The recording is very old, and although it has been cleaned up as much as is possible, it still sounds very old. There is a constant hiss surrounding the voice; the odd crackle here and there. The voice itself is not beautiful – it sounds wavery and distant; chilling; unearthly. Alessandro Moreschi was in his mid-forties when the record was made (between 1902 and 1904), and although he had at one time been called the “Angel of Rome”,¹ by his mid-forties he was undeniably past his prime. If there was ever a time when this particular recording was considered “pleasant” to listen to, those days are long past – and yet this scratchy, eerie sound is the only aural record we have of a phenomenon which ruled the musical world throughout most of Europe for nearly two hundred years: the castrato voice.

In his humourous (and mostly accurate) look at the history of opera, When The Fat Lady Sings (Opera History As It Ought To Be Taught), David W. Barber describes the castrati as representing “what might be considered the ultimate example of putting art before common sense”.² It is generally suggested, however – in what little literature dealing with the castrati is availiable – that the castrati were born out of convenience and greed as much as they were born out of any lofty artistic goals. The earliest days of the practice in Italy (where it eventually became the most widespread) remain a bit of a mystery, but Richard Somerset-Ward suggests that it originated in the province of Apulia, located in the southeast corner of Italy on the Adriatic side (a part of Naples).³ The Church's power was dominant and poverty was the norm, and the possibility that a son, if castrated, could become a successful performer must have been an alluring idea – the most successful of the castrati did, after all, become very, very rich. The truth of the matter was that only a fraction of the castrated boys ever achieved fame (Somerset-Ward suggests the figure one out of every hundred), and very few were successful enough to even earn a decent living (perhaps ten to fifteen out of the same hundred).⁴ It is unclear how many young boys actually underwent the operation (officially known as a “bilateral orchidectomy”⁵); Somerset-Ward claims that even at the height of the castrati craze there might have been only a few hundred castrati in Italy at any given time,⁶ while other sources state that as many as 5000 boys per year went under the knife.

From the Church's point of view, the castrati were necessary: St. Paul's edict had included the words mulier taceat in ecclesia – women were to remain silent in the Church.⁷ Someone was needed to sing the high parts, and while it was not unheard of to use boy sopranos, the fact that by the time they were properly trained their voices had broken was a major disadvantage.⁸ The castrato voice displayed all the lightness and flexibility of a boy's voice, with the added breath control and power of a man's voice. The first castrati recorded as singing in the Sistine Chapel were Pietro Paolo Folignato and Girolamo Rossini, both of whom joined the papal choir in 1599.⁹

It is impossible to say what a castrato at the height of his powers actually sounded like: Moreschi's recordings give some indication of the timbre of the castrato voice, but not much else. All we know about these men's voices, we have learned from the music that was written for them. We know, for instance, that Farinelli had a high soprano voice where many other castrati possessed ranges more similar to today's contralti. We can make some guess as to what each singer's special talent was, be it long, sustained notes or light arpeggio passages or complicated series of trills. The best-known castrati had specialised arias written specifically to suit their particular talents: these were called “portmanteau arias”, or suitcase arias, because the singers carried them from opera to opera and sang them, to the delight of adoring audiences, whether they fit the opera in question or not.¹⁰

As well as being first-rate performers, a few castrati achieved fame as teachers. The castrato Pistocchi was, for example, best-known as a vocal coach rather than as a vocalist. He was considered the world's greatest child prodigy in the years before Mozart's birth: Pistocchi was a published composer at the age of eight; he was a contralto castrato in the cathedral choir of Bologna during his early teens, and he was a well-known opera singer for more than twenty years. As well as performing in operas, he wrote at least five operas of his own – however very little of these survive today. His greatest contribution to the music world, though, was the school for singers which he founded in Bologna after his retirement from performing.¹¹ Pistocchi's student, the castrato Bernacchi, later followed in his teacher's footsteps and founded his own school in Bologna¹² – between the two of them, Pistocchi and Bernacchi, they taught many of the greatest castrati of two generations.

Over the years, many of the castrati rose to incredible fame not just in Italy, but throughout Europe (with the exception of France, where the practice of castration was deemed unacceptable). Ida Franca's Manual of Bel Canto, while it is excessively harsh in its treatment of the castrato singer's history, provides a fascinating overview of the lives and careers of the most famous of the castrati. Here I will mention just a few of these famous singers:

Gaetano Majorano, better known as Caffarelli, was born in 1703 and died in 1783. His range is described as “soprano”; he was a harpsichordist and a composer; and by the time he died he was a duke.¹³ Caffarelli is an interesting case in that he appears to have been castrated at his own insistence¹⁴: his father was against the notion. In time, he became the highest paid singer in Italy; virtuosic but very arrogant. Handel wrote many opera roles specifically for Caffarelli's vocal talents.¹⁵

