Elijah McCormack on Castrati Roles and Artaserse

I’ll admit that when Haymarket Opera offered me the role of Semira in Vinci’s Artaserse, I accepted mainly out of curiosity. Some of that curiosity was about the opera, of course: this would be the North American premiere of an almost legendary piece, discussed in music history textbooks as one of the finest examples of Metastasian opera seria, yet rarely performed. I had worked with Haymarket in the past and was eager to return. It promised to be an exciting artistic experience, full of incredible colleagues and remarkable music.

But my primary question was: what would it feel like?

It’s impossible to explore all the nuances of transness, castrati, and drag within just a few pages’ worth of reflection. I’ll try to abridge a few things.

Necessary personal context: the last time I performed a female role onstage was thirteen years ago, in my senior year of high school. I transitioned to male shortly after. I did it scared. In 2012, awareness and public opinion about trans people was rapidly evolving. I myself wasn’t a very textbook case of adolescent gender dysphoria. I had never really understood normative femininity (it felt like I’d skipped class the day everyone learned about it), but I would regard that as less an inherently trans experience than a neurodivergent one, since conventional masculinity escaped me also. I wasn’t even clued in enough to be a proper tomboy.

My dysphoria manifested in the insidious form of “derealization”—emotional numbness and a sense that my surroundings were artificial somehow, a dream or hallucination. It stopped when I transitioned. The responses to my coming-out were mixed enough that it took me a long time to really trust myself; but I knew things felt vivid in a way they hadn’t before. I felt more present, for better and for worse. It turns out that if you’ve spent half your life sleepwalking, things hit differently once you “wake up.”

In time, I pursued the aspects of transition that I needed. After much consideration, I chose to remain a soprano and pursue early music. I had to make some other compromises in the course of that. I am misgendered frequently, by strangers and by colleagues. I am, in general, a visibly queer person, which comes with a degree of risk. For me, it is a level of risk that I am privileged to be able to assume; as a white transmasculine person, I am less likely to be made a target than trans people who don’t share those traits. But it is a risk nonetheless. I made these compromises because I hoped it would be worth it. I made this choice, in large part, because I discovered castrato repertoire.

When people gush about the queerness of opera, they often bring up the castrati, along with the better-known trouser roles and occasional skirt roles. Castrati were male singers gelded in boyhood to preserve their treble voices. Their starring male roles were treble roles, and due to a papal ban on women performers, they also played female roles in drag. They performed love scenes with each other. Their androgyny reportedly made them objects of desire for both men and women. This was not queer identity by any modern understanding, of course—they can’t be said to have had agency in their situation, and they fundamentally owed their collective existence to misogyny, not liberatory politics. But they are nonetheless a source of intrigue to many queer and trans musicians.

For me, their repertoire offered hope that, despite what I had been told, I didn’t need to choose between being trans and being a soprano. What’s more, all early music (and most of the operatic canon) is in the public domain. We have carte blanche for gender-bending, fach-bending, and other transformative reimaginings. Rewriting or transposing a role for a new performer is a historically informed practice, after all. In modern stagings, a pronoun swap would hardly register on the wackiness scale. Truly we could do whatever we want! What a gift.

That said, when I decided to go into music, I was hardly all optimism. The trajectory of the shifting political landscape of the 2010s was not clear. I didn’t know how I would navigate the world of classical music, or how it would receive me. I was aware of a few trans singers on the global scene—Adrian Angelico, Lucia Lucas, Holden Madagame, all inspirational—but there wasn’t really an established career model for us. Maybe the field would prove untenably hostile after all.

So far, it’s worked out better than expected. I’ve personally benefited from the early music demand for countertenors, of which the field is generally happy to have more. My work is mostly concert work, in which gender is (or should be) immaterial. And my opera roles are mostly “treble boy” roles, which don’t discomfit me in vocal range or gender presentation.

