Snip

Giuseppe Giuliano de la Terra de la Castelluccia kneels humbly at the feet of Their Most Illustrious Lordships and begs them to be kind enough to admit him a student of the Royal Conservatoire of Santa Maria di Loreto, being a eunuch, with a soprano voice, and undertakes to remain in the Conservatoire for ten years."

After the audition:

Carrying out the orders from Your Most Illustrious Lordships, I have examined the above mentioned petitioner and found he has an excellent soprano voice, proving that he has talent and the wish, I hope, to sing well. — Maestro Gallo

So it would seem that little capon Giuliano was admitted to the Loreto, where he was subjected to the long years of intensive training characteristic of the great Neapolitan conservatories. His life was no longer his own: kept separate from the instrumentalists and composers, he lived on a quasi-monastic schedule that demanded his constant dedication and hard work. He started his day as early as 4:45 am in the summer with singing the Laudate Pueri Dominum while making his bed (in a common dormitory room) and washing his hands and face. He spent his early morning hours in chapel and ended his day—as late as 11:30 pm—in the same place. Between the two, he went through a series of two-hour classes or individual appointments, typically studying music theory, solfege, instrumental playing (particularly the harpsichord and, later, pianoforte), and of course voice, in addition to a reasonably well-rounded curriculum of languages, literature, and even science and mathematics.

His vocal training would focus on breathing, particularly the deep costal-abdominal style that could result in extraordinary feats of breath control and stamina. Over the years he would be expected to master passaggi, trills, messa di voce, martellato, gorgheggi, agility, mordents, and appoggiaturas. He would learn to hold a note for an incredible time, to combine hall-filling volume with quicksilver nimbleness. With the guidance of a teacher at the level of Nicolo Porporà, our little Giuliano could acquire a reliable vocal technique that would last for his entire career.

But a career precisely for what? The historical record is brutally clear on that subject: most castrati eeked out a paltry living singing in church choirs, if that. Many of them wound up abandoning singing altogether, typically moving into the clergy if lucky, or into the church courtyards with begging bowl extended if not. Castrati were not as a rule employable in everyday society; many were strangely-shaped or startlingly tall, with secondary female sexual characteristics and often wildly unpredictable emotional makeups. It wasn’t their fault. Males reaching the age of puberty without a supply of testosterone are at the mercy of a cocktail of hormones that flourish unimpeded by the normal evolutionary checks and balances. Testosterone counterbalances growth hormone, for example, which is why so many castrati wound up spindly and tall, with toothpick bones that could snap at the least impact. Their body chemistries were chaotic, and thus they reached adulthood with whatever psycho-somatic balances that could be achieved under such circumstances.

A life spent in poverty, singing in a third-rate church choir. It would have been better for those kids to stay home on the family farm, genitalia intact. At least they might have gotten more to eat, and they could have enjoyed the basic human pleasures of wife and family. But instead they were castrated—not always responsibly or properly—and packed off to schools like the Loreto or the Gesù Cristo or San Onofrio or the Turchini, there to be trained like prize race horses on the chance of winning the era’s equivalent of the Kentucky Derby.

And quite a prize it was, too. A castrato who made it big in the opera houses of Europe raked in money like a maharajah. It wasn’t untypical for the star castrato of a Baroque London opera production to make four hundred times more than the prompter. Consider that Caffarelli, one of the superstars of the day, made in 1737 over three hundred times the income required to sustain a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. The star castrati were pampered and indulged, their silliest whims and most blatant vanities catered to with cringing servility. They got away with levels of diva-hood that even a firebrand like Maria Callas would have found excessive. Oh, once in a while they were called to account, such as the English lord who stomped backstage during a rehearsal and thrashed Senesino after the boorish alto had made nasty remarks to the lord’s mistress. Nor did every impresario, producer, director, stagehand, conductor, or composer take it all lying down. Senesino went head-to-head with Handel (no slouch he in the arrogance department) and came out rather the worse for it. "Damned fool", said Handel.

