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Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early-Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera By Naomi André. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006. 230 pp.
STEPHANIE JENSEN-MOULTON
It's 7:36 p.m. As I tighten the Ace bandage that flattens my breasts to my torso, I sympathize with a woman reflected in the mirror who complains that her facial stubble has rubbed off. Slipping into high-heeled loafers and a satin vest, I steal a glance at yet another costumed figure; she laughs and nibbles on green olives, careful not to spoil her full-skirted dress. In about twenty minutes she and I will sing a love duet, but she will fall for the tenor and perish before the night is through.
In her book Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early-NineteenthCentury Italian Opera Naomi André confronts the complex issue of gender dynamics in primo ottocento opera. Although André asks a familiar, fundamental feminist question ("why do the heroines of Romantic opera die at the end?"), her study cleverly unpacks this query through a multivalent approach that incorporates not only documentary evidence about performers and performance practice but also a blend of postmodern criticism and personal experience. Rather than placing emphasis on female opera heroines' collective and untimely demise, André theorizes the phenomenon of the treble voice in opera, whether that voice emanates from the physical form of a heroic castrato, a crossdressed mezzo such as the one I played above, or a swooning soprano diva. The voice, a fact of opera, passes through the singer's body and demands to be heard; yet listening to women in primo ottocento opera reveals a startling hybridity that is ripe for analysis. In Andre's words, her project "is a critical intervention in theorizing voice more historically and historicizing voice more theoretically" (11). She skillfully connects the history of castrati to sopranos en travesti, linking them to distinct types of women characters in Italian opera and, finally, to the heroines of post-1830 operas by Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi.
To the burgeoning body of feminist opera scholarship of the past two decades André contributes a meticulously researched guide to an undersung period in Italian opera. The strength of the study lies in the author's willingness to theorize primo ottocento operatic voices as...