Sensitized with the burning issues that concern today’s society, the Liceu has hit the nail on the head by commissioning a new-style opera that precisely sheds light on intersex, a topic on which the trans law and the market of sexual identities and gender has not put the spotlights on and that sounds like Chinese to the majority of citizens. As? That? Are there human hermaphrodites?
These types of comments still do not differ much from those that the French Herculine Barbin must have heard in the 19th century in the medical cabinets in which her body was rummaged in an attempt to explain its confusing anatomy: until he was declared a “hermaphrodite man with pre-eminence”. of the male sex”.
Her nickname, Alexina B., gives the title to this enormous compositional work by Raquel García-Tomás from Barcelona –140 minutes of contemporary music that is very easy to listen to and of constant vocal beauty–, whose world premiere was held yesterday at the Coliseum on La Rambla with a 90% full and a final warm applause of 8 minutes. A newly created opera in a large hall and with the audience standing. The never seen!
“I loved it. I was curious to see how this issue would be dealt with, which is also a debate that is difficult for it to reach other social spheres such as the Liceu public, and the truth is that this opera touches it in a very sensitive way”, he commented during the intermission the lawyer Carla Vall, specialized in sexist violence. The actress Itziar Castro hugged her, expressing her disbelief at having witnessed a bed scene between two women –Alexina B. (the mezzo Lidia Vinyes-Curtis) before being declared a man, and her beloved Sara (the soprano Alicia Amo). –. “And speaking of squirting! What a historic moment at the Liceu!”
Castro was one of the thirty actors and actresses who had attended the premiere, as well as creators such as the illustrator Raquel Riba-Rossy (Lola Vendetta) or the filmmaker Albert Serra, the LGTBI celebrity Samantha Hudson and politicians such as the Minister of Universities, Joan Subirats, and the Minister of Culture, Natàlia Garriga.
The new creation showed its muscle in tune with the public, who found music that drank from French impressionism and Gregorian chant combined with electronics. The latter required microphones, which was the cause of debate about the honesty of vocal beauty. Is it acceptable that they sounded wonderful pianissimi but amplified in an opera house?
The play had a flashback start that made it clear that Alexina died young: she committed suicide with toxic gas, already calling herself Abel, after a judge welcomed her into the world of men: she could not return to her world of women as governess of a boarding school, where his beloved awaits him, and he was not going to be able to earn a living as a man either. “My place is not among the living, but in the realm of angels. Yes, I am an angel, ”she raves about her at the end.
Factors that add up: the script by the French Irène Gayraud, which echoes this real case of tragic and heroic intersexuality – she suffered terrible inguinal pain without having her period, while the priest and the doctor treated her like a monster–; the staging of Marta Pazos, cheap and tending to the naïve, which in the end turns into sensitivity; the costume carousel, with a cast that gave room for various characters; the acting ability of Xavier Sabata, and the great vocal work of Elena Copons, applauded as Alexina’s mother. Ernest Martínez-Izquierdo elegantly governs the sinfonietta of some twenty instruments, and the girls’ choir of the Vivaldi-Petits Cantors gives meaning to the angelic world.
The Liceu changed its sex yesterday, figuratively speaking, with this denunciation of a social system based, forever and ever, on gender standards and sexual binaryism.
