimplifies the characterization of Octavian when she claims that his lesbian visibility (the female lovers) automatically de-problematizes his gende r travesty, as if the characters in Der Rosenkavalier become transparently and unproblematically homos exual. Surely, the mo re sexually suggestive aspects in the lesbian relationship between Oc tavian and the Marschal lin (and later Octavian and Sophie) cannot be completely swept under the rug, but I would argue that Octavians characterization is far too mercurial to be labele d as simply homosexual. By blending together the seemingly binary genders embodied in the ch aracter of Octavian, merging the feminine and girlish with the masculine and boyish, Strauss and Hofmannsthal not only move Octavian beyond the limited depiction of the operatic pageboy, but reify emergent non-heteronormative sexualities that are still surprisingl y relevant in contemporary society.
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22 ACT II TEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF OCTAVIAN AND THE TROUSER ROLE In exam ining the opera Der Rosenkavalier Octavians multifarious gender and sexuality can been seen in virtually each facet of operatic performance: from the musical to the visual; however, I would like to begin my examination of the opera with a textual analysis of the libretto, because it is often this literary aspect of opera that is overlooked in current scholarship. Indeed, while opera layperson and fanatic alike may often attribute authorship of Der Rosenkavalier to Richard Strauss solely, the work finds a great deal of its shape and narration through the libretto of Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Like the famous collabor ation between Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte, Strauss and Hofmannsthals professional partnership has been, and still is, touted as one of operas great est composer-librettist pairings (an extra-textual homosocial relationship linked to Der Rosenkavalier that has not gone unnoticed by opera scholars and queer theorists alike), and their extensive corresponden ce helped to shape the convoluted birth of the opera. Also, in Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity Harry Oosterhuis asserts that for Hugo v on Hofmannsthal sexuality was an intriguing subject that could be deployed to unveil bourgeois societys sense of secur ity as a faade, full of empty conventions (260). Thus, I propose that Hofmannsthal, via his textual cues throughout the operas libretto, knowingly e ndows the character of Octavian with a manyheaded and fluid sexuality. This non-static gendering present in Der Rosenkavalier not only prevents the lesbiancoded relationships in the opera from being read as merely por nographic, functioning solely to excite sexually and sensationally, but also presents audiences with an indefinable sexuality that helps to liberate gender and sexual representations from the male/female, hetero-/homosexual dyad, both in our current cultural conceptions as well as the microcosmic realm of the operatic mise-en-scne
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23 As the opera begins, the viewer is automatically provided with visual clues that suggest Octavians sexual otherness. Immediately, the audience is confronted with the image of a woman in mans clothing; howev er, even the listener (or reader, if th e opera house employs surtitles) can recognize the unique space that Octavian inhabits through the words of the opera. This liminal space is often seen when the audi ence, recognizing the femaleness of the actor portraying the male character of Octavian, is continuously reminded by the libretto, through gendered names or pronouns for example, of Octavi ans maleness. In order to reinforce the theatrical illusion of Octavians male gender within the diegesis of the narrative, Hofmannsthal saturates the libretto with various references to Octavians maleness and masculinity. For instance, the Marschallin constantly refers to Octavian as mein Bub, a term of affection typically translated as my boy (61, 64). Even this simple pet name between lovers signifies with a very specific male gender. Also, on two separate occasions, the Marschallin remarks how the queerly-gendered Octavian behaves much like other men do. When Octavian reacts petulantly and possessively to the Marschallins fear of abandonment in the first act, she pleads, No, please, do not be as all men are [Nein bitt schn, sei Er nur ni cht, wie alle Mnner sind!] (104). Then, near the end of the last act, the Marschallin relinqu ishes Octavian to his new love, Sophie, both chiding his fickle heart and his sex as a whole when she bittersweetly comments, You are so like a mango to her! [ Er ist ein rechtes Mann sbild, geh Er hin] (196). Not only do these purposeful references to Octavians maleness an d masculine behavior keep the femaleness of the acto r performing the role textually hidden, but the juxtaposition of these remarks with the actors true gender also provide for a sly undercurre nt of self-referential humor at the genderplay involved in the opera. Although these purposes may strike the reader as both expected and even necessary in reinforci ng a more conservative masking of Octavians
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24 queerness, when viewed in conjunction with a number of purposef ully non-masculine references, Hofmannsthal complicates and problematizes Octa vians seemingly strai ght-forward role as a man in the context of the opera. While Octavian physically flirts with a more feminine sexuality (most prominently, when he dresses as the handmaid Mariandl in order to escape Baron Ochs noti ce as hes leaving the Marschallins room after a night of lovemaking), th is more feminine characterization of Octavian also translates to Hofmannsthals textual tr eatment of the character. Probably the most consistent example of this is Hofmannsthals use of a thematic sexual sameness in the dialogue between Octavian and the other two female lead s, the Marschallin and Sophie. Beth Hart explores this mirroring motif be tween the operas all-female love triangle in Strauss and Hofmannsthals Accidental Heroin e: The Psychohistorical Meaning of the Marschallin. In her examination of the opening scene between Octavian and the Marschallin, Hart rhetorically asks her reader, We wonder what need Octavian fulf ills in the Marschallin as she mirrors him in voice and gaze, calling him her boy, her darling b oy (421). As Hart suggests, despite the difference in their characters genders, the female actors portraying the Ma rschallin and Octavian reflect one another vocally and vi sually. Even Octavians effusive tendresse manifests itself in poetic waxings that begin to blur the boundaries between the Marschallin and Octavian, the feminine and masculine: You, youwhat does it m ean, this you? This you and I? but this I is lost in this you [Du, du, duwas heit das D u? Was du und ich? aber das Ich vergeht in dem Du] (61). Octavians emphatic lapsing of the two pronouns carries a significant added weight when cons idering the similar lapse that occurs between the genders of both Octavian and the Marschallin: like the ac tor portraying the Marschallin, the supposedly male Octavian actually possesses the body of a woma n (the actor who plays him). To rearrange
