(It.).
A type of high-voiced male singer, brought about by castrating young boys with promising voices before they reached puberty. It was central to both church music and opera, in countries under Italian influence, throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, and disappeared from Vatican church music only as late as c1920; it had vanished from opera by 1830. At the height of their popularity, leading castratos were among the most famous and most highly paid musicians in Europe, and their virtuoso singing method had considerable influence on the development of both oratorio and opera. The term Musico was commonly used in the 18th century as a euphemism for castrato.
The practice of castration for musical purposes was confined almost wholly to Italy, though it may have originated in Spain and was occasionally adopted in the southern German states. The first documented castrato singers appeared in Ferrara and Rome, about 1550–60. One entered the Sistine Chapel choir in 1562, others the Munich chapel choir under Lassus by 1574. Then, and up to their eventual disappearance, most castratos were church singers; some undertook no other work, while others also performed as chamber singers in the service of noble or royal patrons or appeared in occasional, often local and minor, opera seasons on the side. The whole practice appears to have been bound up not with the rise of opera (which it antedated) but with the profound and lasting economic crisis that struck most parts of Italy about the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, and with the accompanying surge in the numbers of those joining the monastic orders. There is evidence to suggest that in 17th-century Italy castration for musical purposes was regarded as a specialized form of the celibacy imposed by a monastic vocation and, for the boy’s family, one more likely to bring financial security. It did not then attract the obloquy that was visited upon it in the late 18th century; operations were carried out with only perfunctory concealment, and were sometimes paid for by the ruler of a princely state or by the governing body of a leading church.
The taste for castrato voices arose mainly because in Italy women’s voices were not allowed in church. Of the available substitutes, choirboys were no sooner trained than lost. Falsettists came to seem unsatisfying compared with castratos, particularly in soprano parts; the use of falsettists in alto parts went on side by side with castratos, to whom they were regarded, however, as inferior – for, odd though it now seems, castrato voices were referred to as ‘natural’ and ‘true’ (sincere) while falsettists’ voices were artificial. The quality of castrato voices cannot now be recaptured; the gramophone records made in 1902–3 by Alessandro Moreschi, a leading soprano in the Cappella Sistina, give only a faint notion. Contemporary accounts speak of uncommon brilliance allied with power, a wide range, a breathing capacity beyond the reach of most normal voices, and sometimes an unearthly timbre (not at all like that of falsettists). This was true of the best castratos; many turned out to be mediocre or poor singers, and had none or few of these merits.
This quality of voice was accounted for in part by physiology, in part by training. The operation ensured that the thoracic cavity developed greatly, sometimes disproportionately (leading to a form of gigantism), while the larynx and the vocal cords developed much more slowly and had considerable power brought to bear on them. Training was not interrupted by puberty as in normal males; since the whole point of the operation was to produce a professional singer, a young castrato would as a rule undergo regular training from an early age, often in instrumental music and in theory as well as in singing. Castratos were therefore often more accomplished musicians than were most normal singers. This intensive and continuous training (whether with a private teacher or in one of the many schools attached to churches, orphanages and other religious institutions throughout Italy) made possible the cultivation of the elaborately florid singing for which the best of the castratos became famous, and which was essential to oratorio, in Italy at least as important a genre as opera until about 1750. Two castratos, Pier Francesco Tosi and Giovanni Battista Mancini, wrote the most influential 18th-century treatises on singing.
Within the new genre of opera in the early 17th century, castratos were not predominant as they were to become later on. In Venetian opera through most of the century women were at least as important, because of the stress on eroticism. Leading male parts, it seems, were assigned to castratos or to normal voices according to which singers were available rather than on any set plan. In Rome, a few leading castratos who were mainly church singers appeared in occasional operas put on by the cardinal who patronized them, for instance Loreto Vittori and Marc’Antonio Pasqualini. The Papal States (Bologna and its neighbouring towns excepted) banned women from appearing on stage: until 1798 women’s parts in opera were sung by young castratos. Many famous singers made their débuts in this way, generally in their teens.
From about 1680 the expectation, eventually the rule, was that the leading male part in a serious opera (primo uomo) should be sung by a castrato; there might be a less important secondo uomo part, also for a castrato, with tenors singing the parts of kings and old men. This was also the period when Italian opera came to be given fairly regularly both in Italy and in those parts of Europe under Italian musical influence – in the German-speaking countries and the Iberian peninsula, from about 1710 in London, from the 1730s in St Petersburg. The best castratos therefore became international stars, welcomed and highly paid in all the leading courts and capital cities, with the notable exception of Paris (where, after Cardinal Mazarin’s attempts at importation in the mid-17th century, they were not allowed to appear in opera; some leading castratos gave concerts when they were passing through, and some much more modest ones remained on the king’s musical establishment as church singers until the Revolution).