But at their best, the castrati were miraculous combinations of teen-idol glam and unparalleled vocal splendor. Imagine Justin Bieber crossed with Cecilia Bartoli crossed with Joan Sutherland crossed with Luciano Pavarotti, with just a soupçon of Mick Jagger tossed in for garnish. All that androgynous sex appeal (provided the castrato wasn’t one of those who turned hippopotamus, or looked like a praying mantis) with singing voices that offered the resonant power of a man and the clarity, range, and brilliance of a woman. Then consider all that intensive musical training; maybe not all of the castrati displayed refined musical taste, but they knew their stuff. They were real musicians, not just illiterate singing mules.

If Caffarelli and Senesino represent the bitch-diva flavor of castrati, then Carlo Broschi, a.k.a. Farinelli, was the polar opposite. The greatest star of them all, he was also a musician of refinement, an attractive, normally-shaped man with precisely that fluffy, forbidden-fruit twink persona that has made untold millions for teeny-bopper idols such as David Cassidy, the Jonas Brothers, and now Justin Bieber. It doesn’t hurt one bit that Farinelli was also an intelligent, well-balanced man known for his sobriety, responsible lifestyle, and generous personality. Nobody had anything bad to say about him, and in the dishy world of eighteenth-century English tabloid journalism, that’s really saying something. Nor did Farinelli hang on until he had become an anachronism, as did Senesino; he went graciously into retirement at his prime, spending his life in the service of the King of Spain, for whom he acted as adviser, confidant, friend, and psychotherapist of sorts.



Farinelli: teen-idol glam in the 18th century

They were an odd, tragic, but fascinating lot, the castrati. Nowadays we depend on highly-trained female mezzos or male countertenors to give us a sense of the awesome vocal technique of a great castrato in full flower. Certainly there’s no going back to the past, not at that price. And even if by some horrid turn of injustice the idea of castrating a pre-pubescent boy should stop seeming so criminally hateful, we’ve lost the training, and that—not the departed testes—is what made the castrati so remarkable. We don’t really know how the great masters like Porpora or Francesco Durante did it, and trying to decipher their techniques from the surviving documentation is bound to be an exercise in futility. Consider how warped our understanding is of even relatively recent teachers such as Theodore Leschetizky or Artur Schnabel, often passed down by students whose hero-worship of their mentors has led them into romanticized and inflationary rhetorical glosses. No: the day of the castrati is over, and the sound of their voices lost forever. Those few recordings left by Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato, cannot be taken as anything more than oddball curiosities. Moreschi was a lousy musician, prone to every overblown habit of the late 19th century when he was trained, and far beyond his (pallid) prime when he made his few discs. Nor was the castrato tradition anywhere near flourishing in Moreschi’s youth—it had peaked a century-and-a-half earlier and was in a final state of disreputable decline. So forget Moreschi.

I should mention that the operation itself has been studied by a number of medical researchers. Castration was practiced throughout Italy, although it would seem rather on the sly; nobody wanted to admit that it was being done anywhere. The Italians may have gloried in the sound of their prime vocal capons, but they were distinctly ashamed of the requisite surgical measures. So documentation is rather scarce. However, Dr. Meyer Melicow provided an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that provides some guidance. It seems that the boys—between about eight and eleven years old—would be sedated with an opium tincture, after which they were placed in a cold-water bath to help staunch bleeding. According to Dr. Melicow, often the testes were rubbed until they were no longer palpable, with knives playing only a subsidiary role in the procedure. Apparently it had been determined (through trial-and-error, yikes) that a bit of residual testosterone could prove beneficial, thus the roundabout approach rather than the quick bladed solution. It also makes sense given the state of medical technology at the time; less chance of the poor kid bleeding to death or succumbing to infection.

Which means that perhaps the title of my article—Snip—isn’t altogether accurate. Perhaps I should rename it Squish.

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