Gender bending Handel

The BBC people introducing Handel’s Partenope on Opera on 3 enthuse over the gender-bending aspects of the plot. (In a typical Handelian flourish, one figure in the opera is a woman who, in order to get close to a man she wishes to woo, cross-dresses as a man and begins to woo the woman her beloved is wooing). That the BBC anchor people find this fascinating shows several interesting things: such as that, for example,

1. they find the inanities of Handel’s plots interesting, a notable fact in itself; and

2. that they have no notion of the uses of cross-dressing in the past.

(The breadth and depth of the general historical incompetence among the so called educated classes today is absolutely astounding. Here, for their edification, a 15 second tutorial: a) Men fleeing from law disguised themselves as women in order to borrow the gender’s traditional voluminous dresses and protection from searches; b) women traveling alone disguised themselves as men in order to escape unwelcome advances (or worse); c) these uses of trans-gender disguise would have been obvious to anyone in the original audience; it is therefore very unlikely that the librettist had meant to titillate them with the pomo-sort of drivel like: “oh, this heroine, disguising herself as a man, is in actual fact a man disguised as a woman and singing in a falsetto voice, wow, how cool”. This kind of inanity had to await modern times to attain scholarly attention).

So why do these BBC people find Handel’s gender-bending fascinating? There can only be two reasons: either they find themselves uncertain of their own sexual identities (whether hetero or homo); or, more likely, they do not actually find it at all fascinating, but take their clue from fashion: since it is intellectually fashionable to talk about gender bending in the academia, they reason, then, surely, the topic is fair game in an opera program.

In other words, they would not know what to talk about without first drawing some notion from the observation of others as to what it is that it talkable about. Conversations on radio, it seems as much as in real life, are not about saying something new, but always more of the same. Always. Why do we bother?

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(PS. Come to think about it, there is a great deal of cross-dressing in Handel. Though I have not run a 6-sigma analysis, statistically speaking, I should imagine, the elevated frequency of his cross-dressing -- as opposed to it i Mozart, say, or Vivaldi -- may be significant. Handel, of course, almost certainly was gay; which I conclude not because he never married; but because he always traveled everywhere with various male secretaries, frequently changed).