(It. travesti: ‘disguised’).
An operatic role played by a member of the opposite sex. The term is most commonly applied to men who sing female roles; for women playing male roles, Breeches part is more usual. Such parts, often depicting elderly, amorous women and having an inherently comic or derisive element, are frequent in early Venetian opera: for example, the Nurse (alto or high tenor) in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (1642) or Alcesta in Cavalli’s Erismena (alto in 1656, tenor in 1670). The later period of Zeno and Metastasio banished such parts as distasteful, but the custom persisted in early Neapolitan comic operas. French opera offers an example in the title role of Rameau’s Platée (1745), an ugly marsh-nymph, for Haute-contre. A rare instance in 19th-century Italian opera is Mamm’Agata (baritone) in Donizetti’s Le convenienze teatrali (1827), the hectoring mother of a seconda donna. In Britten’s Curlew River (1964), one of the monks relating the story plays the leading role of the Madwoman (tenor). Although this example differs from the preceding in that the travesty is acknowledged within the opera, it offers an important 20th-century example of unusually raw emotional power.
A related but distinct tradition also making use of travesty involves the castrato voice in Baroque opera. On the one hand, in Rome and elsewhere, where women were barred from singing on the stage at many periods of the 17th and 18th centuries, castratos sang the roles of young princesses and lovers en travesti. On the other hand, given the vocal range of male castrato roles, male characters could sing disguised as women within the context of the plot, like Achilles in Handel’s Deidamia (1741). It is within the tradition of treble male roles that breeches parts for women also became common, a convention that has continued more actively in practice than travesty. Situations in which male characters dress as women but do not sing so disguised derive from the comic tradition of travesty. Examples are Cherubino, a treble breeches part, in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (1786) and Falstaff (bass) in Nicolai’s Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (1849). (C.E. Blackmer and P.J. Smith: En travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera, New York, 1995).
JULIAN BUDDEN/ELLEN T. HARRIS