WHEN the new students arrive at Sweden’s two opera conservatories this autumn, they’ll share one thing in common: they’ll all be women. In the most recent round of auditions, only women won a place. There just weren’t any qualified male candidates. “Women have always been in the majority among our applicants, probably because Sweden has so many successful sopranos,” says Professor Anna Lindal, dean of the Stockholm University College of Opera, which along with the Gothenburg University College of Opera trains Sweden’s opera singers. “It’s rare that we get a bass, but this year was the first year that no tenor or bass passed the auditions.” Of the 72 applicants this year, 50 were women; 35 sopranos and 15 mezzo-sopranos. The conservatory decided that even though it would make for skewed student productions, it could not admit male singers on the grounds of gender alone. The Gothenburg University College of Opera has found itself in a similar position. Of the 45 singers who auditioned this year, nine were men, but as the Dean of Studies Monica Danielsson tells Prospero, “none of them reached the level of admission”. Consequently, none of them won a place.

Professor Lindal isn’t sure where the female domination comes from. Perhaps, she reasons, it is connected to the growing share of women at universities in general. In 1978, the number of male and female students at Swedish universities was roughly the same; by 2014, there were one-third more women than men. And it’s not just Swedish conservatories that are noticing an increasing dominance of female applicants. At the Leipzig Conservatory in Germany, 92 of the 323 students who applied last year were men (28%), down from 35% in 2002.

Many conservatories have a steady stream of good male applicants, but it's not large enough. The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, well known for its opera programme, receives a similar ratio of female to male applicants. But unlike Swedish conservatories, the school admits a weighted student body. In effect, sopranos have to score much higher marks to gain admission. “We have to strive for a balance between the voice parts,” explains Professor Mary Ann Hart, chair of the school’s voice department. “You can teach singers repertoire but at an opera school, at some point, they have to act on stage.” Though the opera repertoire features many leading ladies, with a large majority of sidekick roles written for men, male singers are patently needed.

Karin Fjellander, a Swedish soprano who graduated from the Gothenburg University College of Opera seven years ago, states that female singers consistently outnumber their male peers from secondary school upwards. “Girls are competing against one another from the very beginning,” she says. “Because there are so many girls, you might get one solo, while the boys get several each.”

The trouble is that while women have made great strides in education and the labour market—and opera conservatories—during the past century, operatic casting has changed little. Young tenors and basses can launch their careers in a myriad of smaller roles as courtiers, soldiers, watchmen and servants, while female singers have much fewer roles available to them. “La traviata”, the world’s most-performed opera, features a cast of three women and six men. “La bohème”, another perennial box office favourite, features two women and eight men. Even “Der Rosenkavalier”, Richard Strauss’s much-loved magnum opus (which stars a mezzo-soprano as the leading lady’s young male lover) features 18 male soloists versus nine female ones. Ms Hart puts it bluntly: “In many operas, you have the heroine and a bunch of men.”

"This is a general tendency," says Bruno Mantovani, director of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris. "We have a lot of sopranos for one bass. That causes big problems when we programme repertoire. We have to find pieces with more women than men." At the Jacobs School of Music, which boasts its own opera theatre, soprano roles are now double-cast. And, Ms Hart notes, “we can't do 'Dialogues of the Carmelites' every year’”, referring to Francis Poulenc’s opera about nuns. In Stockholm, Professor Lindal says that the conservatory will have to adjust the student productions next year to fit the available voices. But, she adds, “we can’t introduce quotas for male singers.” Ms Danielsson agrees. Back in Indiana, a local composer has even written a tongue-in-cheek opera called “Too Many Sopranos”.

But female singers’ success is no trivial matter when the resulting competition for roles makes it challenging for performers to earn a living. Frustrated with the situation, Ms Fjellander and several opera singer friends have started a tiny opera company called Pop-up Opera, in which women make up the bulk of the cast. When scores call for a tenor or bass, they simply transcribe the part up by an octave, which allows a soprano or mezzo-soprano to sing it. “What’s wrong with casting women as courtiers in a 19th-century opera?” Ms Fjellander asks. “All you need to do is change the tradition.” Or commission more operas about nuns.