Coming out from Behind the Curtain: Diverse Sexuality in Opera

Varsity
November 2019

For eight weeks every summer, the BBC proms are the place to see the world’s best musicians for as little as six pounds. One of this year’s biggest names was the American mezzo soprano, Jamie Barton, soloist for the last night of the festival. Barton is both openly bisexual and vocal about the need for people of all shapes and sizes to appear on the operatic stage. After dazzling with arias from Carmen and Samson et Dalila, she re-appeared to lead her audience in a rendition of Rule Britannia in a dress specially designed in the colours of the bisexual pride flag, and instead of the customary Union Jack, she flew a rainbow pride flag as she sang. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, she was not the only one to abandon the Union Jack and there many more than usual EU flags in evidence too). Many would argue that a message of openness and acceptance regardless of sexual orientation is just one way of expressing the quintessential Britishness that the Last Night of the Proms celebrates - though of course the word ‘hijacked’ was not entirely absent from comments on videos of the moment posted on social media.

Barton has since been in New York singing one of the title roles in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice at the Metropolitan opera; not the ill-fated Euridice, however, but her husband. This is just one of the many ‘trouser roles’ regularly sung by women. Mezzos play everything from emperors of Rome to sexually frustrated teenage boys and drunk, entitled Princes. So in opera, women loving women is common, if, of course, they are dressed as men.

Nearly three centuries passed between what is usually considered the birth of opera and the first openly gay character on the operatic stage, Countess Geschwitz in Alban Berg's Lulu which was premiered in 1937. Whilst this is by no means miles behind other arts forms, the world of opera has not exactly been overwhelmed with LGBTQ+ characters since and by far the majority of operas staged today are from well before this point. At first reading then, the outlook for diverse representation on the operatic stage is bleak. This is one of the reasons why Barton’s bold statement was so celebrated in many quarters, and pushed quietly under the carpet in others.

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Perhaps with the next generation of artists and directors opera will be transformed in more ways than this, and one day, Barton’s successors might sing a female Orfeo at the Met.