The World of the Castrati: The History of an Extraordinary Operatic Phenomenon

by Patrick Barbier

This entertaining and authoritative study of the castrati during the baroque period explores the lives and triumphs of more than 60 singers over three centuries—their social origins, training, and relationship to society and church. Blending history and anecdote, it traces the course of a phenomenon that held Europe in its thrall. People were fascinated by these hybrids—part man, part woman, and part child—who became virile heroes on the operatic stage. The reader will learn of the horrors of castration, the nature of the strange castrato voice, and the conflicts these singers experienced.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Music, 18th Century, Italy, Eunuch, 17th Century

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Alan]

Conservatoires in Naples especially, trained the castrati in “passaggi (meow, head to chest), messa di voce (long note, crescendo & diminuendo), gorgheggi (warbled solfeggio), mordents and appoggiaturas. (p.53)

What of the others, who may have been admitted with good voices, but worsened?
The governors of the Conservatoire, Sept 1763, “Certain eunuchs, possessing good voices when admitted, later become, through adolescence or illness, incapable of singing. Charity demands that they not be abandoned; for this reason we charge the choir masters in the Conservatoire to do everything they can to guide them as singers, directing them to contralto if they cannot succeed as sopranos. If they can not sing as contraltos, the choir masters should ensure that they be taught to play some instrument at which they can succeed and thus and thus supply their own needs”(55).

Physiological disruption. “Feminisation” among some, fattier limbs and maybe face; but also, “Another surprising aspect often observed was the abnormal height of the castrati, a somewhat awkward phenomenon for men who often took women’s roles and stood a head taller than their partners.” Height because the pituitary action was not counterbalanced by testosterone, so sometimes overactivity of growth hormone. (14)

Castrati were the rock-stars of the 17th and 18th Centuries, commanding huge sums, and in England, privately gifted by Lords, Monarchs and Merchants with as much again as their huge fees. France was an exception “which held the record for meanness.” London, Vienna, Lisbon, Moscow and the German courts offered them good money, as they did women singers and instrumentalists. Merely being Italian musicians gained twice the fees. This caused great jealousy, and more than one castrato was ambushed at night and “beaten by rivals” (117).
One castrato invited to sing in Portugal only deferred his/r fee because of the Lisbon earthquake on All Saints, 1755. It is said the earthquake alone kept Brazil solvent from singers’ overcharging.
To show how monarchs’ valued castrati, consider this: the war between Sweden and Poland was stopped for the loan of Ferri by the King of Poland. Queen Christina of Sweden demanded a truce and sent her “royal ship to fetch him, while hostilities ceased provisionally”(120).
In an American addendum a century later, the Jubilee Singers from Fisk University tried to raise money by touring the north, but got nowhere until their Oberlin concert followed by Henry Ward Beecher’s rich church in NYC. Proud he was a grad of my Amherst College, in fact I walked past his statue every day—this before they put up a bad statue to Frost. (My teachers there included Bill Pritchard, T Baird and Archibald MacLeish.)

Barbier concludes his book with the last castrato at the Vatican, in the early 20C, and a film on Farinelli in 1994 where Corbiau tried to replicate the voice by blending a soprano and a counter-tenor. His final sentence, "This adventure lasted for three centuries, defying all the laws of morality and reason to achieve the impossible union of monster and angel"(242).

[James Barker]

In much of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe the castrati were the pop idols of their day. Castrated between the ages of 7 and 12 these men- frequently from impoverished backgrounds in Italy- had a small opportunity to become successful, famous and financially secure. Those who made it caused women in Italy, Vienna, London, Madrid, to swoon; they toured the continent entertaining royalty and the super-rich and were lavished with diamonds and objets fashioned from gold. The most famous (and apparently most humble), Farinelli, became confidante of the Spanish monarchs in his 22-year stay at their side.

There is much to admire in Patrick Barbier's book examining 'the history of an extraordinary operatic phenomenon.' I particularly liked his descriptions of the grand Italian opera houses of the 1700s- the superb set pieces by ingenious designers, the use of perspective, the appearances on stage of elephants, camels. All this versus the squalor of the corridors, the boxes of the wealthy (furnished however they wished as they rented them annually), the rabble in the pit spat on by their betters in the boxes.. The author certainly brings to life the social aspect of attending the opera, the fact that the music was not always the main attraction. Rather it was a chance to gossip, to see and be seen.