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25 Harts rhetorical inquiry, perhaps the more f itting question to ask is What does the Marschallin fulfill in Octavian, because it is when Octavi an conflates his own self and gender with the Marschallins that his role moves beyond the simple woman-as-man transvestite performance to a more complex, ungendered one. Even Octavians interaction with Sophie re veals a similar mirroring trend. After Sophie meets the loutish Baron Ochs, she confides he r dissatisfaction to the dashing young Octavian. When Octavian promises to oppose the marriag e arrangement on her behalf, he makes her a request: All alone, you must now stand for us bot h! [Nun mu Sie ganz allein fr uns zwei einstehn!] (132). The provided tr anslation reinforces the doubleness of the Octavian and Sophie figures as Octavian not only asks that Sophie stand up for both of their honor but also that she stand for (i.e., represent) bo th characters. Again, these textual choices made by librettist Hofmannsthal muddy what initially appears to be a conventionally-masculin e characterization of Octavian. Still more convincingly, only minutes after thei r pact, the frightened Sophie insists that Octavian stand up for her: No, no! I cant open my mouth. You speak for me! [Nein! Nein! Ich bring den Mund nicht auf. Sprech Er fr mi ch!] (137). At the textual level, Sophies request speaks to the similarity between the gender of the two characters insomuch as the one can stand in for the other; however, at this mome nt, Octavians mercurial gender even transcends the confines of the libretto, as the audience will recognize that the female actor playing the male Octavian, when speaking her next lines, actually does speak for Sophie with an almost identical female voice. This sexual sameness between Octavian a nd both the Marschallin and Sophie located within the libretto can also be seen in the flesh, so to speak, in the ways in which varying artists
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26 have graduated through or swapped the female ro les over the course of their careers. Since Strauss composed all three characters for the soprano voice (although Octa vian is most often performed by a mezzo soprano), many singers have found the transition between these differently-gendered characters to be surprisingly smooth and natural. Christa Ludwig and Gwyneth Jones both essayed the role of the Mars challin after successful portrayals of Octavian, and Swiss soprano Lisa della Casa has the distin ction of having performed as each of the three lead roles at different stages in her operatic career. This fascinating mobility that performers have found shifting between the roles of the ma le Octavian and the female Marschallin and Sophie speaks to the same textual/sexual ambiguity that Hofmannsthal gives to the character of Octavian throughout his libretto. Hofmannsthal likewise imbues Der Rosenkavalier s operatic mise-en-scne (especially during the love scenes) with a whimsical surreal ity that hints at the queerness at work in the character of Octavian. In what is perhaps the operas most famous set piece, the second acts Presentation of the Rose scene, Octavian bears a silver rose to Sophie in recognition of her betrothal to Baron Ochs. When staged, this scene is quite ofte n visually resplendent, with a silver-clad Octavian arriving at hi s musical cue with a train of si milarly clad officers amidst the filigreed architecture of Faninals opulent hom e; however, while the visual markers of the scenes fantastic qualities are no doubt in plai n view, even the operas libretto iterates the otherworldliness of this realm where roses sm ell celestial and a woman playing a man can be both and neither genders. In The Queens Throat Wayne Koestenbaum elaborates upon the ways in which this scene arrests the flow of time and how that chr onological topsy-turvydom corresponds to the operas queer sexuality:
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27 The silver rose [] carr[ies] the charge of an unspeakable and chronology-stopping love because a connection arose in the late nineteenth century between tampering with time and tampering with gender Disturb gender, and you disturb te mporality; accept the androgyne, and you accept the abyss. (218) Here Koestenbaum asserts that the artificiali ty and unreality of the ceremonyas well as the silver rose around which it revolvesopens a site for reassessing concepts of time and gender which appear equally fantastic. Indeed, Hofmanns thals libretto reflects this notion that the Presentation of the Rose ceremony represents so mething queer and other that has ripped the fabric of conventional understand ings of time, beauty, and gender. When Sophie first smells the silver rose, she notes that it smells not only like an actual rose but also lik e roses of heaven, not of earth like roses of holy paradise [Wi e himmelische, nicht irdische, wie Rosen vom hochheiligen Paradies] (115). Sophies recogniti on (or failed recognition) of what is the fantasy and what is the reality of the rose parallels the audiences ow n recognition of the meshing of fantasy and reality in the perfor med gender of the character of Oc tavian. Hofmannsthals clever use of the metaphorical silver rose in the libr etto (as a symbol of the unreal) thus comments upon his and Strauss purposeful decisi on to cast the character of Octa vian as similarly illusory, by using a female soprano or mezzo soprano to portray the male knight of the rose. Even the simultaneously spoken words of Octavian and Sophies duet during this scene further the idea that the opera ha s suspended reality, a llowing the queer and the other to emerge in this fantastical staged world disconnected from the more realistic and typical ideas and traditions of the early twentieth century. Calling to mind Koestenbaums aforementioned discussion of temporality and sexuality, Sophie exclaims, Theres Time and Eternity in this moment of bliss [Ist Zeit und Ewigkeit in einem selgen Augenblick] (116), while Octavian speaks of the tenuousness of his ow n gender: I was a boy and did not know her yet. Who am I
