A voice between two worlds and two souls - The "Castrati singers"

This is an aria from "Artaserse" an opera written in 1734 by Riccardo Broschi in London.Let yourself go to this frenzy dance of notes.

The author is the brother of the most famous "castrato" singer Carlo Farinelli for whom he wrote several of his arias and operas .

Arguably the most famous castrato, Farinelli (born Carlo Broschi) lived from 1705-1782. “Sopranist, composer, poet, harpsichordist, viola d'amore player, very ugly, extremely clever...” 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.

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.

The story of "castrati singers" ,along with their essential role in the Opera history ,is a very interesting example of how Beauty and Harmony won over the attempts made by Culture and Religion together to suffocate Nature and its perfect laws.
The castrati play a fascinating role in the history of singing. To discover the origin of this practice we need to look at the Church of Rome's interpretation of two biblical passages: "Let your women keep silence in the churches," (I Corinthians 14:34), and "Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over men, but to be in silence." (I Timothy 2:11-12). The current thinking is that St. Paul appreciated the contributions of women to the early church, but that he believed women should not take part in theological discussions or teach men.

Religion is paved of nonsense!

The Church's interpretation of these passages, however, was strict. Women were not allowed to speak or sing in church. The Church also forbade women to participate in the theater. In the Middle Ages, the lack of female voices in the relatively simple church music was not a problem.

So what this "sick" people conceived to please themselves and God in name of an absurd and rootless concept was to distort not just a "nature" but a sound and to do it they ended up in transfering this distortion to a body and to a soul .

Again the resul was a big pain . But again Nature won ,giving us one of the best music (written for these distorted voices) and one of most misterious mix of voice and music and soul where we cannot distinguish anymore human voice from human music.

Is this the "voice" of God itself who reaffirm his power and his mistery upon the insanity of our Culture?

These poor souls of boys literally forced into a voice not belonging to them according to nature ,surrended themselves to a surprise made by the same Nature so forced and constrained by stupid rules and prejudices.

Young boys' voices had difficulty with the complex polyphony that was being written in the late 1500s by the contrapuntalists in the Netherlands. Either their voices were not strong enough to maintain the part, or by the time they had gained the musicianship required to execute the music, their voices were changing. Initially this problem was solved by importing falsettists from Spain and for a time Spanish falsettists held a monopoly in the Sistine Chapel. Somehow they seemed to have discovered a secret for giving the falsetto voice more agility, range and a richer sound. Some have suggested that these falsettists were, in fact, castrati and some may have been. In 1599 two Italian castrati were admitted to the Sistine Chapel. This, along with the invention of opera at about that time, ushered in the age of the castrati. Castration had existed for centuries as a form of punishment. In other situations, slaves were castrated and then used as harem guards or as servants or tutors for upper class women. Essentially there are two types of castration: removal of all the genitalia (usually inflicted as punishment and often fatal) and removal of the testes only. The latter of these was what was performed on prepubescent boys usually between the ages of seven and twelve. Unfortunately many boys were castrated with the belief that castration alone would make them good singers. It is estimated that at the height of the castrati's popularity during the eighteenth century as many as four thousand boys a year were castrated in Italy. Sadly very few of them became rich or famous.

So a foolish punishment was turned into a "way to beauty and harmony" !

Some men ,self -proclaimed more manly than others with God's endorsement ,self -attributed to themselves the right of stealing the manliness from other men both to entrust their women to them (so precious they were!!!) and to enjoy the harmony they were not able to echo from Nature (because maybe of their exhagerate manhood?).

The vendetta of this "cutted souls" is nowadays evident but at that time the damage was immeasurable .

The vocal consequences of castration went well beyond the mere perpetuation of a boyish treble. The child continued to grow, and so did his voice; or at least his physical powers to exploit the voice he already had. Under the rigid discipline to which he would now be exposed, his lung capacity and diaphragmatic support would be augmented to an extraordinary degree, enabling him to sustain the emission of breath in the projection of tone up to a minute or more, which is beyond the ability of most normal adult male and female singers.They had, as a consequence, great vocal power. Finally, a small and flexible larynx, and relatively short vocal chords allowed them to vocalize over a rather wide range (over 3 and 1/2 octaves) and to sing with great agility (they could control wide intervals, long cascades and trills).

The mature castrato was a boy soprano or alto with all the physical resources of a grown man .