But in this regard, I sometimes feel like a lone figure on a lifeboat, with few lifelines to throw as I watch others vanish beneath the surface. Despite the rosy discussions of queerness in opera history, trans people do not often have a good time in classical performance. The world of opera, built on white European aesthetics, is not very tolerant of perceived nonconformity in any respect. Gender-bending is ubiquitous, but only as performance; genuine queer self-expression is riskier. Trans people who change their voices find themselves in the difficult position of starting their vocal journeys from square one, and there isn’t really a career model for that. Trans people who do not change their voices might battle vocal dysphoria; and also, crucially, tend to get stuck in repertoire associated with their assigned genders. That’s a practice that affects us all, clearly, although it seems especially inescapable for trans women, who largely do not benefit from the abundance of castrato and trouser repertoire. They bear the brunt of cultural anti-trans hostility in general, which can make even the most progressive spaces into minefields. No wonder I’ve seen so many of them quietly fade out of the scene post-transition. The field prefers for transmasculine people to be women, and for transfeminine people to be, ideally, nowhere. This kind of thing might be a predictable occupational hazard in such a conservative art form, but it’s worth saying: we lose many brilliant people to bigotry.

So I have some mixed feelings about singing the role of Semira. I was genuinely interested in playing her, on a personal and artistic level. After thirteen years, having received the gender-affirming care I did need, most of my dysphoria is resolved. I have acclimated to frequent misgendering as a circumstance of my own choices: I still react to it internally, but it doesn’t ruin my day. This desensitization allows me to function, although it also hamstrings my already-questionable ability to evaluate a space for safety (I don’t trust myself to tell other trans people whether a given organization is trans-friendly or not).

In singing Semira, I admit I was curious to poke my own sense of self, in the way you might bother some minor injury to see if it still hurts. How would I cope? Would I start dissociating again? Would I “sleepwalk” through it?

I began preparing the role a couple months before rehearsals began. I didn’t expect to have strong feelings about Semira herself, to be honest. Opera seria characters tend to have whatever personality traits allow them to sing their prescribed arias at any given time. But as I got to know Semira, I found myself developing an image of a sassy, self-possessed woman, principled yet impulsive, prone to speaking her mind even at unwise moments. Her emotional journey was surprisingly relatable to me.

Of course, Semira does not exist in a vacuum. Opera is not a solo engagement—the colleagues are really what make or break the experience for me, and the colleagues made this one. Semira does a fair bit of standing around while people sing at her, which means I had ample time to look affected while being serenaded by my exceptional castmates. If I gave every fantastic artist and staff member their due praise, I would be here for pages. But I offer shout-outs to my most frequent scene partners: Emily Fons as Mandane, who did spectacularly elegant work with some of my favorite arias in the show (and also did us the artistic service of bringing her puppy to rehearsal); and Ryan Belongie as Megabise, a secondary villain carrying an unrequited torch for Semira, who was tremendous fun to play opposite.

Semira is the one who gets the final aria, preceding the obligatory love duet. It comes on the heels of her last clash with Mandane, the prima donna, her friend and sister-in-law. The aria laments the futility of trying to make yourself feel better by lashing out at someone else—truly a timeless error. Maybe Metastasio was going through it when he wrote that one.

That moment is striking to me: it reminds me that people have always been, fundamentally, people. There’s a powerful sort of mundanity in the details of human history, which makes it hard to idealize or devalue past eras overmuch. In the same way that people have, for millennia, loved their pets, complained about “kids these days,” argued with their spouses, buried dead children with their favorite toys, people have always had regrettable outbursts at their friends in moments of emotional turmoil. Girl, we’ve all been there.

Consider also Appiani Giuseppe, the castrato who originated the role of Semira. It’s sometimes easy to think of castrati as historical curiosities, caricatures, horror stories of a bygone age—grisly episodes in music history, as I called them before. They were people, of course. But we have few personal details about most of them. We know that Giuseppe, a notable student of Nicola Porpora, was very successful in his time, performing in several opera premieres and well-compensated Italian tours. The only things I could find about him were on a webpage lacking sources: it listed several of his known engagements, but no biographical details, not even a cause of death. He premiered Semira at about age eighteen. He barely lived to be thirty.