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28 then? Were I not a man, I should lose my sens es [Ich war ein Bub da hab ich die noch nicht gekannt. Wer bin denn ich? Wr ich kein Mann, die Sinne mchten mir vergehn] (116). Indeed, even Octavian himself draws a ttention to his complex gender characterization by voicing his own confusion about his identity in this surreal and chimerical scene; however, Hofmannsthal does not intend for this glimpse of an indefinable, non-normative sexuality to remain encapsulated inside the hermetically-sealed world of the opera. As mentioned earlier, the sodomy trial of Oscar Wilde (on whose play Strauss had based his 1905 opera Salome ) had occurred less than twenty years before the premiere of Der Rosenkavalier and Richard von Krafft-Ebing wrote his psychiat ric study of sexual deviance, Psychopathia sexualis which catalogued and medicalized homosexuali ty in the nineteenth century,3 only ten years prior to that. Wendy Bashant provides a link between Ho fmannsthals world of opera and the thenemerging understandings of sexuality in her essay, Singing in Greek Drag: Gluck, Berlioz, George Eliot. Bashant explains that the [ u]nbridled, gender-bending women like Salome were created by men after Krafft-Ebings theories linking athletes, feminists, and opera singers and actresses who appear in male attire on the stage by preference were published in 1889. They were meant to be viewed as monstrous women (222-23). Certainly Octavi an can be included in this discussion of gender-bending women; however even with his knowledge of these cultural happenings, Hofmannsthal uses the character of Octavian not as a symbol of fear, mutation, or disease, but, moving beyond the moral decay of nineteenth century decadence, creates a character who is complexly-gendered and yet still endowed with a sympathetic humanity. 3 For more on Krafft-Ebings influence on homos exuality in the nineteenth century, see Oosterhuis, who makes the claim that sexual perversion was recognized, confirmed, and legitimized through the dialogue between patient and psychiatric community present in KrafftEbings numerous case studies (212).
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29 In the concluding act, readers can finally be gin to envision Octavian s full character arc as well as the non-normative sexuality with which Hofmannsthal has provided him. When the Marschallin finally arrives at the inn, subsequently ending th e convoluted plot Octavian had devised to thwart Baron Ochs plans of marrying Sophie, she informs the police commissioner that the whole thing was a charade and not hing more [das Ganze war halt eine Farce und weiter nichts] (189) and Tis a Viennese masquerade nothing more [Is eine wienerische Maskerad und weiter nichts] (190). Ostensib ly, the Marschallin is referring to the ploy concocted by Octavian involving numberless char acters now dressed as widows, children, and ghosts, but the pointed use of the words charade and masquerade echo the notion of fantasy and alternative sexualities exemplified in the Presen tation of the Rose scene. But this leaves the audience wondering, Was all of this, then, a hoax? An operatic sleight of hand? If so, the return to the triangle of lovers at the operas dnouement and the deservedly famous final trio seem to silence any suspic ion of the operas con tinuing insincerity. The moving, even if melodramatic, display of emo tions in the Marschallins relinquishment of Octavian and the charming, even if ephemeral, pairing of the young lovers in the final duet contradict any arguments that may claim that th e manygendered Octavian is merely a charade or inassimilable other. At the end of the opera, wh ether or not Sophie and Octavian remain together long after the curtains close, Ho fmannsthal allows this symbol of non-heteronormative sexuality to exist and to merit affording a happy ending.
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30 ACT III MUSICAL ANALYSIS OF OCTAVIAN AND THE TROUSER ROLE W hile the more literary aspects of Der Rosenkavalier s libretto point to a multigendered characterization of Octavian, the most recognized feature of opera tends not to be the text but the music. German composer Richard Strauss gain ed fame (and notoriety) by writing operas that explored complex and oftentimes disturbing portrayals of gender and sexuality. As I mentioned before, Strauss first triumph as an ope ra composer came after the premiere of Salome in 1905. Adapted from Oscar Wildes dramatic treatment of the biblical story, the opera recounts the young Salomes obsession and lust after Jokanaan (J ohn the Baptist) and closes with an extended scene where she sings a fascinating and horrific song of desire to his severed head. Even Strauss follow-up opera, 1909s Elektra focuses on the Greek tragedy where the eponymous heroine plots the death of her mother, Klytemnst ra, who has murdered Elektras father. Aside from their psychosexual subject matter, both of th ese operas were also marked by Strauss use of harsh and unnerving dissonance in order to convey the equally unsettli ng narratives of sexual deviance (Plaut 268). While the later Der Rosenkavalier has been criticized as a retreat from the more adventurous compositions in the darker Salome and Elektra the composer by no means balks from musically molding yet another ch aracter who explores non-normative gender and sexuality. Indeed, Strauss not only endows Octavian with both masculine and feminine motifs in his musical signatures but also orchestrally shap es Octavians scenes in order to draw the audiences attention to the characters queered presence. In her landmark text on feminism and opera, Opera, or the Undoing of Women Catherine Clment devotes a sectio n to the discussion of Der Rosenkavalier describing Octavian, in particular, as the young count Octavian, [who] is distinctly unruly, sc atterbrained enough and with a good enough start under ladies skirts to be known tenderly as Quinquin. And Richard