Arguably the most famous castrato, Farinelli (born Carlo Broschi) lived from 1705-1782. Franca's description of him reads thus: “sopranist, composer, poet, harpsichordist, viola d'amore player, very ugly, extremely clever...”¹⁶ Farinelli made his opera debut at the age of fifteen and went on to become the Baroque equivalent of a Hollywood star. Fans in England reportedly screamed “One god, one Farinelli!” from the balconies of the opera halls where he performed, and in 1994 his life was turned into a motion picture – the only castrato to have received this particular honour, as far as I know. After a very successful career in opera, Farinelli was hired by the Spanish King Philip V, who suffered from depression and, if reports of the day are to be believed, the King was cheered by Farinelli's performance of the same four arias every night for the remainder of his life. After Philip V's death, Farinelli remained at the Spanish court to serve the next King, Ferdinand VI.¹⁷

Gaetano Gaudagni (1725-1792) was apparently one of the better actors amongst the castrati, who were often not noted for anything beyond their singing. Gaudagni sang Handel's Messiah and Samson, and was perhaps best known for creating the lead roles in Gluck's Il Telemacco and Orfeo.¹⁸

The last castrato to become an opera star was Giovanni Battista Velluti, who was born in 1780 and died in 1861. His middle range was strong and Meyerbeer's Il crociato in Egitto was written especially for his talents.¹⁹ He sang in London in 1825, but while some patrons were ready to hail him as the next Farinelli, others were not so welcoming and after a second season during which he was not received nearly so well as during his first, Velluti left London and reportedly lived out the rest of his days saying to his friends, “Thank God that I am one of the last disgraced”.²⁰ After Velluti's retirement, castrati continued to perform in the Church but never again did they appear on the stages of Europe's great opera houses.

Perhaps it was inevitable that in many cases, the fame went to their heads. Some of the castrati had legions of fans who would cry out “Eviva il coltello!”, or “Long live the knife!”²¹ One of the most outlandish reports of castrato arrogance belongs to Luigi Marchesi (1754-1829),²² who insisted that, no matter what opera he was performing in, his first entry should be on a hilltop, wearing a helmet with plumes at least six feet high and carrying a lance and a sword, and that his first words should be “Dove son io?” (“Where am I?”). A trumpet fanfare would then sound and Marchesi would sing “Odi lo squillo della tromba guerriera!”, which means “Hear the sound of the war-like trumpets!”, and then he would sing his “portmanteau aria” (Mia speranza pur vorrei, composed for him by Sarti). After his performance of his aria, he would slowly descend the steps amid cheers from the audience, and then and only then was the opera allowed to continue.²³

Perhaps a match for the onstage flamboyance of many castrati was their flamboyance offstage. Far from being rendered celibate by their childhood surgeries, many of the castrati led very active sex lives. Although some castrato singers were considered unattractive (one of the side-effects of the orchidectomy was a tendency towards gigantism and/or obesity), many others were not – and from the point of view of many women, an affair with a castrated man was a “safe” affair: there was absolutely no risk of pregnancy. Although countless affairs were conducted in secret, some were a bit more public – for instance an affair carried out by Giovanni Francesco Grossi with a Modenese widow; in 1697, Grossi was assassinated by his lover's angry relatives.²⁴

There are nearly as many questions surrounding the decline of the power of the castrati over the music world as there are about their beginnings. During the 19th century attitudes began, slowly, to change, and as women began to be allowed to perform in operas, both the need and the demand for castrated singers declined. By the time Velluti retired from the opera stage, the practice was generally regarded as barbaric; after Velluti's retirement the only place one could go to hear castrati was the Church (and after 1870, only the Sistine Chapel).²⁵

The view of castration as barbaric mostly carries through to this day, but in the preface to his book The World of the Castrati, Patrick Barbier asks “how can we adopt an attitude towards emasculation when no great castrato has confided his deepest feelings to us?”²⁶ The castrati Carestini and Salimbeni reportedly burst out laughing when people tried to express pity for them.²⁷ Modern Italian counter-tenor (and cross-dresser, and cult-status cabaret performer) Ernesto Tomasini claims regret for not having been castrated as a boy. His one-man show “True or Falsetto? A Secret History of the Castrati” played to sell-out crowds throughout Europe in 2002, and in an interview on his website, Tomasini discusses the hysteria which surrounded the castrati's performances during the height of their fame. “'I regret not having been castrated,' he says. 'I would have perfectly happily given up my masculinity for my art.'”²⁸

Lucy Powell, the writer of Tomasini's show, offers the ready counter-argument: you just can't make that choice as an adult.²⁹ Eight was the standard age for castration; the goal was to cut puberty off well before it had even started. Except in very rare cases (such as Caffarelli's), the choice was not made by the boys at all, but rather by their parents in the hopes that their talented young son might begome a talented and very rich castrato star.

