ABSTRACT
Following the book's argument that operetta is a permissive space in which social and musical conventions could be challenged and transformed, this chapter examines the travesti protagonists in Emmanuel Chabrier's L’Étoile (1877) and Reynaldo Hahn's Mozart (1925). Despite a brief efflorescence initially, L’Étoile, Chabrier's first stage work to reach a commercial audience, remained popular with both contemporaneous and successive composers, who deemed it to be a model of French operetta: Hahn referred to it as a ‘pearl’; and to Poulenc it was ‘the subsequent source of all French operetta’. This national esteem has been in some measure borne out by a recent international resurgence of interest in the work, productions of which uniformly stress the gender transgressions embedded in the musical score. Of the composers who claimed a debt to Chabrier, Reynaldo Hahn shows the most affinity, traced in the titular breeches role of his Mozart, one of the most successful opérettes of the early twentieth century genre, which critics similarly lauded for its adherence to tradition.
Though separated by half a century, the works are similar in the earnestness with which the travesti character is presented, rejecting its historical delineation as a character of comic pity, incompetence, effeminacy, or all three. To effect this recasting, Chabrier and Hahn rejected musical characterisation that relied on broad comedic devices such as quotation and instead applied a finer process of bricolage in which allusions were subtly altered in order to create associations devoid of satirical intent, at least as applied to the character. The construction of dramatically and musically serious breeches roles within these works illustrates a gender fluidity that highlights the utility of operetta in normalising the unconventional, even as the works themselves are situated firmly within the French national canon.
