Der Rosenkavalier in the context of "Richard Strauss"

In theater, a breeches role or breeches part (also pants role, pants part, trouser role, trouser part, and Hosenrolle) is a role in which a female actor performs in male clothing. Breeches, tight-fitting knee-length pants, were a standard male garment when these roles were introduced. The theatrical term travesti covers both this sort of cross-dressing and also male actors dressing as female characters. Both are part of the long history of cross-dressing in music and opera and later in film and television.

In opera, a breeches role refers to any male character that is sung and acted by a female singer. Most often the character is an adolescent or a very young man, sung by a mezzo-soprano or contralto. The operatic concept assumes that the character is male, and the audience accepts him as such, even knowing that the actor is not. Cross-dressing female characters (e.g., Leonore in Fidelio or Gilda in Act III of Rigoletto) are not considered breeches roles. The most frequently performed breeches roles are Cherubino (The Marriage of Figaro), Octavian (Der Rosenkavalier), Hansel (Hansel und Gretel) and Orpheus (Orpheus and Euridice), though the latter was originally written for a male singer, first a castrato and later, in the revised French version, an haute-contre.

The German composer Richard Strauss (1864–1949) was prolific and long-lived, writing 16 operas from 1892 up until his death in 1949. Strauss "emerged soon after the deaths of Wagner and Brahms as the most important living German composer", and was crucial in inaugurating the musical style of Modernism. His operas were dominant representatives of the genre in his time, particularly his earlier ones: Salome (1905), Elektra (1909), Der Rosenkavalier (1911) and Ariadne auf Naxos (1912). His earliest work, Der Kampf mit dem Drachen (comp. 1876), was a juvenile sketch, and is sometimes not counted as part of his operatic oeuvre; his final opera, Des Esels Schatten (de) (comp. 1947–1949), was unfinished at his death and completed by Karl Haussner in 1964.