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31 Strauss gives him a disturbing womans voice (108) I find that Clments choice of words in referring to Octavian as having a disturbing voice robs the character of its powerful position of gender reevaluation as a figure which overlap s genders. Clments comment also seems to dismiss that this very particular voice allows Octavian to maneuver more fluidly between the genders represented by the other ch aracters in the opera. For example, in the first act, Strauss often features horn fanfares to represent Octavian s arrogant and specifically-masculine behavior when he attempts to overpower the Marschallins doubts of his fidelity. In deed, in his article, Kitsch, Camp, and Opera: Der Rosenkavalier Gary Le Tourneau describes the use of brass as ejaculatory horn calls (93). While, in this quotation, Le Tourneau assigns a masculine vocality to the character of Octa vian, he continues on to argue that Octavian is made a member of both genders by the music (93, emphasis mine). Certainly, despite Octavians musical and verbal ejaculations, he can often revert to a more lyrical and feminine line that mirrors the musical characterization of his female lover, the Marschallin. In the selection provided in figure 1, as Octavian and the Marschallin intimately c oo over one another, thei r alternating pet names become repeated musical phrases that produce th e effect that the two female voices echo or answer one another:
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32 Figure III-1. Der Rosenkavalier ; Act I (Source: Strauss 24-5) This androgynous vocalizing in the first act al so resembles the vocal and gender leaps of Octavians pageboy predecessor, Cherubino. Naom i Andr explores this notion of Cherubinos two voices in Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early-NineteenthCentury Italian Opera : As for Cherubino, the aria [Non so pi] illustrates the tug and pull he experiences between his two voices. [I]t is as though he is trying to tame his voice and push it down to a lower tessitura, yet it keeps popping up to a higher range, almost beyond his control. Split between his higher and lower voices, his I am encompasses the two simultaneous aspects of the childlike boy and the budding adult male personalities he embodies. (109) Much like this doubled voice that exists inside the character of Cherubino, Octavian experiences a similar multivocality. With a vocal line that al ternates between violent and bombastic as he
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33 imagines challenging the Marschal lins husband to a duel and light and lyrical when he comforts and woos his older lover, Octavi an and his vocal characterization, even in the span of the first scene, swing wildly from the masculine to the feminine. This multigendered vocal line that Strauss attributes to Octavian (Strauss himself wa s no stranger to Mozart, and it is believed that Octavians character and name are drawn from the character of Don Ottavio from Don Giovanni [Abel 159]) reinforces the comple x gender construction of the char acter, allowing Octavian to transcend the limiting label of a lesbian samen ess and represent an even more universal, ungendered figure. The female ensembles also especially em phasize this tricky destabilizing of gender in Octavians character. Like the previous ex amination of Hofmannsthals libretto during the Presentation of the Rose scene and duet, Stra uss orchestration highlights the mystical, otherworldly quality of this scene which undermin es traditional concepts of time and sexuality. Strauss prominent usage of celesta, harp, and fl ute in the descending theme of the duet creates a shimmering, glossy effect which enhances the un-/surreality of the moment. To the fore of Strauss orch estration during this scene, however, are the twin female voices of Octavian and Sophie. As the duet begi ns, Octavian sings in a low, almost monotone voice, even dipping down to a C sharp below the st aff to sing the word Jungfer. While Sophie begins in a similar monotone, she soon soars up to a B above the staff when extolling the beauty of the silver rose (Wie himmelische). Th is marked contrast between the lower-lying passages of Octavians more masculine voice and Sophies hi gh, feminine tones present the listener with very separately-gen dered voicesaural signifiers of Octavians masculinity versus Sophies femininity; however, when Octavian and Sophie begin singing together, the yearning triplet pattern of their shared musical line becomes almost identical, and the audience finds it
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34 difficult to separate which voice belongs to Octavi an and which voice belongs to Sophie. In the climatic measure especially (beginning at the section labeled 36 in fi gure 2), the two singers melodies synch up perfectly, remaining only a thir d apart from one another on the musical scale, emphasizing the transvocality of Octavian who, through the course of th e duet, sings as both male and female: Figure III-2. Der Rosenkavalier ; Act II (Source: Strauss 175-76) Thus, through his composition a nd orchestration in the Pres entation of the Rose duet, Strauss adds an additional dimension to Hofmannsthals textual description of the scene,
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35 underpinning the break from gender tradition and convention captured in the duets otherworldly atmosphere and Octavians fluctuating musical line that at times embodies both masculine and feminine characteristics. Strauss attention to the ge ndered vocality of Octavian becomes even more focused in the final trio and duet. In the celebrated trio (Hab mirs gelobt), the compos er layers the voices of his female performers to create an almost impenetrable mesh of feminine sound. In Opera and the Culture of Fascism Jeremy Tambling describes this en semble, explaining that the voices soar, and it is not clear which voice is being heard, whether that of the stage women or the putative malethat is, Octavian (190). Surely, in composing this piece, Strauss was aware of this inevitable aural confusiona confusion that, in obscuring the gender of the male Octavian among the female voices of Sophie and the Ma rschallin, undermines gender binaries, giving form to a character without tangible or definite maleor femaleness. Even more so than its role in the Presentation of the Rose scene, Octavi ans voice alternates be tween its masculine and feminine colorations, at times providing the s upportive moving line whil e the voices of Sophie and the Marschallin draw out their high notes and then suddenly soari ng higher than both the other voices (as seen when Octavian sings Ist den nein groes Un recht in figure 3):
