White Shirt Monday: All The Girls To The Yard

[The moment where Marzelline is all of us. – Lise Davidsen (Leonore), Amanda Forsythe (Marzelline) and some dudes (including the Jaquino of Robin Tritschler) in Beethoven’s “Fidelio”, London/ROH 2020]

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Lessons learned in the 2020 Edition of The Twelve White Shirts of Christmas: In attempting to cover a wide range of ages and body types, ethnicities and range of approach to masculinities, there have, once again, been far too few images of singers who are not white and/or fit standards of conventional Western femininity offstage.

Opera houses, please give me more to work with.

Further (and far more delightful) lessons learned: 1) valkyries bring all the girls to the yard. 2) Sonia Prina and her hair reign supreme. And they are is fabulous.

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[Sonia Prina (Ottone) in Vivaldi’s “Ottone in villa”, Venice/La Fenice 2020]

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But back to 1) and apparently we are revisting the days of Fremstad and valkyries/Wagner singers as queer lady icons. Look at this and tell me this is not a good thing. (This is not a good thing. This is an excellent thing. This is approx. 7 ft. of vocal excellence in a dashing drama coat. I am feeling faint.)

[Lise Davidsen (Leonore) in Beethoven’s “Fidelio”, London/ROH 2020]

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