Transgender Opera Singers Discover Their Voices


AUSTIN, Texas - Holding his whiskey with one hand and his Stetson on the opposite, the hero of the opera - a tricky stagecoach driver - supplied an sad barmaid recommendation in a loud and clear tenor voice.
"You might be something," sang the tenor Holden Madagame.
He ought to know. Mr. Madagame, 28, is a part of a brand new wave of transgender opera singers. Skilled as a mezzo-soprano, he risked his singing profession when he made the transition a number of years in the past. gradations.
"Some pals singing pals have been a bit like, you damage your profession, your life, the voice is the whole lot," he stated just lately. "And I believed that's not the case. I'd somewhat take pleasure in my life and proceed singing if that occurs. I didn't know if I might do it. "
It turned out he might. He's now one of many many transgender singers who're starting to impose themselves on the planet of opera, historically linked to custom. Some, like him, have discovered new voices, both with the assistance of hormones, or by recycling themselves. Others have saved the voices on which that they had constructed their careers - even when that meant persevering with to play within the style that they had left behind them. Now, some are getting higher-level roles - and preconceived notions about voice and gender.
The opera itself is starting to change: the newest opera produced in North America in recent seasons has been "As One", a story of transition to transgender adult age. This happens when transgender rights are debated by sports officials, in state legislatures and in the armed forces, where President Trump has taken steps to ban the service of transgender troops.
While Mr. Madagame was singing in Austin this spring, a transgender woman, Lucia Lucas, was 450 km north, at the Tulsa Opera House, in Oklahoma, repeating the title role in "Don Giovanni "by Mozart. Ms. Lucas has retained her powerful baritone voice. after his transition: estrogen does not raise the voice as testosterone reduces it.
"It would be great if I could take estrogen, wake up and sing Brünnhilde," she said. "It does not work like that."
In some ways, this generation of transgender singers adds a new twist to a very old tradition: Opera has been a fluid genre since its inception. In early operas, boys' roles were sung by female sopranos, and both female and male roles were sometimes sung by castrati - castrated men before puberty to preserve their high voices.
At the end of this practice, the high masculine roles they had sung were often assumed by women. And many great composers, including Mozart and Strauss, wrote "Pants' roles, male parties created for women to sing. Adrian Angelico, a 35-year-old Norwegian who kept his mezzo-soprano voice after the transition in 2016, is one of Europe's most titled transgender opera singers. He became one of the few men specialized in panty roles.
We spent time with four of the artists at the forefront of this new wave.
At first, testosterone did not seem like an option.
Mr. Madagame, was assigned female at his birth, moved to Berlin after graduating from the University of Michigan, where he had studied singing, but things did not go according to plan.
"I became very depressed. I just could not sing, "he recalls. "And I knew somehow that it was a gender issue, but I did not want to admit it."
At this point, he had spent years working hard to become a mezzo-soprano. A whole new voice could compromise her.
"Frankly, I had no experience of what was going to happen," said Stephen West, one of his singing teachers in Michigan, who remembered him as an exceptional mezzo.

Opera singers rely on their unamplified voices to earn a living, and spend years perfecting their techniques - so they tend to be wary of anything that might cause them grief or pain. damage the voice. But Mr. Madagame had become so unhappy that he had decided to embark on the unknown.

"I decided if I was not singing and the only reason I was not taking testosterone was because I wanted to sing, so I should just take testosterone," he said. .
After the first gunshots, he remembered that the tone of his voice - his overall color and resonance - was beginning to change. "At first, it's not the lands that are falling," he said, "but it's as if the harmonics are decreasing."
Then came a period when his voice became unstable: "I had no singing voice, I had a range of octaves," he recalled. "It was terrifying. I thought, what if it stays like this?

