WNO True Voice Award raises the voices of trans and nonbinary singers (2024)

Meanwhile, for singers, gender is simply who you are — the voice you show up to the audition with, the box into which you go.

And perhaps “simply” is the wrong choice of word — for singers whose gender falls outside (or moves between) the traditionally drawn gender roles of the art form, operatic parts (if they can get them) can be a rigid fit.

This is where the True Voice Award aims to assist. On May 1, the Washington National Opera will recognize transgender singer Katherine Goforth as the inaugural recipient of the award, “intended to help support the training of transgender and nonbinary opera singers, as well as increase their visibility in the industry.”

The award was established in 2022 by trans filmmaker Kimberly Reed, composer Laura Kaminsky and librettist Mark Campbell — together, the creative team behind “As One,” a 2014 chamber opera sung by two voices who share the part of a transgender protagonist. The team approached WNO artistic director Francesca Zambello with a potential donation to launch the prize, which will be awarded every three years.

In working on “As One,” it became clear to Reed how limited the pathways were for trans and queer artists to tell their specific stories onstage. She also realized that there was no vocal-training pipeline catering to trans artists.

“Even when opera may, on its face, appear to play with gender norms, it still falls right back into the same conventions of voice type,” says Reed in a phone interview. “We really wanted to blur the lines of some of these categories, and to create opportunities where both artists and presenters would start to think differently about the way trans folks could inhabit these roles.”

Recipients of the True Voice prize will receive a recital performance at the Kennedy Center alongside singers from the WNO’s Cafritz Young Artists program, as well as short-term participation in the program, where they will receive career training and artistic coaching.

Reed says that as the award is given out, its design will be tailored to the needs of individual performers. And Zambello hopes to “amp up” the presence and package of the prize as it recurs.

Goforth, 33, is a singer and actress who has performed in a range of operatic and theatrical productions. (She recently played Emily Webb in a production of “Our Town.”)

In 2022, she shared a joint recital with Julia Bullock, who selected her for a career advancement award at the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s fourth Women in Classical Music Symposium. She has performed with the Bozeman Symphony, Walla Walla Symphony, Yakima Symphony and Vancouver Symphony. She has also sung operatic roles with Seattle Opera, Portland Opera and OperaBend, where she is currently cast as a transgender Alfredo in a specially tailored production of “La Traviata,” and previously sang a feminized Beppe in the company’s production of “Pagliacci.”

For transgender and nonbinary singers, the high artifice of opera can often feel directly at odds with the authentic self. Goforth recalls her struggle to select arias years before her transition — the strange disconnect that separated her like a moat from the roles she was singing.

“I thought everyone was feeling the same way that I was feeling about opera characters,” she tells me. “Like, there’s nothing of yourself in them and you can’t relate to them. I didn’t know that I was playing the wrong characters.”

And, years before that, she remembers the resistance she felt as a fourth-grader to her choir teacher shifting her from soprano to alto — a discomfort that grew more fully pronounced as she moved further into her career. These days, she sings with a sturdy, deeply colored tenor with lovely fullness and soft edges, slipping in and out of its category. (“I’ve never wanted to embody all of the tenor stereotypes,” Goforth says. “I don’t even really identify as an opera singer.”)

For Zambello, the True Voice Award represents a natural extension of her intention to run a more inclusive WNO.

“We are definitely looking much more at, let’s say, casting someone whose voice can sing something but you wouldn’t think of them conventionally in that role,” Zambello says, pointing to the company’s casting of mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves as Don Fernando in next season’s production of “Fidelio.”

“You have to be careful that you’re not doing sensationalist casting for that reason only,” she says. “You have to cast the best person for the part, and if that person is gender-fluid or transgender, then that’s the person to cast.”

When it comes to questions about gender and opera, Zambello doesn’t see what the fuss is, pointing to a long history of liberties taken across the performing arts — from inversions of traditional Shakespeare storylines to the comic drag of, say, Les Ballets Trockadero.

“Historically, opera has always played with gender,” she says. “From Monteverdi on, there were contraltos playing men, men playing women. I think now, in contemporary works, the door is thrown wide open.”

Reed and Goforth might disagree on how wide open that door actually is.

“When you look at the ways that traditional opera ‘plays’ with gender, ultimately it just reinforces the norm,” Reed says. “And it’s really easy to look at that and feel like you’re just kind of paying lip service to this issue. But, you know, we’re not issues. We’re people.”

“As much as we want to say from our modern perspective that gender is so fluid and there’s so many opportunities with gender in opera, and that there always have been,” says Goforth, “at the same time as the castrati were onstage, in the exact same society, there were people who were being executed for being queer. So I don’t really care to hear this.”

Goforth also cautions that surface-level “play” with gender through casting tweaks and winking plot adjustments opens up the hazard of erasing the experiences of trans people for the sake of ticking a gender-fluid box.

“A lot of times it feels like we’re there to be puppets,” she says. “Basically, someone else has a vision and we have to fulfill that vision. It never feels like art to me. I think many marginalized and oppressed people have the experience of a presenting organization or person in power wanting their body, but not them as a human being.”

For both Reed and Goforth, new works are what hold the key to creating a future for trans and nonbinary artists in opera. Goforth is interested in performing work that embraces trans identity for what it is and that elevates the actual stories of trans people.

“It’s so hard to fight against all of these systems of making opera that really are inherently transphobic,” she says. “It’s so much easier just to build something new and do something different.”

Reed and Zambello hope that the True Voice Award — and similar awards and initiatives it may inspire elsewhere — can clear a space for this work to commence. And while traditional repertoire offers a point of departure for trans and nonbinary singers, it can also provide a model for how to move the art form forward.

“It’s easy to forget just how radical so many of these classic works really were in their day,” says Reed. “So it’s important to not just think of these stodgy old structures, but to think of the radical steps that they were taking, the controversy they were causing, how they were really challenging the assumptions and structures of their own day. That’s something opera is still very capable of doing.”