"Achille in Sciro" -Heroes of baroque opera disguised as women-

"Achille in Sciro" - Heroes of baroque opera disguised as women

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Summary

Metastasio's opera Achille de Sciro was first performed in 1736 at the wedding of Maria Theresa.

The peculiarity of this work is that the main character is dressed as a woman.

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Achille appears as a woman from the beginning of the play to the end of the second act.

A born warrior, he disguises herself perfectly as a lady-in-waiting at the court of King Ricomede.

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The opera was a resounding success at its premiere and, despite its theme of transvestites, was considered suitable for wedding celebrations. There are two possible reasons for this.

First, in eighteenth-century Italian opera, the heroes were sung by castrati, whose high voices were symbols of greatness rather than femininity.

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Second, Achille constantly dislikes skirts and lyres and criticises them for their glory.

He eventually wants to sail off to the Trojan War.

In this libretto, we can read the sexual ambiguity of Baroque opera and the masculine virtues of the ancien regime.

1. premiere background

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Metastasio's opera Achille in Sciro premiered on 13 February 1736 at the Grand Court Theatre in Vienna to celebrate the marriage of Princess Maria Theresa of Habsburg.

2. A hero disguised as a beautiful girl

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This work is unique because the main character, Achille (Achilles), is dressed as a woman in most scenes.

No other Metastasio opera seria deals with the subject of male transvestites.

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Achille's mother, the goddess Thetis (Thetis), foresaw that her son would die in the Trojan War and hid him in the palace of SSciro (Scythia) to avoid her fate.

Achille lives there as a servant called Pirra and secretly loves the king's daughter Deidamia.

Metastasio's opera deals with the episode when Ulysses (Odysseus) brings Achille out of hiding to the battlefield.

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Achille is a hot-blooded young man.

His heart swirls with longing for spectacular battlefield achievements and frustration at his current situation of having to hide at court in the form of a girl.

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For him, the dress is a "misery spoglie" and the lyre a "vile stromata".

On the other hand, the marching trumpets and weapons capture his heart. So when a Greek warship comes into port, he forgets to run away and is fascinated by it.

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When he hears the exploits of others, he can't stand still.

He naturally has a ferocious personality and will try to draw his sword at the slightest provocation.

This is why his lover Deidamia and his protector Nearco worry about when their identities will be revealed.

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However, Achille's appearance on stage completely belies his brave words. From the beginning of the first act to the end of the second, he is dressed as a gentle girl.

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His cross-dressing is also too successful.

Lycomede (Lycomedes), King of Sciro, never dreams that his maid Pirra is a man.

He watches with a smile as his daughter never leaves her maid for a moment,

"Pirra has Deidamia's affections. No two people in the world are more compatible," he says.

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Achille and Deidamia are startled by this, but they are innocent, playful girls in the king's eyes.

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Also, in Act II, King Ricomede asks Achille (not his daughter Deidamia) to sing at the banquet, and Achille sings beautifully on her lyre.

Achille-Pirra also has the skills required of women.

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The elegant Prince Theagene, who appears as Deidamia's fiancée, falls in love with Achille because he thinks she is strong-willed.

The prince sings an aria, comparing a gallant maid to a goddess.

3. Achille's conflict and its resolution by the monarch

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The characteristic of Achille drawn by Metastasio is that his mind and actions are divided.

His body always moves in opposition to his desires.

In Acts I and II, Achille's mind is preoccupied with the battlefield's glory, but his body is in a dress beside his lover, Deidamia.

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Forgetting his position, he stumbles closer to the warship, admiring the soldiers and shouting at his rival, the prince.

Even when she performs a song for a guest as the maid Pirra, she interrupts her performance when she sees the beautiful armour being brought.

Each time he acts carelessly, he is scolded by Deidamia and reflects on himself.

4. Between "Reform" and "Disguise

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In the 17th and 18th centuries, many paintings were made on the theme of Achille hiding on the island of Skyros, where Achille has a mysterious androgynous charm.

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Batoni's painting Achille and Chirone (1746) illustrates this tendency.