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36 Figure III-3. Der Rosenkavalier ; Act III (Source: Strauss 439) This inseparable web of female voices dissipat es soon after when the Marschallin exits to attend to the neurotic Faninal, leaving Sophie and Octavian alone to perform the operas final piece, the duet Ist ein TraumSpr nur dich. What strikes the liste ner about this duet is how relatively conventional the piece sounds af ter the complex vocal maneuverings and chordal dissonances of the trio. The duets more typical and familiar structure and delivery stem specifically from the tradition of the hetero sexual love duet that runs throughout operatic performance history. As Eric A. Plaut recounts in Grand Opera: Mirror of the Western Mind it was Hofmannsthal himself who suggested to Strauss that he com pose a Mozartian duet for the operas finale (281). Both structural ly and tonally, this closing duet in Der Rosenkavalier follows the pattern of the Mozartian heterosexual love duet typified by the famous L ci darem la mano from Don Giovanni In The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozarts Vienna Mary Hunter explains the predictable duet st ructure of Mozarts duet via th e scholarship of Ronald Rabin:
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37 Rabin has described the progression as moving from independent statements for the two participants, through dialogue, to a closing tutti in parallel thirds and si xths. The independent statements often repeat the same melody (162). By extension, this same structure applies to Strauss Mozartian Ist ein TraumSpr nur dich. Indeed, even though Sophie and Octavians duet begins with the tutti after the first unis on section, Octavian and Sophie trade off the melody as mentioned above. Just like Don Giovannis heterosexual se duction of Zerlina in L ci darem la mano, the male and female figures of Octavian and Sophie alternate the melodic line of the duet until closing the opera w ith their shared reprise of the duets main theme. In composing this duet, whose format and content would be familiar to operagoers, Strauss places Octavian and Sophie in the longs tanding tradition of hete ronormative gender roles in opera; however, at the same time, the conscious choice to use the androgynous voice of Octavian as a participant in the duet works against a strictly straight reading of the scene. The similarity of the two female voices when swappi ng identical melodic lines or even when singing in harmony enhances the sexual sameness of thes e supposed differently-gendered characters. Also, the recurrence of celesta, harp, and flute ec hoes their same thematic uses in the queered Presentation of the Rose scene. So, not only does Strauss present his audi ence with a non-static character that constantly maneuvers between genders, but hi s is a character more fully-formed than the pageboys of operatic past, for while Ch erubino sings love songs to the worlds women in Non so pi and Voi che sapete, these arias are sung alone; Octavian, on the other hand, is permitted to function in a romantic relationshi pto sing a love song to another character and have that character reciprocate his desire.
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38 ACT IV VISUAL ANALYSIS OF OCTAVIAN AND T HE TROUSER ROLE Last, but most definitely not least, in reading the queerness of Der Rosenkavalier audiences and scholars alike must pay especial attention to th e staging and production of the opera. Although the visual aspect of opera is of ten its most vivid and striking quality, audiences are deprived of this crucial tool to understa nding opera performance when it is heard as a recording. Because this visual component is of ten ignored by scholars in opera analysis, Linda and Michael Hutcheon argue for the necessity of examining this physical space of opera in their 2000 essay, Staging the Female Body: Richard Strausss Salome : While it may seem obvious that the staged body is central to any form of theatrical representation, it is the voicealmost a dise mbodied voicethat has come to dominate discussions of opera, especially since the t echnological advances in audio recording and radio transmissions. In a related move opera criticism has been dominated by considerations of the music th at voice singsusually separate d from the librettos verbal text and the dramatic staged narrative. Musicologists confidently assert: It is after all the music that an opera-lover goes to hear. But, speaking for these opera-lovers, at least, we go to see as well as hear a performance, and th at performance includes a verbal text and a staged dramatic narrativefor wh ich that (admittedly important) music was especially written. Opera is an embodied art form; it is the performers who give it its phenomenal reality. Indeed, opera owes its undeniable affective power to the overdetermination of the verbal, the visual a nd the auralnot to th e aural alone. And it is specifically the bodythe gendered, se xualized bodythat will not be denied in staged opera. (206) Indeed, the gendered bodies of the characters in Der Rosenkavalier are extraordinarily vital means through which audiences may apprehend the complexities of the work, not to mention the ways in which various aspects of the opera as seemingly inconsequential as props and costumes further the queer representations of Octavian. Silver Roses, Swords, and the Gendered Props of Der Rosenkavalier Aside from the titular silver rose, perhaps the most famous prop that cleverly comments upon Octavians sexuality is his sword. Serving as a surrogate phallus for the female actors literal lack, Octavians sword doesnt simply sit at his side for the enti rety of the opera but
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39 almost performs a role of its own in pr opelling the narrative to its finale. In Opera in the Flesh Sam Abel explains the use of Octavians sword in Der Rosenkavalier against the more blatant psychosexual dramas of Salome and Elektra claiming that Strauss car ries over the fetish-laden atmosphere of his first two successes and transf orms it into a much more subtle use of the sexually obsessive symbol (124). This vis ual objectification of Octavians elusive masculinity (124), as Abel calls it, often comes into play in the operas pl ot in order to clarify Octavians maleness. In the first act, for exampl e, Octavian accidentally leaves his sword in the Marschallins room as he runs to hide from Baron Ochs. Not only does the phallic sword, in this instance, allude to the post-coital scene that opens the opera, but the Marschallin also chides Octavians masculinity for his misplacement of the weapon, stating, You scatterbrain, how careless of you! Is it the thi ng to leave ones sword lying arou nd in a ladys bedroom? Have you no manners? [Er Katzenkopf, Er Unvorsichtiger! Lt man in einer Dame Schlafzimmer seinen Degen herumliegen? Hat Er keine besseren Gepflogenheiten ?] (63) This utilization of the sword as a prop in this scene and the Marsch allins subsequent chastisement of Octavians maleness reinforce once again that Octavian is a character who has been gendered in multiple ways by the staging of Der Rosenkavalier Not only does the sword metaphorically signify Octavians masculinity, but his improper placement of it (i.e., his misuse of the phallus) labels him as unmasculine and dis tinctly non-heteronormative. In the second act, the sword takes on an even more significant role as the scuffle that ensues between Baron Ochs and Octavian climati cally sets into motion the conflict that will bring about the operas deus ex machina resolution. When Octavian initially confronts Ochs on behalf of Sophie, Ochs is di smissive and condescending toward the young boy. Octavian rashly challenges Ochs to a duel, brandishing his swor d, which results in Oc hs accidentally wounding