Clearly the castrati were the most vivid representation of the artifice popular in Italian opera during the late seventieth century into the nineteenth. But this meant a sacrifice that involved much more than two pieces of their anatomy. Rigorous training that could last up to 10 years meant that the boys that entered conservatoires as brand new eunuchs usually lost touch with their family (very often they resented their family, in any case, as often hard-up fathers pushed for the operation in the hope that it would bring financial stability). They often lived isolated lives, attacked by a variety of enemies, although their relationship with the church depended on the proclivities of individual popes. I found it particularly interesting that castrati in Papal-run conservatoires were dressed as cherubs and rented out to families grieving lost babes. The cherub-castrato would watch over the body until it was buried. The castrati most certainly did not have an easy time of it.

There is simply not enough documentation regarding the castrati, so Barbier has to rely often on anecdotes and asides. These are entertaining enough but, just as with the castrati themselves, there is something missing.

I'm not a great fan of opera but as an insight into what I would consider a dark and barbaric chapter of musical history this is a fascinating read. Castrati were known as 'sacred monsters' and this alone indicates how they were considered something of a third sex, diabolically bodied but with voices suggestive of angels.

[Jonathan Vasquez]

*4.5
fascinante.

[Nick]

He asked me first if I am
Man or woman, where I came from,
If people like me are born
With this voice and skill, or rain down
From the sky. In confusion I reply:
If I say ‘man’, I lie,
‘Woman’ I certainly shall not say
And ‘neuter’ would make me blush.
But finding courage I reply
That I’m a man, from Tuscany, and
In my country there are cocks
Who lay eggs and hatch out sopranists;
These cocks are called Norcini,
The brooding goes on for years,
And once the cock has become a capon
The eggs win flattery, love and wealth.

Thus the castrato Balatri attempts to explain himself (his identity, origin, and gender) to Ayuki Khan, of the Kalmyk Khanate at the turn of the eighteenth century. In my mind this conjured medieval images of Kubalai Khan in Xanadu, attracting to his court all the curiosities and exotica of the world; as he may make Muslim debate Nestorian debate Catholic for entertainment, so he may enjoy the dulcet tones of an Italian eunuch castrated in youth to preserve his voice in a high-pitch sonority for life. In reality of course, Balatri was escorted to this Caucasian Khan by Peter the Great as an exercise in Russian cultural imperialism, which, being more sophisticated in the 18th century than it is in the 21st, sought to use an example of the latest musical craze deriving from Italy to showcase Russian engagement in the splendour and sophistication of early modern European culture to a target for vassalisation.

I’d wanted to read more on the castrati after encountering them in both Diarmaid MacCulloch’s book on the history of Christianity and sex, and Tim Blanning’s history of eighteenth century Europe (both absolute bangers). The former used them as an example of the androgynous gender ideal of the angelic and the Church’s generally ambiguous relations with sex and sexuality, whereas in the latter they appear as prime examples of the artificiality of high baroque culture alongside the choreographed “hunting” spectacles of eighteenth century Germany . Of course, the two approaches can be linked to make a notion of the castrati as artificial angels; attempts at making an aesthetic bridge to the divine on a par with the architecture of Bernini. However, I bought the wrong book – I picked this up from a charity shop, thinking it was The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds (Ernest Bloch Lectures), a work I had fished from the footnotes of MacCulloch. This book, to my understanding at least, focuses on the castrati to explore issues of gender, categorisation, and ideal in the eighteenth century. I.e. a critical work informed by sociology, gender studies and other such wokery that I hoped would be quite insightful. Instead, the work I picked up is much more focused on the castrati as an operatic phenomenon and so was not exactly what I was looking for. That being said found it overall an enjoyable and insightful, if often quite frustrating, piece of scholarship and am glad I read it.