In the Italian language, nouns of feminine gender end with "a", while those of
masculine gender end with "o"-yet we label Joan Sutherland a soprano, not
soprano and Marian Anderson a contralto, not contralta. Why?

What is in some way "superior" is masculine while the "inferior " is feminine perhaps.

The rise of opera coincided with but in no obvious way caused that of the castrati. If anything, the taste for the castrato voice antedated opera. Nor did it at once dominate the new form. A castrato sang the prologue and two female parts in Monteverdi's L'Orfeo at Mantua in 1607, but the lead part was sung by a tenor. Of Monteverdi's two other surviving operas, II ritorno d'Ullisse in patria (1640) uses normal male voices, but L'incoronazione di Poppea (1642) allots the two male leads to castrati. Vocal casting then and for another 200 years was determined by which singers were available castrati: it seems, were not yet always at hand or perhaps always wanted.

People were besotted with the high, in particular the soprano, voice its special value called for the exotic powers of castrati. This value may have lain in an association with youth: in opera, castrati were to sing the parts of young heroes. It may also have had to do with superiority. 'Soprano' means 'higher', a notion not taken lightly by a society that was at once hierarchical minded and used to displaying hierarchical order in forms perceived by the senses. A composer in charge of a church choir, writing when the system had been going for a long time, assumed that higher voices took precedence of lower--and that a 'natural' alto (a castrato) must as a rule take precedence of a falsettist.

Falsettist is definitely a "man" who enters temporalily and under a certain extent the region of the feminine (voice) and comes back ,being is feminine tone not perfect and complete and most of all not more perfect feminine than the feminine!!!

We still need to explain why a preference, even a craze, for high voices should have led ordinary people to undertake (and people in authority to condone) so drastic a step as castration. One possible answer is that the cultivation of the solo voice in the new genres of the early seventeenth century--opera, cantata, and oratorio--required a new professionalism uncalled for in the age of polyphonic music that had gone before, and that the castrati--thanks to unbroken study from childhood, less hampered by social custom than the education of girls--were best able to meet this new demand. This is of some help. Yet we still need to ask was the step taken as drastic as we think?

Or it is again a violation against a feminine skill. A man overcome a woman in her "voice" kingdom : then he is made lik a woman phisically in some way but remains a man for other physical features that are enhanced as a result of an "ormonal revenge ".

Severe economic crisis struck Italy about 1620. The city of Venice apparently managed to keep much of its industry going in spite of increasing rigidity and lack of competitiveness. In many other places, however, deindustrialization--followed by war and by the two great plagues of 1630 and 1656--confirmed the upper classes in their retreat into landholding as their main source of income; sometimes the retreat was accompanied by a new imposition of feudal tenures or by a strengthening of entails to safeguard the line of descent. With it went an increase in the numbers of monks and nuns, probably most marked in the period 1580--1650: by the 1670s they seem to have accounted for some 5 per cent of the population in Florence and Catania, for about 9, 10 or 11 per cent in decayed Central Italian towns such as Siena, Pistoia, and Prato; in more populous Cities--Venice, Rome, Naples--the proportion was lower but absolute numbers higher, with monks alone numbering well over 3,000 in Rome, 4,000 in Naples.

For rich families, getting a son or a daughter into a monastic order cost less than setting up the son in an official career or than marrying off the daughter; in a lean time it could bring privileges such as tax concessions. For many middling or poor people a child who became a monk or a nun held out the hope of security in troubled times, not just for the individual but for the family. Such decisions about a child's future were a matter of family strategy. Material explanations of this kind need imply no denial of the intense religious feeling common in baroque Italy--itself stirred by the sense of longer and decline. These conditions broadly held through the whole of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century

Monks, according to a late eighteenth century German writer, were 'so to speak, castrati who had not been operated upon' (quoted in F. Haböck, Die Kastraten in ihre Gesangskunst, 1927, p. 148). They were celibates, not always of their own choice. A castrate could be thought of as an enforced celibate with an unusual chance of securing for his family an income, perhaps a fortune. There were castrate monks who sang in or directed church choirs: one took part--though only after Mazarin had spent six years using diplomatic pressure on the Pope--in the Paris performance of Cavalli's opera Ercole amante (1660), singing the part of a woman disguised as a man. Some other castrati became monks late in life; many more became priests. But no vows were needed for the castrate's 'vocation' to have something in common with that of the monk.

