The reality of intersex people, born with chromosomal, genital and gonadal patterns that differ from the characteristics that the bodies of men and women present in a binary way, has been little explored and socially not normalized at all. Not even the ambitious Trans Law places sufficient emphasis on these cases, whose low percentage, 1.7% according to the UN, has meant that they generally remain in the shadows. Medicine has decided for centuries to subject them, in many cases, to ablations and castrations as soon as they are born, supposedly to provide them with a normal existence and away from ridicule and persecution.
The composer Raquel García-Tomás echoes this reality in her new opera, Alexina B., commissioned by the Gran Teatre del Liceu, which 175 years later is finally hosting the world premiere of a woman's work. The piece, which combines acoustic instruments with electronics, is based on a real case, that of Adélaïde Herculine Barbin, also known as Alexina B., whose vital testimony is the first documented in an intersex memoir.
Born in France in 1838, Barbin committed suicide shortly before turning thirty, in some humble whores in Paris. Unable to understand her body and find her place in a society that associated hermaphroditism with homosexuality and lesbianism, she inhaled toxic gas. Leaving, yes, a handwritten autobiography. Thus, in a nineteenth-century patriarchy whose greatest terror was the effeminacy of a man, the fact of not being a complete man led medicine to present her as a girl.
She grew up like girls until at puberty she found that her body did not develop like the rest of her schoolmates. She never had her period and when she got her first job as a governess, she fell in love with the school principal's daughter and declared himself a man. He wanted to marry her. After going through medical examinations, a judge allowed him to register civilly as a man, and adopt the name of Abel. However, she would not find peace in this role either.
His memoirs, rescued in 1868 by the forensic doctor Regnier, were edited by the president of the French Academy of Medicine, Auguste Tardieau (who suppressed fragments that have not been recovered), and were published by the philosopher Michel Foucault in 1978. These experiences were It now includes the opera that they have created over three years and jointly and simultaneously by the composer -and 2020 National Awardee- Raquel García-Tomás, who applied and won a Leonardo scholarship from the BBVA Foundation; the French librettist Irène Gayraud -the text of the piece is in the original French-, and the stage director Marta Pazos, with whom Tomás had already collaborated on the celebrated Je suis narcissite.
After interviews with intersex people and documenting themselves to carry out a respectful approach to this reality, the creative trio offers in four unique performances starting this Saturday, March 18, a piece with a musical and verbal language that is a round trip from the aesthetics of the 19th century to the present. García-Tomás, who also signs the video creation of the piece, explains that, in the same way, "the libretto explores the spoken languages more typical of memories, in nineteenth-century French, but there are also free moments and poetic forms of the XXI century.
"We not only describe the actions, but the emotions, especially those of Alexina, and to describe that, music is created with suggestions, something very sensory, in which electronic music has an important weight, describing maximum joy and maximum anguish, to at the same time that audiovisual resources are used. Because the language of opera goes further: you have flashbacks, subjective shots, etc".
The use of electronics forces the orchestra -of about 20 musicians- to be amplified as much as the voices... "because that way we can pick up the subtleties, the whispers, the crying... what audio post-production would do in a movie" , points out García-Tomás. The leading role is assumed by the mezzo-soprano Lidia Vinyes-Curtis. And Ernest Martínez-Izquierdo will finally be the musical director, because the delay in getting the score has forced Josep Pons to give up taking over the study and preparation of this new opera.