There, Achille, with an innocent face, dressed in a loincloth, his skin shining white, holding a lyre in his hand, speaks somewhat intimately to a powerful half-animal.

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In Metastasio's work, however, the overt sensuality associated with homosexuality is carefully avoided.

In Achille in Sciro, Achille's spirit in woman's clothing is too masculine.

He curses the woman's dress, unaware of the admiring glances he sees in it.

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This is not the case when other opera heroes dress as women.

In Handel's Deidamia, which deals with the same subject, Achille amuses herself with her transvestites, fooling those around her, and Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier traps his rivals by doing so.

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They are aware of the effects of their disguise and use it as a weapon.

However, Achille, drawn by Metastasio, is entirely indifferent to his gaze on his body and does not notice Tegene's love.

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While Achille is allergic to transvestites, the people around him are surprisingly calm.

Deidamia wants her lover to stay in Sciro disguised as a woman.

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The agent thinks that Achille, dressed as a woman, is a girl and her heart flutters, but when she learns the truth, she quickly takes her side and supports Achille and Deidamia's marriage.

Ulysse tells Achille that it is dishonourable for a brave man to dress as a woman, but it is only a means to get him into battle.

25)

In the first act, when she realises that the maid Pirra is Achille, she is delighted but not scornful.

For her, cross-dressing does not diminish Achille's value.

This openness to disguise would have been a typical response in eighteenth-century theatres.

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The literary man's task is to portray virtuous figures who are the citizens' role models and influence them through entertainment.

The idea of ``the poet as educator'' is the mainstream idea of the Arcadian school, as espoused by Metastasio's teacher Gravina.

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This is why Metastasio's favourite is Attilio Legolo (1740).

This is a work about a hero who gives his life to his homeland, Rome.

He said it was the most complete of his works and that if he had to choose just one, it would be this one.

That would be it.

However, only four musicians wrote music for this work, which is unusually unpopular for Metastasio's opera seria.

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On the other hand, "Achille in Sciro" is one of the masterpieces of Metastasio's middle period, full of fun and excitement as a play. Moreover, it was a famous play repeatedly performed in theatres nationwide. Still, as an author, I did not seem to have enough confidence.

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He mentions Achille in nine letters from 1736 to 1774 but remains sceptical about its performance, even after its immensely successful premiere.

This is not only because the time allowed for writing was short.

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Metastasio knew that "Achille in Sciro" was based on the dangerous theme of the main character's cross-dressing.

Even when Achille is on stage shouting his manly longing for glory, the eyes of the audience are watching.

What is striking is the appearance of a young man dressed as a woman, who is more attractive than the girl, and the interest in the gap between them is the key to this play.

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Moreover, Achille, full of honour, has no time to be aware of other people's gazes, so his body is not something to "show" but to be "seen" unprotected.

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An unprotected body unilaterally exposed to the gaze of desire.

Metastasio would later wholly eliminate these elements from their work, but "Achille in Sciro" returns to them.

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The figure of Achille, obsessed with the desire for fame but unable to live on it alone, is also the figure of Metastasio itself.

At the level of the text, Achille denies cross-dressing and seeks honour in Troy.

By leaving for Troy in search of honour, the work avoids being criticised as immoral.

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However, when she performs on stage, she reveals an androgynous charm.

Achille is visually a perfect beauty, but she speaks of her longing for great deeds as a man, and her singing voice is bright and high, neither masculine nor feminine.

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A "reformer" of the libretto, Metastasio transformed opera seria into comedy.

Although he removed the obscene elements, he did not wholly eradicate the 17th century's penchant for cross-dressing.

His works depict the rational order of the Ancien Regime but occasionally offer glimpses of the illusion of Baroque opera.

Ancien Regime/Old System:

The ancien regime, in the sense of the old system, refers to feudal society before the French Revolution.

The French Revolution took place at the end of the 18th century, when the peasants were suffering under the rule of the nobility and the church, with the Bourbon royal family at the top, and the contradiction became severe. Ancien Régime means 'old system' in French.