He felt better emotionally, but he was worried when he was still struggling to sing after the first few months. He began to wonder if he would be able to work again.
"I have no idea: no one knows," he remembered, thinking. "So here it is, terrifying."
He returned to some of the easy Italian tunes that he had learned in adolescence, neither too harsh nor too high. But they were suddenly not so easy.
"They teach you a lot by singing them," he said. "I said to myself: I just need to be recycled to do these things. But at first I could not even sing those songs. "
Stephanie Weiss, a voice teacher in a private studio, led her as her voice settled and saw him through rough times in the beginning, when his voice cracked. Mr. Madagame made a breakthrough when he was working on a Mozart tune. As many young tenors have experienced, recalls Ms. Weiss, elegantly reaching the high notes. She gave him some advice, especially on the vowels to hold so that his voice goes to the top of his voice.
Something clicked.
"He said, 'Oh my God, I never thought I could do that,'" recalls Ms. Weiss.
She added that Mr. Madagame had already developed a solid technique. "Now," she says, "he really found his voice - anyway."

Soon, Mr. Madagame, who now lives in Görlitz, a German city on the Polish border, has started to get small roles with small businesses in Germany and the United Kingdom. It has been accepted by the Glyndebourne Academy, program of the prestigious Glyndebourne festival in England.
He has also become an activist and works to educate people about transgender issues. His site includes essays on "Why is it rude to ask a trans person * what is his birth name?" And "The FAQ to end all FAQs," which includes a series of "do not ask questions, but I will answer when same ", including a section explaining which parts of his anatomy he has changed and which ones he has not changed.
He dreams of singing Lensky, the condemned poet of Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin", but he works mainly for smaller parts of tenors, not for leading roles. "I'm 5 feet 2," he noted - another casting challenge.
But it is a leading role that brought him to Austin. He starred in "Good Country," an opera by composer Keith Allegretti and librettist Cecelia Raker, based on the true story of Charley Parkhurst, a driver of diligence who lived as a man but who was discovered after his death in 1879. were born a woman.
They wrote the role for a transgender singer - and after throwing it on Mr. Madagame, they adapted it with his voice in mind.
She entered the rehearsal room with her street clothes (striped top, silver boots, hair pulled into a ponytail, a little lipstick) and began singing one of the most toxic characters of the opera: the main role in Mozart's Don Giovanni. "
Mozart has written a number of male roles for women to sing. Don Giovanni is not one of them. But while her powerful and powerful baritone roared walls, Ms. Lucas, 38, became the character - planning his next seductions with delight and threat.
Her performances at Tulsa made the headlines in the press and the latest indication that her career was more than just a return to the right track after she risked it by passing to a woman while she worked as a baritone. an opera company in Karlsruhe, Germany.
"It was always a question of, then, when will my career be over so that I can make the transition?" She recalls. in a recent interview in New York, explaining that she had felt disconnected from her birth sex since her childhood in Sacramento. "I never thought that they would coexist."
But in 2013, she decided to no longer postpone her transition. She went out to the annual opera ball in KarlsruheHis wife, also a singer, wore a tux and Mrs. Lucas wore a dress.

The company was initially supportive. "It was a good case study: can a transgender person make a career in opera?" Said Ms. Lucas. "I thought, can I have a career afterwards if I change only one thing? In fact, it's not a matter of scene, it's something personal. Because I will continue to sing the baritone; I will continue to play with men on stage. "
As the hormones would not change her voice and recaling as a contralto seemed impractical, she remained a baritone. Now, the vast majority of her stage roles are men - a genre with which she was uncomfortable in life. But she said that she had made peace with that.

"I'm just going to put a beard on myself," said Ms. Lucas, noting that she personifies all kinds of characters on stage. "Clearly, it's a disguise. It does not take you back to an old life. "
When she underwent a facial feminization operation, she did not let her doctor do anything to the sinus cavity, nose, or Adam's apple.
"Even if I put my transition ahead of my career," she said. "I did not want him to play with anything that would hurt my voice."

