Anna Bonitatibus is one of the most successful mezzo-sopranos of our time. On her new album entitled "en travesti", together with the Munich Radio Orchestra conducted by Corrado Rovaris, she presents the most famous and important arias written over the past three hundred years for women acting in male roles on the opera stage: so-called "trouser roles". The fifteen arias begin with Handel and Vivaldi, then go on to include works by Gluck and Mozart, the Italians Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, the French opera composers Meyerbeer, Offenbach and Massenet, the Verists Mascagni and Puccini, as well as Ravel and Richard Strauss; and the programme concludes with a song from the film musical "Victor/Victoria". The "trouser role", i.e. the woman performing in male dress, has always been a popular phenomenon in spoken as well as musical theatre. The notion that it served only to gradually replace parts written for castrati – whose tradition ended in the first half of the 19th century for humanitarian and aesthetic re