We need to stand as far as we can away from modern assumptions. Central to these is the right of human beings to sexual fulfillment. The tradition of Christian asceticism began to decline even in Southern Europe from the mid eighteenth century; it is nearly lost. But around 1600 it was still strong. Renunciation of sexual life could seem not just possible but ideal. Sexuality could anyhow be a burden when (as happened in at least parts of Italy) celibacy was on the increase between 1600 and 1750 owing to economic hardship and the efforts of families to safeguard property, while the vigilance of those same families probably did much to prevent sexual relations outside marriage. Celibacy was a means to birth control.

Nor was it a step condemned by the Church. Theologians held that we are caretakers, not owners, of our bodies. Most thought castration licit only to save life, on medical advice and with the boy's consent. A minority, however, held that on a balance of advantage castration for artistic purposes could be licit if the benefit to the community (to the effectiveness of church services or the supposed needs of rulers) outweighed the damage to the individual. Among Italian theologians it was discussed until about 1750 a matter finely balanced between 'probable' and 'more probable' opinions, and even when opposition began to build up Pope Benedict XIV advised (1748) against a proposal that castration should be forbidden by all bishops--essentially on prudential grounds: it was better to avoid disturbance and work for a compromise that would bring about gradual change.

In 1600, with the performance of Euridice composed by Jacopo
Peri, marks the birth of modem opera. Prior to that date, Greekstyle
dramas were performed in which polyphonic choruses dominated.
Vincenzo Galilei, the father of Galileo, and Jacopo Peri rebelled against
this and introduced a significant innovation by employing single vocal
parts consisting of arias and recitatives. This in time led to bel canto,
often for sheer vocal display. At first there were no public opera houses,
and performances were given in private theaters or chapels But opera soon caught on and in 1637 the first public opera houses opened in Venice. Composers had problem because for centuries women were not allowed to sing in church or theater. There were no
women singers; all roles, male and female, were played by men. Only a man with normal testis
could be a witness-the very word testis means witness. He could swear
in court by placing his right hand on the scrotal area and declaiming: "I
hereby 'testify'."Should the term "testify" raise the ire of Women's Lib, I would suggest that the ladies substitute "ovarify" for "testify" !!!

The Church forbade castration, but in the case of the castrati
singers it was faced with an accomplished, irreversible deed and, hence,
welcomed the victims at least to serve it in its choirs and thereby to expiate
their (?) sin. Although castration was done clandestinely, news of the success of the
castrati singers spread rapidly. Often, poverty-stricken parents themselves
performed the mutilation, trading the boy's future sexual potency and
fertility for a hoped-for "pot of gold." In the very young constant
compression and rubbing of the tiny gonads were done until they were no
longer palpable. When the child grew up, excuses, some fantastic, were
offered by parents or guardian: that the boy was injured in a fracas with
other boys; or that he was bitten by a dog, a pig or wild goose; or that he
fell from a horse and injured his testes, and so on.

Note how always the burden of an empty excuse and blame is cast on animals or other "weak" subjects. And this again shows off the big power of the Church and how brave they are .

As we saw the castrati were usually tall, with a disproportionately large thorax,
infantile larynx, long, spindly legs, and flat feet. Most were handsome
with feminine facial features. They were beardless, although scalp hair
was luxuriant. Gynecomastia was at times prominent; they were widehipped,
somewhat obese and a few had steatopygia.Though deprived of their gonads, many of the castrati singers, had heterosexual affairs, in some instances with scandalous and tragic consequences.

Loss of both testes during adulthood does not necessarily result in impotence, but their
complete removal or destruction in childhood should result not only in
sterility but also prevent potency. Were these heterosexual relationships
physiologically normal, or were the liaisons with morbidly curious
women? We have no way of knowing.

Everything is covered by the mist of a false "decency" that Religion and its related false Culture has always used along the centuries to cover the human natural feelings and pulses . This has led to those unnatural behaviours .And to conceive these hiding superstructures that generates "monsters" .

But Nature in her kindness and wisdom has turned monsters into fairies and their cries of pain into celestial voices.

Unfortunately, we have no records or statistics regarding the type of operation and technique performed on the children and on the age when the mutilation was carried out. We do
not know how many were mutilated without complete removal of the
gonads. Other procedures may have caused some destruction, retarding
androgencity but not necessarily negating eventual potency or even fertility.
Boys castrated at a later stage, i.e., from nine to 12 years of age,
should have been rendered sterile, but potency need not necessarily have
been compromised because the interstitial cells that manufacture testosterone
had probably functioned and induced erections and, once begun,
erectability may have continued because of testosterone-producing cells
along the cords and in the retroperitoneum.

