In 1994, a controversial collection of essays in a book entitled Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, brought some very famous musicians and their music out of the historical closet.

One of the authors, Gary C. Thomas, gathered enough evidence about lifelong bachelor George Frideric Handel to come up with a ‘homotextual Handel’ who gravitated toward the most homocentric places in Europe at the time: the Italian and London theatres, where he wrote operas especially for the famous Italian castrati.  

 These castrati – men castrated before puberty in order to preserve their high voices – dominated the opera houses, attracting legions of both female and male admirers.

Nearly 300 years later, Handel’s fantasy operas seem camp inversions of male heroics: particularly an opera like Orlando, where a castrato sang the title role while the other male lead, Medoro, was taken by a female singer!   

In Opera Australia’s new production of Orlando, director Justin Way bends the gender the other way, with the title role being sung by a woman: mezzo soprano Dominica Matthews.

“There were two types of castrato,” Ms Matthews explains, “soprano castrati and alto castrati. They sang both female and male roles; the soprano castrati sang female characters while the alto castrati specialised in male ones, boys on the verge of manhood.  

“These days mezzo sopranos sing the roles that are young men, and Orlando is one of these characters, so his music is way down in my boots. I’ve had to put away my mezzo soprano voice for the time being to concentrate on the lower contralto music.”

Queering the Pitch claims that because castrati sang male and female roles, and women sang male roles, the audience at the time did not automatically associate high-pitched voices with women. In some operas they ‘were confronted with men who sang their love for each other in similar registers, regardless of the gender assigned them by the libretto’. Thus, baroque opera gave rise to a kind of ‘aural homosexuality’.

“I suppose to the ears of people of that time, the idea of a male character being sung up high was not as peculiar as it is to us,” says Tobias Cole, who sings the role of Medoro in the new production of Orlando.

“Life was so different; think of the camp costumes men wore! I feel there must have been a very wide spectrum of what it means to be male. How strange and challenging the castrati must have been. It was a freak show, certainly, and people thought they must see this. Audiences now expect quality of story and a certain truth of character, so there is more pressure now to make the love scenes more sexy and even show a bit of flesh.”

Cole, a counter tenor, can extend his voice into the soprano range, creating a sound similar to the extinct castrato. The sound is certainly surprising, even to Cole himself.

“Whenever I sing I think ‘Oh! I wasn’t expecting that,’ a high voice coming out of a man, so what we have to do is create that ‘soundscape’ that the audience accepts.

“In performing a Baroque opera now,” he explains, “the first aria is used to ease people into that world, and often it takes the first act to take people into that soundscape.”

Handel took his story from the epic poem Orlando Furioso, about the medieval knight Orlando and his adventures in exotic and pagan worlds, but Justin Way’s production employs 20th century references.

“The idea that he wanted,” Cole says, explaining the director’s staging, “is to capture a time when going off to fight in a war was a good thing. You couldn’t do that today, so he sets it in the Second World War, when people felt that going to fight was a necessary evil. There is a brilliant design idea starting it in what looks like Churchill’s War Room with a map on the wall. The room flies out and a larger version of the map is revealed, which begins to fracture, and becomes the forest. At the end it goes back to the War Room and people feel that the opera is Orlando’s dream.”

Matthews says: “Orlando is a great military general, who spent all his life fighting and who has no experience in sexual matters. Now he is in love for the first time and does not know what to do.”

In Way’s production, Orlando is a masculine war hero, looking like a fighter pilot, and Matthews is perfecting masculine attributes to do that concept justice.

“I’m getting used to the idea of walking like a man,” she laughs. “When a woman walks she takes small steps, putting one foot in front of the other. Men, particularly Australian men, don’t; they take wide steps.

“And just this morning,” she adds, “I asked three different men how I should put my hands on a table because I know it would be done differently.”

Orlando at the State Theatre, The Arts Centre, November 27 & 29, December 2 & 10. Bookings: www.ticketmaster.com.au

Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (second edition), editors P. Brett, E. Wood and G. Thomas, published by Routledge, hardcover, 406pp.