The reasons for this new dominance of the castrato voice are interrelated. Italian composers of the period 1680–1720 began to write operas calling for more technically demanding coloratura singing; the range expected of leading singers widened, and the tessitura generally rose, as it was to go on doing (for both men and women) through most of the 18th century. Virtuoso castratos were now available in numbers in the service of princes who promoted frequent opera seasons: Giovanni Francesco Grossi (‘Siface’) and Francesco Antonio Mamiliano Pistocchi were only the most prominent among a new group of star singers. It was still possible at this time for a famous castrato not to sing in opera at all, like Giovanni Battista Merola, active in Naples in the late 17th century, or, like Matteo Sassano (‘Matteuccio’), whose career lasted from 1684 to 1711, to do so only occasionally. But from then on a famous castrato was in the first place an opera singer. Church choirs had increasingly to grant their best castratos leave to sing in opera.
Castratos occasionally appeared in comic opera but (outside Rome) normal voices were there the rule. In the newly refined genre of serious opera, on the other hand, the castrato voice with its special brilliance appears to have struck contemporaries as the right medium to convey nobility and heroism. Objections, when they came, were to the incongruity of castratos in general – or, on moral grounds, to their singing of women’s parts – rather than to their appearance as heroes or lovers.
Serious opera in the first two-thirds or so of the 18th century was dominated by a succession of famous castratos, of whom Nicolo Grimaldi (‘Nicolini’), Antonio Maria Bernacchi, Francesco Bernardi (‘Senesino’), Carlo Broschi (‘Farinelli’), Giovanni Carestini, Gaetano Majorano (‘Caffarelli’) and Gaetano Guadagni are only the best known. Such artists could command engagements in one European capital after another at unprecedented fees – in Turin the primo uomo’s fee for the carnival season was sometimes equal to the annual salary of the prime minister – while they also kept, as insurance, permanent appointments in a monarch’s chapel choir or a cathedral, and some of them performed there regularly.
Their achievements are now difficult to gauge. Their command of vocal agility – of trills, runs and ornamentation, especially in the da capo section of an aria – was clearly central to their success. So, at least for some, was a phenomenally wide range: Farinelli is said to have commanded more than three octaves (from c to d'''), others more than two, though, like some modern sopranos and tenors, they were apt to lose the upper part of their range as their careers wore on. It would, however, be a mistake to regard leading castratos as vocal acrobats and no more. Command of ‘pathetic’ singing – soft, laden with emotion, powered by controlled devices such as messa di voce – was highly regarded: it was, for instance, central to the reputation of Gasparo Pacchiarotti. Nor was acting ability ignored: Guadagni’s performance as Gluck’s original Orpheus was thought deeply affecting. The issue is clouded by the habit of commentators through most of the 18th century of bemoaning the supposed decadence of opera through an excessive cult of vocalism and ornamentation. This was in part a literary convention. The cult flourished, and was in practice forwarded by some of those who decried it.
Another contemporary habit that needs to be guarded against is that of mocking the castratos as grotesque, extravagant, inordinately vain near-monsters. This was in part a nervous reaction against a phenomenon experienced as sexually threatening twice over: the fact of castration was disconcerting in itself, yet according to legend (held by most modern medical opinion to be baseless, though perpetuated, along with much traditional obfuscation, in the 1995 film Farinelli) castratos could perform sexually all the better for the loss of generative power. In part the mockery visited upon castratos was roused by highly paid star singers in general, among whom they were the most prominent. Because of their musical education they often did well as teachers; some who had also had a general education acted in retirement, or even during their singing careers, as antiquarian booksellers, diplomats, or officials in royal households.
From about 1740, if not earlier, the number of castratos, which may have reached several hundred at any one time in the middle decades of the 17th century, began to fall, and the practice of castration for musical purposes came under increasing attack even in Italy. The reasons for the general decline – which to begin with affected church choirs more obviously than the operatic stage – are probably to be sought in relative economic improvement during the 18th century, and in the simultaneous decline in the kind of Christian asceticism that had held up celibacy as an unmixed good. (The cause once assigned, the ban imposed by the Jacobins after Napoleon’s invasion of Italy in 1796, postdated the decline and was anyhow temporary.) But for Giovanni Battista Velluti, scarcely any castratos appeared in opera after about 1800. Only the Papal States (reduced, from 1870, to the Vatican) went on making and employing a small number of castrato church singers.
BurneyFI
BurneyH
ES (F. D’Amico)
Grove6 (T. Walker)
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JOHN ROSSELLI