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Does this (pants) role make me look fat?

“I hate looksism,” I told my friends the other night at dinner, though truth be told, I’m as guilty of it as the next person.

I was reminded of this while reading an article in the May 24 edition of The New York Times’ Arts section titled, “What Matters More, the Singer’s Shape, or Her Sound?”, in which critics Anthony Tommasini and Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim spoke with reporter Michael Cooper about the brouhaha over Tara Erraught’s appearance – emphasis on the word “appearance” – as Octavian in the Glyndebourne music festival’s production of Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier.”

For the uninitiated, “Der Rosenkavalier” is an easy-on–the-eyes-and -ears opera about an older woman learning to let go of her young lover. (It has a justly famous waltz that makes gorgeous use of sequential phrases, played by the orchestra’s string section, which George Balanchine used to cap off his glittering ballet “Vienna Waltzes.”)

The older woman, called the Marschallin, is one of those glamorous soprano roles, sung by the likes of Renee Fleming.  At Glyndebourne, it was filled fetchingly by Kate Royal. The lover, Octavian, is a pants role in which a mezzo has to pretend to be a handsome youth. Erraught, who apparently sang gloriously, is a woman with a classic pear shape, which neither lends itself to pants nor suggests slim-hipped James Deans. And the (male) critics let her have it, signaling out her “puppy fat.”

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim’s analysis got to the heart of the problem for those critics...

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Scaling “Brokeback” again

When people ask me to give them the “elevator pitch” for my novel “Water Music,” I always say it’s “‘Brokeback Mountain’ meets ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’” – not because I would equate my book with those works but because it deals with gay lovers and issues of power and submission. Such is our world – with no time for anything – that we must reduce everything to labels, boxes and clichés.

Everyone who writes about gay men in love today owes a debt, however, to Annie Proulx’s sparely beautiful short story about two 1960s cowboys – shepherds really – whose love is doomed by an inability to communicate, by a closeted world and, in a sense, by the all-consuming nature of that love.

Now Proulx’s short story and Ang Lee’s equally haunting film version – starring the late Heath Ledger as Ennis Del Mar, the more constricted of the two lovers, and Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist, the more expressive – have been turned into an opera by Charles Wuorinen, whose atonal style would seem pitch-perfect for Proulx’s Heminway-esque writing. (She contributed the libretto for the work, which premieres Jan. 28 and runs through Feb. 11 at the Teatro Real in Madrid.) Read more

 

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