In many ways, the main tragedy in the story of the castrati is just what I have mentioned above – the choice was never the boy's, and it could never be put off long enough so that it could be the boy's. I spoke with a man who, as a child, was a very highly trained treble in a cathedral choir (“By the time my voice changed, I had a range of nearly four octaves” ... “It was the only sense of identity I had, just this big voice”) and he told me about the sense of loss he felt when his voice changed at the age of fourteen. He talked about how, for a time after his voice broke, he could still hear his treble voice, his boy's voice, inside his head, although it didn't match the voice that was coming out of his mouth – and he talked about how he still remembers the moment when the treble voice stopped and left him for good. “I still miss it,” he said. “If I had been given the choice back then – to lose the voice forever or to keep it forever – if I had had that choice... I don't know that I would have done it. But I would have considered it very seriously.”³⁰

In the end, as with most ethical issues, there are no easy answers – there is just the end of the story. Despite its steady acceptance of castrati into the Sistine Choir and other chapel choirs, the Catholic Church had never really condoned the practice of castration. It was in fact never entirely legal, it was just that the Popes wanted to have castrati in their choirs and so tended to turn a blind eye to the procedure that created them. Pope Leo XIII finally decreed in 1902 that no more castrato singers would be admitted to the Sistine Choir, and Leo's successor, Pope Pius X, decreed the following year that no more castrati were to be created, ever. Alessandro Moreschi retired from the Sistine Choir in 1913 and died in 1922 – and with him died, seemingly, the entire legacy of the castrati and their profound effect on the music of Europe during their dominance. The castrati were, for many years, bizarrely overlooked in literature dealing with music of the period: in the whole of the sixth edition of Donald Jay Grout's A History of Western Music, for example, castrato singers are mentioned exactly twice. It is incredible that a group of musicians who had such a profound impact on the musical development of nearly two centuries could be so forgotten. It is only in recent years that the castrati have begun to receive their due in literature dealing with music of the period.

Endnotes

¹Barbier, Patrick, The World of the Castrati: the history of an extraordinary operatic phenomenon (London: Souvenir Press, 1996), 239.
²Barber, David W., When The Fat Lady Sings (Opera History As It Ought To Be Taught), Toronto: Sound and Vision, 1990, 9.
³Somerset-Ward, Richard, Angels and Monsters: male and female sopranos in the story of opera, 1600-1900, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004, 63.
⁴Ibid., 63.
⁵Barber 1990, 10.
⁶Somerset-Ward 2004, 64.
⁷Heriot, Angus, The Castrati in Opera, New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1975, 9.
⁸Ibid., 10.
⁹Barber 1990, 10.
¹⁰http://www.ernestotomasini.com/trueorfalsetto.php
¹¹Somerset-Ward 2004, 69.
¹²Ibid., 70.
¹³Franca, Ida, Manual of Bel Canto, New York: Coward-McCann, 1959, 104.
¹⁴Somerset-Ward 2004, 77.
¹⁵Franca 1959, 105.
¹⁶Ibid., 109.
¹⁷Ibid., 111.
¹⁸Ibid., 114.
¹⁹Ibid., 122.
²⁰Ibid., 123.
²¹http://www.ernestotomasini.com/trueorfalsetto.php
²²Franca 1959, 114.
²³Barbier 1996, 112-113.
²⁴Somerset-Ward 2004 67.
²⁵Ibid., 89-90.
²⁶Barbier 1996, 2.
²⁷Ibid., 2.
²⁸http://www.ernestotomasini.com/trueorfalsetto.php
²⁹Ibid.
³⁰Conversation with Graham Harris, March 25, 2005. I have paraphrased slightly but remained as faithful to his words as possible.

Bibliography

Barber, David W. When The Fat Lady Sings (Opera History As It Ought To Be Taught). Toronto: Sound and Vision, 1990.

Barbier, Patrick. The World of the Castrati: the history of an extraordinary operatic phenomenon. London: Souvenir Press, 1996.

Ellis, Samantha. All Mouth and No Trousers. Article for the Guardian reproduced on Ernesto Tomasini's website: http://www.ernestotomasini.com/trueorfalsetto.php August 2002.

Franca, Ida. Manual of Bel Canto. New York: Coward-McCann, 1959.

Grout, Donald Jay and Claude V. Palisca. A History of Western Music, 6th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.

Heriot, Angus. The Castrati in Opera. New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1975.

Moreschi, Alessandro. The complete recordings. Wadhurst, England: Pavilion, 1984.

Somerset-Ward, Richard. Angels and Monsters: male and female sopranos in the story of opera, 1600-1900. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

Appendices

Listen to Alessandro Moreschi singing Domine, salvum fac

Visit Ernesto Tomasini's website