Numerous cells elaborating testosterone line the interior of the capsule of
the testis and, if they survived and functioned, then it was possible for
some castrati singers to have had heterosexual relationships. The Nature and its embodiment ,our physical body , follows its course without considering our structures and concepts of beauty , our concepts of sin and our ways of covering the sinners.

This leads to an implosion . A lot of pain , physical and psychological , is "bestowed" upon the souls and the bodies just for a caprice or for an absurd defence of a moral position .

Culture becomes the gurdian of a sick Ethic.But yet Nature wins the day by turning a distortion into miracle .But pain and darkness cannot be avoided as the loneliness and despair of a lot of "angels" .

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.

Perhaps other factors of an emotional or sociological interaction between
the sexes may have played a role in modifying the lack of proper
responses by the supposedly sexually frozen castrati. On the part of the
women, the lady friends' hero-worship of a great singer, prurience,
curiosity, and the challenge to their self-confidence in the capacity to
induce eroticism and awaken libido may have led to pseudosexual play,
with even some turgescence in the penis and reciprocal excitation in the
female, climaxed by orgasm devoid of ejaculation.

The view of castration as barbaric mostly carries through to this day.

How can we adopt an attitude towards emasculation when no great castrato has confided his deepest feelings to us?” The castrati Carestini and Salimbeni reportedly burst out laughing when people tried to express pity for them. Modern Italian counter-tenor 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.'”
You just can't make that choice as an adult.

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 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.”

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.

The castrati singers became superstars, performing before huge audiences,
commanding large salaries and receiving adulation which, according
to some authorities, has not been surpassed. The voce bianco, or white voice, was not really human; there was a certain detachment and depersonalization, almost godlike.

A number of composers wrote operas expressly for the castrati. Among
them were Alessandro Scarlatti (1659-1725), composer of more than 115
operas. A popular one was Pompeo, first performed in Naples. George
Frederic Handel (1685-1759) was a famous organist, harpsichordist and
opera composer. Among the literati were Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison,
Richard Steele, Lady Montague, and Samuel Pepys. London was
full of eccentrics, dandies, perverts, poets, the select rich and nobility,
and the numerous deprived poor.
From the purely vocal point of view, the castrati singers are considered by musical authorities to have been the greatest singers of any age. For two centuries, the 17th and 18th, they
dominated opera. All the female parts were sung by these evirati. Their
dominance came to an end early in 1800.

Composers began to write operas for tenors, and soprano roles sung by castrati were now entrusted to women.
However, the hermaphroditic aspect of opera lingered and found expression
in some of the parts created by ensuing composers. For instance:
in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, Cherubino (soprano) poses as a male
page. In his Cosi Fan Tutte, Despina (soprano) poses as a male by
wearing successively the robes of a physician and a notary. Composer Gioacchino Rossini late in life stopped writing opera because "there are no more opera singers; i.e., no more castrati."

The combination of circumstances that heralded the advent of the
castrati will probably never recur. Their voices are stilled forever.They has been thrown out of Nature in a fixed perfection of a cultural model which is beauty and it is not because it implied pain and deprivation. But the phenomenal trills and embellishments can
be culled forth from the rave accounts of contemporaries. These induced
pseudohermaphrodites with their supernatural nightingale voices trained to
perfection awed, thrilled, and intrigued audiences for 200 years. Although
virility was supposedly denied them, the records of their love-life are
profuse. We cannot accurately evaluate their potency, but the majority, as
stated, apparently did not suffer from lack of heterosexual love affairs it
seems that many women brought "orchids" to the castrati! So again what it is denied and crushed by Religion and Culture is affirmed through other ways.

The training the received to force their voice to the magnificence was another torture .Training and education should be a positive way to focusing and to growing up (to educate) .In their case also these means were upturned and used to suffocate and to distort.

Nature showed us its power. It turned into light our darkness. In this case the results were the best voices and music ever and the very peak reached by harmony and creativity at the price of suffering and loneliness and sometimes even madness .

Would not have been better that thouse "angels" had had a happy and forgettable life rather than an unforgettable and magnificent one where music veiled pain and anguish ?

I would have preferred silent angels leading an happy life rather than voices of God on an Earth forced into Heaven .