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40 himself on the weapon. As Ochs blusters over the slight injury he receives, he remarks, One is what one is and has no need to prove it [Ma n ist halt, was man ist, und brauchts nicht zu beweisen] (140). Again, Octavians sword and Ochs response draw atte ntion to the limitations of Octavians maleness. Even the ineffectual w ounding of Ochs (other than the tantrum it elicits from the Baron) reemphasizes Octavians inab ility to wield his substitute phallus and to successfully perform expected male roles. Thus, Strauss and Hofmannsthals effective use of the sword as prop and symbol throughou t the narrative and staging of Der Rosenkavalier work to further Octavians complex characterization as a fluidly-gendered figure that destabilizes conventional binary gender constructions. Alfred Roller, Ert, and the Costuming of Octavian More so than m ost operas (the spartan pr oduction values and costuming of Wagner and verismo operas immediately come to mind), Der Rosenkavalier gains a majority of its appeal from its distinctive, elaborate visual style. This confectioners sugar coating has garnered the opera many critiques for being too superficial, but I would argue that this surface sheen serves as yet another important facet in fles hing out a queered sensitivity of this work. The costuming in particular functions to both masculinize and feminize the character of Octavian. In his discussion of Victorian represen tations of trouser roles in Opera in the Flesh Sam Abel notes that artists often made no attempt to hide the femaleness of the travesti performers: There is no attempt at realistic illusion; the contours of the ideal feminine body are often more highlighted in drag than in proper womens clothes. The male clothes emphasize the female parts. Images of hourglass figur es, wasp waists, and large bosoms recur in these engravings, clearly evoking the ideal of feminine sexual allure. (211) In the sketches available from the original 1911 Der Rosenkavalier premiere, however, the costume designs literally obscure the gender of the actor playing Octavian under mens military
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41 or ceremonial outfits while also introducing f eminine and ornate touches to complicate the characters masculinity: Figure IV-1. Octavian Rofrano: Figure IV-2. Octavian Rofrano: Drittes Kostm, Erster Aufzug Viertes Kostm, Zweiter Aufzug (Source: Roller 17) (Source: Roller 25) In these original 1910 costume sketches for the operas premiere in Dresden, Alfred Roller portrays Octavian with a lithe, boyish figure stripped of any marker of the femaleness underneath (except, perhaps, for the more pronounced hips of the figure in the second image). The faces, however, are certainly more androgynous. In figure 1, Octavians colored cheeks and feline eyes make him more pretty and feminine, while the cherubic face in figure 2 seems to defy
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42 gender categorization completely. Even the costum es themselves, especially the silver outfit in figure 2, are almost feminine in th eir sartorial opulence and finery. Figure IV-3. Octavian Rofrano Genannt Quinquin: Erstes Kostm, Erster Aufzug (Source: Roller 5) The Octavian in figure 3, also by Alfred Roller, brings the actors femaleness even more to the fore as the jacketless figures feminine hips and backside are now visible (even though, surprisingly, the face appears more masculine than the previous two images). Thus, in each of these sketches, Roller emphasizes both the masc uline and feminine qualities of the Octavian character, creating a figure that balances between, rather than resolving into, a strict male or female gender identity.
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43 Erts costume designs for the 1980 Glyndebourne Festival similarly straddle depictions of masculinity and femininity: Figure IV-4. Octavian at the end of Ac t I Figure IV-5. Octavians runners (Source: Ert 19) (Source: Ert 25) Unlike the more ambiguous genders of the figures in Rollers sketches, the image of Octavian in figure 4 at first may appear to be an unquestionable female in mens clothing, as if designer Ert makes no attempt to hide the gende r of the actor playing Octavian; however, when compared to the accompanying paintings of Octa vians retinue (figure 5)male characters, especially those associated with the fantastic al Presentation of the Rose scene, who would actually be performed onstage by male actorsth ey appear similarly effeminate. Thus, the fashion-oriented Ert displays Octavians fluid gender not through the same androgyny of
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44 Rollers images, but through an almost effe minized masculinity, which endows the male characters in the opera, whethe r being performed by male or fe male actors, with a beauty typically associated with females. So, both Roller and Ert maintain a multigendered portrayal of Octavian through their respective costume sketches by recognizing both the masculine and feminine qualities of the character. Even more so than two-dimensional images and sketches, though, the three-dimensional costuming of Octavian plays an integral role in the comprehension of Der Rosenkavalier s queer performativity. Over the course of Der Rosenkavalier Octavian dons womens clothes and disguises himself as Mariandlfirst to escap e notice when leaving the Marschallins boudoir and secondly to entrap Baron Ochs in order to th wart his marriage arrangement to Sophie. This double cross-dressing by the actor playing Octavian draws even more atte ntion to the genderplay at work in the opera. For example, when the Marschallin kisses Octavi an dressed as a woman (You darling! And I can give you no more than a kiss [Du Schatz! Und nicht einmal mehr als ein Busserl kann ich dir geben. ] [69]) and calls after him, And come back, darling, but in mans clothing and by the front door, if you pl ease [Und komm Er wieder, Schatz, aber in Mannskleidern und durch die vordre Tr, wenns Ihm beliebt] (69), she makes known her preference that Octavian return to her in the dr ag costuming of his male clothes. Thus, the Marschallin doesnt desire Octavi an as a lesbian (as many modern scholars have interpreted the Marschallin-Octavian affair) or as a heterose xual woman, but instead desires the other-gendered Octavian who inhabits both realms of sexuality. Fassbaender, Kirchschlager, and the Filmed P erformances of Der Rosenkavalier Lastly, I would like to examine briefly two performances of Der Rosenkavalier available on DVD and how their respective acto rs portrayals of Octavian enha nce (or fail to enhance) the notion of gender mutability I have espoused throughout this project. The first filmization is a
