Giasone: Difference between revisions

 

The character Giasone was originally cast for a [[castrato]]. Susan McClary notes that, in this particular opera, this choice raises some gender issues. She argues that the singer type (e.g. bass, tenor, castrato, alto and soprano) each had certain associations. For example, a bass voice was generally used for an authoritarian or powerfully masculine figure. For example, a character such as Ercole who has as sense of responsibility and obligation to duty would be cast as a bass role. By contrast, Giasone is a youthful, attractive character more concerned with the sensual pleasures of love than any sort of duty, whether it be questing for the Golden Fleece or duties as husband and father. Such a character who shirks responsibility would be considered “effeminate” by seventeenth-century Venetian standards. Because castrati have a youthful appearance due to lack of secondary sexual characteristics, they could easily slip into such a role. Thus, they could play characters with erotic appeal and it would have been acceptable to the seventeenth-century Venetian audience for such characters to have irresponsible sexual relations during the course of the drama. McClary notes that Giasone sings the aria “Delizie contenti” upon entering in II.2, thus declaring he is a character of this “effeminate” type: youthful, attractive, androgynous, pleasure-seeking, and lacking a sense of duty. She stresses that such a character would not have been considered a good role model for masculine behavior at the time and place of the opera’s first performance.<ref>{{harvnb|McClary|2000}}, “Gender Ambiguities and Erotic Excess in Seventeenth-Century Venetian Opera”, in {{harvnb|Franko|Richards|2000}}</ref><ref>Roger {{harvtxt|Freitas|2003}} discusses the "erotically-charged" castrato in "The Eroticism of Emasculation: Confronting the Baroque Body of the Castrato.</ref>

 

==References==