ABSTRACT
METASTASIO’S libretto Achille in Sciro provides the great warrior Achilles with a unique opportunity to redefine the nature of operatic heroism, albeit from a peculiar vantage point. In one of the librettist’s rare excursions into the world of male cross-dressing, Achilles (Achille) spends much of the opera in female clothing: his mother Thetis (Teti) upon learning of her son’s destiny to perish in the Trojan war, dresses him as a young woman, Pyrrha (Pirra), and hides him away in the court of King Lycomedes (Licomede) at Skyros (Sciro). Fortunately for Lycomedes’ daughter, Deidamia, Achilles’ transvestism does not prevent him from demonstrating his skill at love-making. The two young ‘women’ enjoy a sincere, reciprocal—if seemingly unconventional—affection. Their idyllic love is threatened only by the arrival of Ulysses (Ulisse), who awakens Achilles’ dormant masculinity to fight for the Trojans. 1 The opera provides the usual happy conclusion that takes little account of the dire fate awaiting Achilles at Troy: the hero reestablishes his masculinity and embraces his destiny to fight the Trojans, all the while honouring his commitment to love and marry Deidamia. Love and glory are proved compatible, and Metastasio again succeeds in creating an entertainment that not only celebrates those virtues appropriate to the occasion for which it was conceived—the wedding of Maria Theresa and Francis Stephen, the Duke of Lorraine, 13 February 1736—but also expresses a moral stance that is sufficiently homogenous so as to satisfy the requirements of a variety of political, social and artistic situations, despite this atypical use of male transvestism. 2
