In between and outside

Southern England in the 1920s: Fascinated, Virginia Woolf repeatedly circles around the theme of “androgyny” in her writing. With her fictional biography Orlando, she creates a transgender story avant la lettre—and at the same time, a queer love letter to her friend Vita Sackville-West. Meanwhile in Berlin, physician and pioneer of sexology Magnus Hirschfeld is researching “sexual intermediates,” advocating for the emancipation and anti-discrimination of homosexual, intersex, and transgender people, and challenging binary conceptions of gender.

On the occasion of Magnus Hirschfeld Day and the German premiere of Olga Neuwirth’s opera Orlando, the Komische Oper Berlin, in cooperation with the Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation, dedicates a soirée to the theme of gender fluidity from intellectual-historical, personal, and musical perspectives. Together with scholars and literary experts, we will discuss queer reading, Woolf’s classic, and the history of early sexology. What might Virginia Woolf and Magnus Hirschfeld have spoken about? And how is Orlando read today? The singers involved in the new production—Ema Nikolovska (Orlando) and Kevin(a) Taylor (Orlando’s Child)—will frame the evening musically with a journey through time, style, and identities.