My key complaint is that Barbier will often broach fascinating issues and questions only to very quickly drop them and move onto incomprehensible operatic jargon or (admittedly highly amusing) anecdote. Thus, when contemplating the reason for the phenomenon he notes the inadequacy of their vocal power and the papal restriction on female singing as sole explanatory factors, and briefly flirts with concepts of androgyny, artificiality, and the angelic before abruptly pivoting to endless pages on tenor and the minutiae of operatic performance. Likewise, when discussing the opera scene in Italy more generally, we almost get a really interesting discussion of the role of opera and theatre in the shifting nature of publicity in eighteenth century Italy; the increasing role of public criticism, the escape of performance from the private and representative sphere of court to a public display, and the role of theatre as a public space for interstatus socialisation and discussion are all touched upon. But then we quickly move back to the realm of anecdote sans analysis (and these are still very fun! I enjoyed reading about French visitors baffled by the Italian custom of socialising and gambling during performance, only really paying attention if an aria is really good or the king is in attendance). It just hurts that the author comes so close to saying something insightful and then seems to get bored of any attempt at analysis and so feel the need to insert some juicy scandalous detail. Thus, when discussing Christina of Sweden, Barbier teases us with speculation on the link between her own bisexuality and androgyny, and her prolific support for the castrati. He then refuses to say any more on this, but does give us the delightful anecdote that she designed a range of sultry and provocative clothing when in Rome dubbed ‘Innocentian’ in mocking response to Pope Innocent XI’s ban such indecent ‘French’ styles of dress. Likewise we get allusion to the political entanglements of Melani who served as a spy for Cardinal Mazarin, but this bridging of the musical with the world of espionage is not further addressed. The closest we get to any real discussion of a castrato’s involvement in politics is the fascinating case of Farnelli (which makes sense given the author has separately penned a biography of him). Thus, the treatment of this singer’s pivotal role in rescuing two separate Spanish kings from a lethargic insanity and subsequent importance in the Spanish court is very good and the exception that proves the rule. To an extent this is not a fault of the book per se; it is primarily written from the perspective of opera history and not the political, cultural, or sociological and probably does a good job at this. There were several passages I skimmed as to be comprehensible they required getting to grips with more understanding of operatic jargon than I was willing to commit.

Another key issue is that he does little to question the discursive frameworks of the period. Like a pop historian uncritically using Hogarth’s ‘Gin Lane’ as a depiction of social reality, he too often takes the highly gendered (and admittedly quite entertaining) stereotypes and narratives eighteenth century Europeans have bestowed upon us at their word. The following passage should suffice to illustrate my point;

the women singers often made themselves unpopular by their endless tantrums, their intrigues, their unreasonable demands and their haughty manner towards men.

Like I’m not even doubting that some famous prima donnas did demonstrate this kind of behaviour, but the author just takes cultural caricatures at their words sometimes (at least when it comes to women), and it harms the analytical and scholarly power of the book imo. He is more challenging to stereotypes when it comes it the his main subject, the castrati, and even reserves his most acerbic comments for those satirists who unfairly lampoon his darlings. Even so, we still get entertaining stuff on castrati themselves as divas, as the author details how the many vain demands they made came to shape Italian opera from the lack of period-appropriate dress for singers portraying classical characters (Ceaser, Alexander, Zoraster etc.) who appeared instead in the elaborate fashion of the day, to the insistence that any ‘pathetic aria’ allowed the sopranist to sing in chains regardless of context to maximise their individual emotive impact. This is reminiscent of any of the obscure stage demands and whims of petulant twentieth century rockstars. I could not help bring to mind the internal drama in Genesis over Peter Gabriel’s use of (at times messianic) costume in performance. Of course, the difference between the popular and debauched musical genre that is eighteenth century Italian opera, and the exalted and patrician achievement that is English progressive rock in the 1970s, is as wide as the chasm between the vanity of the .primo uomo and Gabriel’s admirable commitment to the profound biblical/Homeric musical analogy his costumes underlined. My pointless crowbarring in of Genesis aside, the point here is that the work frustratingly keeps almost hitting on being scholarly and analytical only to devolve back into this sort of gossipy anecdote that just regurgitates the cultural outlook of the period without treating it as an object of study. This still makes the book quite fun to read, but does damage its explanatory power.

A final point is something that I think the book both benefits and loses from, and that is the authors obvious sympathy with the musical/operatic reasons for castration. On the one hand, this allows for a historicist and sympathetic treatment of a phenomena that it is easy for the modern to write off as barbaric and inhumane. This is important in the sense that understanding value systems and impulses quite different from our own is an important part of any historiographical undertaking. However, I cannot help but feel the author goes a little too native at times in this work - consider the following;

So we have only the testimonies of the period to help us pierce the mystery and comprehend the incomprehensible. But what testimonies, what warmth, what feeling throughout two centuries of memoirs and musical history!