I am thirty-one. I sat in a chair while one of Haymarket’s exceptional makeup artists, Aliza Feder, painted my face (gamely addressing me as “bro”; thanks, Aliza). Semira’s huge and beautiful hair was glued to my head. I wasn’t sure what to expect in that moment. I had been wondering all along what it would be like to actually see myself as Semira. I wondered if I’d look in the mirror, and see echoes of myself pre-transition. Maybe I’d see an alternate universe in which I had never transitioned. Maybe I would experience some particular satisfaction, or pain, or surreality, or even some unexpected grief or regret. Maybe I would continue to feel nothing at all.

In the end, I looked at myself, and thought: I look like my mom.

It turned out that, throughout the process, I felt…fine. I tried to check in with myself conscientiously; I felt fine. I was playing a character, who was a woman. Of course she was “she,” while we were in process. I didn’t even get the usual twinges about it, actually, a lack of information that made me nervous: maybe I was in denial, and would experience some delayed reaction down the line. I haven’t. But it was an odd relief to be misgendered during recording—when I no longer considered myself “in character”—and feel a familiar dysphoric twinge. As with pinching yourself, the pain confirms you’re awake.

It’s safe to say that I probably wouldn’t have agreed to sing Semira in the first place if I didn’t know Chase Hopkins, didn’t have an existing relationship with Haymarket, and didn’t have reason to trust their commitment to a respectful environment. Chase, Haymarket’s general director, asked me ahead of time how I would feel about singing the role. He kept communication lines open regarding Haymarket’s treatment of me as a trans artist, and proactively corrected misgendering in out-of-character contexts (he addressed that instance during recording). Haymarket has also previously engaged in gender-subversive casting with other artists, and has hired me to sing male roles; this encouraged me to think that my casting was genuinely an issue of vocal suitability. There’s not exactly big money to be made in historical performance, and Haymarket, to me, is about as committed to their art as an organization can be. I feel they try for historical recreation while making a good-faith effort to leave the discriminatory parts in the past. I leave their productions feeling that I’ve grown and gained something as an artist.

That said, my complex feelings about having played Semira are more political than personal. It’s difficult, in the hyper-competitive world of the performing arts, to articulate anything but effusive gratitude about receiving any opportunities at all. But my own curiosities are answered; and although it was overall a positive experience, I doubt I’ll make a habit of singing female roles. Moreover, I don’t intend to passively condone the practice of hiring trans people to perform only as our assigned genders. That might seem dramatic, but it’s such a common experience that it is salient to me. I am one person who consented to perform one role, one time, for a particular company; my willingness to do so cannot be extrapolated to any other circumstances, and especially not to other people. I also don’t wish to shrink the already-inadequate opportunities allotted to women (cis and trans). We’re all already pigeonholed enough.

Yet, in this day and age, can we hope for more? What does “more” look like? Public opinion seems to be getting worse for trans people, not better.

It’s both offensive and incorrect to suggest, as some people do, that modern gender-affirming care is at all morally similar to the brutal castration of pubescent boys. These days, “mutilated” is a pejorative commonly leveled at those who medically transition. I don’t feel mutilated; transition salvaged me. On the other hand, few people would argue that castrati were not mutilated. Maybe not all of them saw it that way, especially if they gained spectacular riches and fame. Maybe some of them at least considered it worth the cost. But far more of them sank into obscurity—traumatized, rejected, chewed up and spat out by a society which had little use for them beyond entertainment. The choice was made for them, for financially motivated reasons, using dangerous methods, resulting in lifelong consequences both physical and psychological. They were not equivalent to trans people, by any modern definition. 