But after a while, her contract in Karlsruhe was not renewed and she was not called to audition elsewhere, as she would have expected in the past.
She became more determined.
"Obviously, my transition was important: it was more important than my career," she said. "But now that I've made my transition, basically all I want to do, I'm like, Oh, no, I love my career. I want to keep my career. I will fight for my career now. "
New opportunities have emerged. She was lucky to sing Wotan, the king of the gods, in Wagner's "Die Walküre". Next season, she will sing at the English National Opera, a prominent company in London, in Offenbach's "Orpheus to Underworld".
His journey to the Tulsa Opera began with an email from Tobias Picker, his artistic director and a composer who composed operas for the Metropolitan Opera and other major companies.
Mr. Picker planned to write an opera based on "The Danish Girl", David Ebershoff's novel about one of the first people to have attempted a sexual conversion operation, and he was looking for a transgender singer. The idea appealed to Ms. Lucas: to obtain the creation of a new work by an important composer in which she could play a trans character.
But WWhen Ms. Lucas came to New York to audition and sang Verdi's "Otello", Mr. Picker decided to hire her a lot sooner.
"The Verdi was so amazing that I thought, well, it's time to start throwing" Don Giovanni "anyway - so I asked him to do it," Picker said.
His appearance in Tulsa was an event. When an excerpt from a documentary about her was screened at a local art house, Circle Cinema, Ms. Lucas told the public that much of her work was about showing people that being Trans was not a big deal.
"I'm trying to show that being trans is not a story," she told the crowd. "It's a bit like an anti-advocacy."

"ID?", A transgender character asks a police officer from "Stonewall", a new opera on the raid that helped stimulate the modern gay rights movement.
"I would love to have an identifier!" Pursuit the character. "But the powers entrusted to me will not give it to me - at least not the one who represents me."

The line resonated with Liz Bouk, the mezzo-soprano sang it. Mr. Bouk is a transgender man who has just been granted a new driver's license in which his sex is indicated.
"I felt like a teenager when I had my driver's license," he said. "After getting the driver's license, I went out and bought a van to learn how to drive the gear lever."

But the transition of Mr. Bouk, which took place while the career of a mezzo began with difficulty, finally began to flourish, resulting in difficult compromises. Even though he has sometimes been very eager to take hormones, he fears what they could do to his voice. So he decided to abandon them and continue playing what he calls "inflamed women" and pant roles on stage.
"If I work, if I sing, can I bear the dysphoria of being in the wrong body and being poorly delivered to the grocery store or by people I do not know?"

He changed his name from Elizabeth Anna to Liz (his friends call him "Mr. Liz"), but postponed a future change, possibly to John, so as not to confuse the casting directors. He's wearing his long blonde hair, but not as long as it's before. And he brings two impulses to the auditions: one in costume, entitled "Liz Bouk as himself" and the other in a dress, marked "head shot for female roles. "
Since he was a man, he said and feeling more at peace, his voice has improved. He worked on shows on his trip. And he continues to have work - and good reviews. But he sometimes has moments of desire out of the scene, when he looks in the mirror.
"It would be great," he said, "if my exterior fits my interior.
"Please get up and take off your hat for our national anthem," said the announcer shortly before the start of the Oakland A 2015 baseball game, "starring Breanna Sinclairé, a graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Music Conservatory."
Ms. Sinclairé lifted a microphone and became what we think is the first transgender woman sing the anthem to a major league match.

He did news all over the world, and showed how far she had come since her darkest days, when she had been briefly homeless and subjected to attacks on the streets of New York.
Ms. Sinclairé stated that her first belief was that she did not feel comfortable in her body. This feeling carried him away in his singing too.
"People kept pushing me to become the tenor, because I was great," Sinclairé said. "And I'm like, I do not want to be a hero, I want to be the damsel in distress!
After an unfortunate stint at a Bible college in Canada, she was admitted to the California Institute of the Arts and saved enough money to cut grass and buy a Greyhound bus ticket to perform the trip.
She decided to make the transition in her last year at CalArts and one of her teachers, Kate Conklin, encouraged her to try to sing a mezzo-soprano repertoire.

"We were working with what already existed," Conklin said, noting that Ms. Sinclairé could already sing quite loudly.
Then come San Francisco and its conservatory.
"We never had an audition for us who passed the transition," said her teacher Ruby Pleasure. "And it was obvious that she was a rough diamond."
Last year, she appeared with the San Francisco Symphony. She continues to study and develops into higher roles of soprano. Next spring, she will return to Canada to sing at an opera at the Against the Grain Theater in Toronto.
"I'm going to be in Toronto like a real me," she said. "Soprano singing."




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