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Monday, May 6, 2019

Transgender Opera Singer

Lucia Lucas Makes US Debut In ‘Don Giovanni’







From: HuffPost
By: Ronald Blum - AP


The more authentic you are are with yourself, the more authentic your art will be.  Lucia Lucas 


Lucas long felt uncertain as a male.

“As soon as I knew that there were boys and girls, I knew,” she said. “I didn’t have terminology for it. It was mid ’80s, so it was a little difficult. If I had a phone with Facebook and Instagram and all the things that exist now, I would go: This is me. I would find a video and show my parents and say: This is me. Please help me.”

Harbour sang at Germany’s Deutsche Oper Berlin and Italy’s Teatro Regio Torino in 2009-10, spent the following season in Heidelberg, then shifted with artistic director Peter Spuhler to Karlsruhe and stayed through 2015-16. At first the roles were small, but some were led by famous conductors, including Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” with Semyon Bychkov in Italy.

Lucas made the decision in November 2013 to transition and started taking estrogen and anti-androgens in July 2014. Facial feminization surgery followed that September and gender confirmation surgery in 2016.

She worried how the transition would be received by administrators, colleagues and audiences.

“In the beginning, it was scary,” she said. “And I think that there are people who are still not necessarily on my side and may never be on my side. But what are you going to do? You gravitate towards the people who like you and you try not to worry about the people who don’t.”

By 2016, her roles had grown to the toreador Escamillo in Bizet’s “Carmen” in Karlsruhe and the four villains in Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffman (The Tales of Hoffmann)” at Opernhaus Wuppertal , a staging that had her start as female for Lindorf, become male for CoppĂ©lius, then switch back.

Read the whole article here.

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