Nonetheless, many trans people find the castrati’s societal position relatable. They were sexually altered “others,” simultaneously fetishized and degraded, dehumanized and celebrated as objects of spectacle; reduced to the strangeness of their bodies; emasculated, considered neither wholly male nor female; incomplete. It makes sense that many trans and queer people look at the historical figure of the castrato and feel a sort of kinship that goes beyond repertoire. People have, again, have always been people. Although terms like “queer” and “transgender” are recent, societies have always had their classes of deviants. I myself feel an urge to reach back through the centuries, to find a handhold in these countless ligated bloodlines, and ask, “Would you understand me? Would I understand you?”

(They reportedly weren’t a very collegial bunch, so if I were to actually do this, the result probably wouldn’t be very poetic. Regardless.)

In 1730, at eighteen years old, Appiani Giuseppe would have gotten into costume to sing Semira. Likely he had some huge wig, likely some cakey Baroque makeup full of lead and mercury, which altogether made him unrecognizable. Maybe he too looked in a mirror, and contemplated what he saw.

I wonder what he would have felt in that moment. Maybe it was just a job, a fact of his life, a choice made for him years ago, the best outcome he could hope for. Maybe he had many complex feelings: about his own body, about his lot in life, about what he’d lost, about what he stood to gain. He’d likely seen others like him fail and fade, relegated to the lower reaches of society. Maybe he felt nothing at all.

Maybe he thought: I look like my mom.

Either way, like me, he set himself aside, went onstage, and did his job. We serve the art, as ever.

As I’ve done more queer-focused performances, I’ve gotten a surprisingly specific piece of recurring audience feedback. To paraphrase: “I never really got why historical performance was a thing. I didn’t get why we should keep bringing back this old stuff. Now I feel like I get it.”

I can only wonder at Appiani Giuseppe’s inner life—he met some untimely end nearly three centuries ago. His fellow castrati are likewise in the past. But just as people three centuries ago had music, and dance, and fights with their friends, and celebrities who squabbled like reality stars, so too did they have the “other.” Although a lucky few might have had spectacular success stories, the story of the “other” is usually one of ostracization, derision, disempowerment, and violence. And yet, then as now, the displaced sometimes find places of their own. Sometimes their intolerant society carves some limited niches for them, and they are grateful for what they can get. Then again, sometimes they wish for better. Maybe there can be better for us.

Learn more about Haymarket’s 2025 performance of Vinci’s Artaserse.

About the author

Praised for his “cool control and warmth of tone” (The Washington Post), Elijah McCormack is a rising male soprano specializing in both operatic and concert repertoire. He has performed with esteemed ensembles including Seraphic Fire, Washington Bach Consort, Ensemble Altera, The Crossing, Ars Lyrica Houston, Dallas Bach Society, ANIMA Early Music, Staunton Music Festival, American Bach Soloists, and ChamberQUEER. Operatic roles include: Cupid/Valletto in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea with IN Series; Telemachus in Monteverdi’s The Return of Ulysses, also with IN Series; Amore/Valletto in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea with Haymarket Opera Company; Miles in Britten’s The Turn of the Screw with IlluminArts Miami; and Bell[x] Cohen in the world premiere of Nighttown by Shawn Jaeger and Royce Vavrek at Lowell House Opera. This season, McCormack debuts with Harmonia Stellarum Houston, Sound Salon, and the Santa Fe Desert Chorale. He is the first-prize and audience-favorite winner of the 11th Annual Handel Aria Competition (2024), and earned second place in the Oratorio Society of New York’s Woodside Solo Competition (2023). He holds a Master’s degree in Historical Performance from Indiana University, where he studied with Steven Rickards.

About The Haymarket Review: This new digital publication including thoughts about  the work produced by Haymarket is designed to deepen our connection to audiences, nurture and feed audience curiosity about historical performance, offer critical opinions and thoughtful reflections on our performances, and provide a forum for Haymarket and its audience to connect through sharing insights, opinions, learning, and expertise.