The book is just littered with such exaltatory passages. At times throughout the book, it almost seems the author is of the opinion that the decline and ultimate extinction of the castrati as a musical phenomenon was a bad thing. There are many laments to being unable to recover their voices, to the relative incompetence of male falsettos and female singers in compensating for the loss, and to the fact the sole existing recording is a poor quality record of a choral rather than operatic castrato from the twilight rather than heyday of the ‘profession’ (Alessandro Moreschi sings Ave Maria (no scratch)). This sense of the authors sympathy for the practice is not helped by his obvious contempt for the reformers and philosphes who condemned the it and ultimately aided its extinction. On the one hand this is understandable, as contempt for the practice often came with contempt for the result; the castrato were maligned and mocked by those who viewed the process as unnatural or unethical, treated as monstruous, unproductive, and ridiculous individuals not afforded the status of abuse victims we would now grant them. Thus, it is understandable that an account seeking to be sympathetic to the lives of the castrati would be more drawn to those who celebrated and promoted their fame such as Christina of Sweden or Phillip V. But ultimately it was this appreciation that incentivised and drove the practice in the first place, as Barbier acknowledges. Another point he acknowledges but does not really grapple with is the low success rate of the procedure. Both for practical reasons of the nature of surviving records, and for the sake of interest, the work focuses on the star castrati of early modern Europe who achieved continental fame, becoming the confidents of kings and princes. But the majority were relegated to an obscure life of singing in the local cathedral choir, their musical ability competent but surely not worth the trauma and social ostracism imposed upon them by their elders. Even more unlucky were those who underwent the procedure and came out without any vocal talent at all; the best could be hoped for being charitably accepted (against canon law) into some form of religious life. As noted Barbier acknowledges these poor souls, but even if scant source material is the reason they are not followed further, he does little to account for them in his overall assessment.

Overall, it was a good read and is something worth picking up if you want to know about a strange and unusual element of our fairly recent past. Just felt like it could have been more with a bit application of the authors critical historical faculties.

[Sebastian Nothwell]

Not just a thorough examination of individual castrati lives but also the operatic world that created them. Highly recommended, even (or especially) if you know nothing of opera.

[The Idle Woman]

3.5 stars. For my full review, please see my blog:
http://theidlewoman.blogspot.co.uk/20...

[Jess]

On a low-stakes topic like this, French cultural history is best cultural history: arch, romantic, heedlessly speculative.

“The sincere love felt by certain castrati for a woman sometimes led them into marriage and if this occasionally ended in failure it was never the fault of the couple themselves but of the society in which they lived.”

[Peggy]

This book appeared to be very well researched and thorough, but it was surprisingly slow reading for me. Mostly, I just found it sad and rather depressing. The beginning of the book described the practice of castrating little boys as young as seven and the desperation that drove their parents to allow it. Children in general had such hard lives, especially poor children. Even the castrati boys, who were supposed to have such wonderful opportunities had shockingly hard lives in their prison-like schools. The unbelievably strict discipline and long hours of practice produced unheard of lung capacity and vocal ability but couldn't make up for a genuine lack of talent in many of the boys. Of course, the Catholic church played a major part in this phenomenon. Their church choirs and cardinals benefitted financially and in other ways. Some castrati spent their lives in churches and a few gifted & talented ones became opera stars. The most interesting part of the book to me concerned opera, composers, singers, actors, and the lives of the few castrati who became rich and famous. They had their share of scandals and drama, much like our "jet setters" and rock stars.

[DW Rowlands]

This book was interesting, but at the same time disappointing. Perhaps it would be less so to someone reading it from a history-of-music standpoint, but I was reading it in the hope of learning more about gender roles in early modern Europe. As a nonbinary, somewhat-neutrois-identified reader, I found the book pretty disappointing for both the lack of information it covered, and the author's superficial and not-always-accurate understanding of the medical consequences of castration.

[Ruth]

Super interesting topic and has been on my list for years thanks to Anne Rice. We hard to find but I finally broke down and bought it. Took me a while to slog through it though.

[Rena Sherwood]

This book was originally written in French, using material that was mostly in Italian ... and the reader is still expected to know French, Italian and Latin. The reader is also supposed to know French history, opera and musical terminology. The translator to English must not have been a native speaker, since English names for some phrases are never translated. For example, in English, you refer to Maria Callas by her name -- not "La Callas." And what was going on with the random exclamation points?

I have no idea why I persevered with this. Perhaps its my fascination with the strange and bizarre. This fascination was apparently amped to the "nth" degree for the European musical audiences and upper classes for about 300 years. Castrati were Goddamned rock stars, long before there were rock stars.

There was a lot of speculation about what a castrati's voice was actually like. Only one castrati survived to have his voice recorded. You can find it on YouTube ... and I highly recommend that you don't listen to it. It's absolutely AWFUL. It's generally acknowledged that this last castrati didn't in any way sound like a great castrati like Farenelli ... but the author disagrees and actually likes it. There is no effort to compare what a castrati's voice might have sounded like compared to a 20th century singer.

Farinelli was supposed to've had a vocal range of three octives. Freddie Mercury had a vocal range of FOUR octives (depending on who you read.) So -- the greatest of the castrati sounded like a bad Freddie Mercury impersonator?