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45 1979 performance of the Bayerisches Staatsorches ter, conducted by Carlos Kleiber; Brigitte Fassbaender performs the role of Octavian. Th e second is a 2004 Salzburg Festival performance by the Wiener Philharmoniker conducted by Semyon Bychkov; the Octavian is Angelika Kirchschlager. Although the 1979 performance is more traditional and ty pical in its production and staging choices, I feel that this filmic representation conveys more successfully than the avant-garde and controversial Salzburg Festival entry the plastic and fluid gender of Octavians character. In her justly-famous assump tion of the role of Octavian, Brigitte Fassbaender creates a character whose complicated web of genders and cr oss-dressings are always utterly believable. Never betraying discomfort in her intimate intera ctions with Gwyneth Jones or Lucia Popp (the actors who portray the Marschallin and Sophie, respectively), Fassbaender and her ease of performance naturalizes the non-heteronormativity of her drag character; however, despite her studied mimicry of masculinity, Fassbaender is ne ver satisfied to simply perform as a man. In her essay, In Praise of Brigit te Fassbaender: Reflections on Diva Worship, Terry Castle explains just how Fassbaenders complex performance as Octavian avoids a seamless illusion of maleness: Precisely to the degree that Fassbaender seems to enter into her male roles, precisely as I watch her approach (though without ever r eaching) a kind of zero degree masculinity, I find myself becoming more and more acutely aware of, and aroused by, her femininity. The very butchness with which she tackles, say, a role like Octavianthe sheer, absolutist bravado of the impersonationinfus es it with a dizzying homosexual charge. (43) Indeed, while Fassbaender certainly makes her masculinity believable (seen particularly convincingly when an uncomfortable, almost homophobic, tension builds at the prospect of Octavian, in the double-drag as Mariandl, kissing Baron Ochst hough, in reality, a heterosexual kiss between a male and female actor), as Castle notes, the singer neve r achieves a perfect
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46 semblance of masculinity. Fassbaen der, I believe, is even aware of this disjuncture, and often, in her characterization of the multigendered Octavian, fondles his sword, sheathing and unsheathing it, in symbolic recognition of he r ownand, by extension, the charactersultimate phallic lack. Thus, I feel that Fassbaender succeeds in providing an inte rpretation of Octavian that truly explores the characte rs ungendered qualitie s, rather than simply assigning Octavian either a masculine or even subversively lesbian identity. Angelika Kirchschlager, on the other hand, fo r all her many musical talents, fails to succeed in providing the wholly complex char acterization so evid ent in Fassbaenders interpretation. The problems with Kirchschlage rs performance surface most prominently when her Octavian is dressed as Mariandl. In the first act, when shes attempting to escape Baron Ochs, no amount of playacting can di sguise the fact that Kirchschlager has now reverted back to being a woman. Wearing red lipstick and her breasts unbound, it becomes obvious to the audience that the actor playing Octavian is, in realit y, female. It is almost as if director Robert Carsen had wanted to divulge th e theatrical secret of Octavians character by having the actress dress in female clothing in order to reveal her true identity. Unlike the aforementioned 1979 performance, which never tips its hand either way about Fassbaenders tr ue gender (even during the curtain calls, Fassbaender chiv alrously leads Jones and Popp out in front of her), this more recent performance breaks the operatic conceit and, even more detrimentally, explains the previously unexplainable gender of the Octavian character. In the final scene of the Sa lzburg performance, when Octavi an dresses as Mariandl in order to seduce Baron Ochs, Kirchschlager is co stumed in layered lingerie and comes sashaying campily through a circle of women in her new dis guise. Almost completely antithetical to her previous double cross-dressing, Kirchschlager now treats femininity not as Octavians true
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47 identity, but as full-blown parody. Instead of fleshing out the varying genders and sexualities that comprise Octavians identity, this parodic portrayal of Octavians double drag performance turns the characters sexual sl ippage into a humorousbut mean inglessjoke, rather than a source of gender exploration and examination. Then again, some viewers and scholars may ar gue that the subversive sexuality absent in Kirchschlagers performance can be seen more openly in the vivid and unabashed sexual displays throughout the 2004 production. Certainly, the operas bookending scenes feature Octavian and the Marschallin (Adrianne Pieczonka )and Sophie (Miah Persson) in the finale in various stages of undress, passionately kissing, embracing, and rolling around on beds. Unfortunately, I see this seeming celebration of Der Rosenkavalier s queer sensibilities as ultimately limited. Rather than truly exploring th e sexual complexities of Octavians character, these scenes simply exploit the more prurient and sensationalist homosexual aspects of the operas casting, as evidenced by the remainder of the pre-World War II Regietheater production, which sets the final scene in a brothel where numerous couples simulate intercourse in the background. In contrast to the Presentation of the Rose scene, where the otherworldly atmosphere queers gender and sexuality, the scenes of sexuality in Ca rsens production of Der Rosenkavalier simply serve to shock and titillate.