On the whole, I'm not altogether sure if the author wrote this book in part to revive castrati in opera. I know biographers or historians tend to fall in love with their subjects, but Jesus. Unfortunately, getting gelded before puberty was no insurance against voices breaking, or worse.

There is one bit in the book that is particularly confusing to me as a horse lover: Farenelli bought "thoroughbred Lichensteinian horses." I don't know that the word "thoroughbred" is incorrectly used as a synonym for "purebred" as seen here. (Thoroughbred only means a particular breed of horse.) I have no idea what horses these animals from Liechtenstein could be, since that country has never been known for producing outstanding horses. I've got a feeling Farenelli was taken in by a horse dealer with a clever tongue.

Now, that would be a book worth reading.

[Leanne]

There is much to admire about this history of the castrati. Some reviewers felt it was a slow read. I think we have gotten so used to wonderfully entertaining books written in the narrative history mode (which can be page-turners like a novel) that it makes it harder to tackle straight expository style history. This was originally written in French so being a translation could have also made it feel bogged down. Interesting, though, that the French were the one people in Europe who were not head over heels over castrati voices, or of Italian opera in general. The French did stand apart in their musical tastes during the Baroque period and in general were not enamored by high voices. And yet not only do we have this wonderful history book, but the popular movie about Farinelli from the 90s was also a French production (Brilliant movie!)

The descriptions of the opera houses were specially dazzling. I really loved the way the author not only described the architecture and history of these opera houses but went to great length to illuminate the way audiences were quite different back then in the days before Mahler (he says Wagner) insisted that audiences sit quietly and face the stage. In trying to describe what things were like in Naples in the 18th century he compares it to attending a religious service in southern Italy today.

His explanations about the history of the castrati in terms of baroque music in general was the best part of the book. This was very well done. Castrati voices and technique certainly fit in with the predilection for artifices, high voices, and ornamentation.

And he was thorough on the role of the Catholic Church. Anne Rice in her novel Cry to Heaven also describes the way castrati boys working in church choirs were sent to as "cherubs" to watch over the bodies of dead children until burial. The book is about the deplorable tradition in terms of opera--but Barbier is very detailed (and even-handed) in his examination of the role of the Catholic church.

[Tracy]

This book was just… dense. I enjoyed it, and I learned a lot, but it was something of a slog to read. I think you would need a grounding in the history of opera for it to go down easy. But I don’t think the author’s overly academic approach helped much. He divided the book up, basically, into the life stages of a castrato: first, castration; then an Italian music school school, singing in the church, singing in the theater, going out in society, etc. and in these he would give myriad examples of how all the major castrati went through these passages. The problem with that, it was very easy to get these singers mixed up so they became a castrati zupa. I’d rather he’d just concentrated on a few to go in-depth on and make anecdotes of all the others.

The book would really be best read before or after seeing a movie like Farinelli or Amadeus, or reading a book like Anne Rice’s Cry to Heaven. In Rice’s case I can see how she went to Barbier’s sources to get her own fictional background right.

As said I did enjoy learning about early opera but boy am I still pissed there’s no way to hear the group of people I’ve learned about.

[Natacha Pavlov]

This insightful read figures as a favorite of mine for this year.
In a phenomenon that’s as strange and barbaric to us as it was then (at least in principle), a castrato is an opera singer who’s been castrated before puberty to preserve the soprano or contralto range of his voice.
This authoritative book is the first study of the phenomenon of the castrati in relation to the baroque period, covering the lives and triumphs of more than 60 singers when the fashion for castrati was at its peak. Arguably the most famous of these was Farinelli, who enjoyed a successful career at the Spanish court that included singing to improve the king’s health. There’s also a 1994 film on him that—though highly fictionalized—sheds light on the 18th century craze for these uniquely gifted singers.

[Lauren Patton]

Really interesting, as I expected it to be. The information was laid out in a readable and digestible way and appeared to be well-researched. For readers of European history, social history, and music/performance history.

[Liz]

A wonderful cultural overview. Read this, then listen to recordings of Moreschi.

[James Lombardi]

The subject here is fascinating to me and I do appreciate a book like this existing. For the most part I enjoyed this, but there are large portions of this I found a bit boring.

[Laura L. Van Dam]

Uno de mis libros favoritos de no ficción.
Es evidente que mi amor por este periodo histórico, por un lado, y por la música de esta era, por otro, me hacen bastante poco objetiva. Pero el libro está tan bien escrito, y las historias son tan bellas, en algunos casos tristes, nunca aburridas, bien documentadas, que lo releo cada tanto y me vuelvo a enganchar.
Una gran adición a la biblioteca de cualquiera que se interese por la música, la historia o este período.