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48 POSTLUDE So, in exam ining the extraordinarily vital textual, musical, and visual features of Der Rosenkavalier, modern operagoers and scholars can begi n to see how Strauss and Hofmannsthal as well as subsequent opera dire ctors, producers, costume designe rs, and performers have each attempted to preserve the fascinating sexual a nd gender mores of the opera and its eponymous hero(ine). As I bring this project to a close, I would lik e to draw your attention to a correspondence written by composer Richard Stra uss to librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal on the ninth of July, 1909. Replying to a draft of the second act that Ho fmannsthal had recently sent, Strauss discusses the character of Octavian and his elaborate plot to foil Baron Ochs plans of marrying Sophie: The more mischievous Octavian is the better (267). Whether or not Strauss intended this comment to refer specifically to Oc tavians complicated cro ss-dressing as Mariandl or simply the convoluted scheme in general, I feel that this quotation helps us to grasp the very purposeful intent behind the character of Octavian: to function as a contrary to heteronormativity. Not simply a lesbian or homosexual figure, Octavian is a powerfullyungendered other that opens a site for ques tioning accepted genders and sexualities and challenging the status quo. As we look over the long lineage of the trouser role and its multifaceted methods of commenting on gender and sexuality, from the onstage gender anarchy of Handel to Mozarts lusty pageboy, arriving at Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthals Der Rosenkavalier brings us to a point in operatic hist ory where the queer sensibilities currently so synonymous with opera truly began to emer ge and, even to this day, flourish. So, as opera continues to build an even la rger gay and lesbian following, queer scholars and fans alike can continue to expand and refine the discourse of gender rebellion that occurs on the operatic stage. By viewing opera through the lens of queer and gender studies, we can unlock perceptions and interpretations long obscu red by the more conservative ideologies that
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49 have dominated this multimedia art form. Thus if we truly recognize and embrace the queerness of operafrom its travesti to its divadom to its still untappe d realms of non-heteronormativity lovers of opera can begin to mine the rich dept hs of subversion inherent in these extravagant, melodramatic, campyand fabulously gayworks of art.
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50 LIST OF REFERENCES Abel, Sam Opera in the Flesh: Sexuality in Operatic Performance Boulder: Westview, 1996. Andr, Naomi. Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early-NineteenthCentury Italian Opera Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006. Bashant, Wendy. Singing in Greek Drag: Gluck, Berlioz, George Eliot. Blackmer and Smith 216-41. Blackmer, Corinne E. and Patricia Juliana Smith, eds. En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Blumer, Rodney, ed. Der Rosenkavalier LP Booklet. London: Decca, 1969. Brett, Philip and Elizabeth Wood. Lesbian and Gay Music. Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology Eds. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas. New York: Routledge, 2006. 351-89. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. Castle, Terry. In Praise of Brigitte Fassbaender: Reflections on Diva-Worship. Blackmer and Smith 20-58. Clment, Catherine. Opera, or the Undoing of Women Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. Ert. Erts Costumes and Sets for Der Rosenkavalier in Full Color. New York: Dover, 1980. Hadlock, Heather. The Career of Cherubino, or the Trouser Role Grows Up. Smart 67-92. Hart, Beth. Strauss and Hofmanns thal's Accidental Heroine: Th e Psychohistorical Meaning of the Marschallin. Opera Quarterly 15.3 (Summer 1999): 414-34. Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. Der Rosenkavalier Libretto. London: Decca, 1984. Hunter, Mary. The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozarts Vienna: A Poetics of Entertainment Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. Hutcheon, Linda and Michael Hutcheon. Sta ging the Female Body: Richard Strausss Salome Smart 204-21. Koestenbaum, Wayne. The Queens Throat: Opera, Homosex uality, and the Mystery of Desire New York: Poseidon, 1993.
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51 Le Tourneau, Gary. Kitsch, Camp, and Opera: Der Rosenkavalier Canadian University Music Review 14 (1994): 77-97. Leonardi, Susan J. and Rebecca A. Pope. The Divas Mouth: Body, Voice, and Prima Donna Politics New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1996. Levin, David J. Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007. Oosterhuis, Harry. Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Ps ychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. Plaut, Eric A. Grand Opera: Mirror of the Western Mind. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993. Reynolds, Margaret. Ruggieros Deceptions, Cher ubinos Distractions. Blackmer and Smith 132-51. Roller, Alfred. Octavian Rofrano: Dritt es Kostm, Erster Aufzug. Blumer 17. Octavian Rofrano: Viertes Kostm, Zweiter Aufzug. Blumer 25. Octavian Rofrano Genannt Quinquin: Erstes Kostm, Erster Aufzug. Blumer 5. Der Rosenkavalier Dir. Otto Schenk. Perf. Dame Gwyneth Jones, Brigitte Fassbaender, Lucia Popp, Manfred Jungwirth, Carlos Kleiber. 1979. DVD. Deutsche Grammophon, 2005. Dir. Robert Carsen. Perf. Adrianne Pieczo nka, Angelika Kirchschlager, Miah Persson, Franz Hawlata, Semyon Bychkov. DVD. TDK, 2004. Smart, Mary Ann, ed. Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Strauss, Richard. Dear Herr von Hofmannsthal. 9 July 1909. Opera: A History in Documents Ed. Piero Weiss. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. 266-68. Der Rosenkavalier Vocal Score. New York: Boosey & Hawkes, 1943. Tambling, Jeremy. Opera and the Culture of Fascism New York: Oxford UP, 1996.
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52 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Peter DEttore is a native of Florida, born and raised in Pem broke Pines. He earned his bachelors degree in English literature with a minor in womens studies from Florida State University in December 2004. Over the course of his graduate study, he has developed interests in 20th century womens poetry, gender and queer studi es, and opera studies. After receiving his masters degree from the University of Florida in December 2007, he plans to pursue a career as a junior college literature and writing instructor.
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