FICHAMENTO

The Castrati in Opera

1. Rise and Fall of the Castrati

 “The opera buffa was everything that the serious opera was not. It was natural, lively,
based on everyday life, and often in the local dialect.” (p. 16)
 “At Rome, for instance, where women were banned from the stage throughout the
eighteen century, the female parts had to be taken by male sopranos, in comic as in
serious operas.” (p. 17)
 “The castrati for their part, and Marchesi in particular, seem to have welcomed the
chance to play characters nearer to everyday life than Alexander the Great and
Orpheus, and even encourage the trend” (p. 19)
 “Where realism is beginning to be prized, a tenor or baritone hero is obviously more
suitable than one with a soprano voice” (p. 19)
 “Operas on the old Metastasian type of subject continued to be written, but they too
showed and increasing tendency to approach the comic in style, as the comic had
already evolved towards the serious.
 “[footnote 1] A very popular opera of the day, showing a strange mixture of old and
new tendencies, was Zingarelli’s ‘Giulietta e Romeo’ (1796), in which the hero’s role
was sung by a castrato. Tradition dies hard, and in Bellini’s version of the
Shakespearean tragedy (‘I Capuleti ed I Montecchi’, 1830) the part was taken by a
woman.” (p. 20)
 “Thus it was not Rossini but Meyerbeer who gained the strange distinction of being
the last operatic composer of importance to write for the male soprano voice;” (p. 21)
 “So, after two hundred years of splendour, and a long and gradual sunset, the story of
these strange creatures mutilated in the name of art, but sometimes reaping rewards
more glittering than those any other singer have achieved, had almost ended.” (p. 21)
 “(…) the last of all seems to have been Alessandro Moreschi (1858-1922)” (p. 22)

2. Causes of the Castrati’s Supremacy

 “As was shown in the last chapter, the castrati were very important figures in opera
almost from its inception until 1800 and even a little later, and were absolutely pre-
eminent during a large part of the time; yet the causes of their popularity have never,
perhaps, been quite satisfactorily explained.” (p. 23)
 “Castrati, as was mentioned earlier, were made use of in churches because women
were not allowed to sing there; and the introduction of castrati on to the stage
undoubtedly arose from a similar reason.” (p. 23)
 “It would have been absurd to have a tenor or a bass singing a feminine part; whist
boys soon proved as unsatisfactory as stage singer as they already had in church choirs
(…), the only course left open was to make use of castrati.” (p. 24)
 “The early seventeenth century was in fact an age of celebrated women singers: but it
is probable that they themselves, or most of them, as respected and lionised members
of society, would not have been willing to lose caste by appearing on the stage in
public.” (p. 24)
 Continuing “Besides, they were essentially singers da camera, with a style no doubt
akin to that of a present-day lieder singer, and their delicate and intimate art would
have been dissipated in the yawning spaces of the theatre.” (p. 24)
 “The Church was place in a curious quandary: for, in discouraging women from the
lyric stage, with the estimable aim of safeguarding public morals, it implicitly
necessitated the practice of castration, which in theory it should have opposed with all
its might – quite apart from encouraging the more abstruse forms of sin that were in
any case prevalent.” (p. 24)
 “The attitude of the Church towards the practice of castration continued to be
absurdly inconsistent and unreasonable throughout the eighteenth century: anyone
known to have been connected with such an operation was punishable with
excommunication (…).” (p. 25)
 [footnote] “The word ‘musico’ came to be used very nearly exclusively as a synonym
for ‘castrato’, though originally it had no such connotation. ‘Evirato’ is another
commonly-used term.” (p. 25)
 “Goethe, of all unexpected people, was so enthusiastic about the travestied castrati
that he went so far as to advocate their superseding of actresses in every type of
theatrical production.” (p. 26)
 “Consolino, another castrato, was able to carry on an affair with a society woman
under her husband’s nose, by the simple expedient of arriving in one of his stage
costumes; and it was not uncommon for castrati to go about in women’s clothes all
the time.” (p. 27)
 “Occasionally, it seems, women did appear on the Roman stage, pretending to be
castrati pretending to be women – a singular state of affairs which was of course quite
illegal.” (p. 27)
 “It was in these particulars especially that the castrati were considered superior to
women: their training was in general much more rigorous and sound, and they
possessed more application and perseverance.” (p. 30)
 “So much for the rivalry between the castrati and female singers: but what remains to
be examined is the singular neglect of natural male voices throughout the period in
question. It has been computed that, in the eighteenth century, seventy per cent of all
male opera-singers were castrati.” (p. 31)
 “One reason was undoubtedly a purely physical one; for a man’s vocal chords
inevitably thicken at puberty, and in doing so lose a good deal of their agility. No
natural man’s voice could have encompassed the fantastic bravura passages that were
then so much admired, and considered indispensable for the principal characters in a
opera.” (p. 31)
 “The percentage of castrato parts in individual operas was at its highest during the
early Roman and Venetian periods, where frequently all the male characters were
assigned to sopranos and contraltos, and female characters were proportionately few
– as they are, generally speaking, in Shakespearean drama.” (p. 32)
 “Towards the end of the eighteenth century, in the serious opera, there was a
tendency to employ tenors more and more in the parts that would have been taken by
a ‘second’ castrato, and there was often not more than one castrato part in an opera:
not so much because castrati were going out of favour, as for the sake of variety – for
the very popular comic opera had by then reconciled audiences to a larger dose of
tenor and bass voices.” (p. 32)
 “Thus, out of eleven characters, four were sung by castrati, three by natural male
voices, and four by women. Of the women, however, three were singing male roles,
which in another performance might equally have been sung by castrati.” (p.33)
3. Life and Times of the castrati
 “The castrati were born, as a general rule, of humble parents; for only those in fairly
pressing need of money would have consented to the mutilation of their children.
Among these unfortunates, however, it was the accepted thing to sell any male child
who showed the slightest aptitude for music, or signs of a potentially fine voice, into
such musical slavery, much as the poor of industrial England sold their children to be
sent down the mines, or to become chimney-sweeps.” (p. 38)
 “When a virtuoso is a contraltist or sopranist.” (p. 38)

4. Careers of some well-known castrati

 Annibali, Domenico – alto (Hasse operas) (p. 84)
 Appiani, Giuseppe
 Aprile, Giuseppe – soprano
 Bernacchi, Antonio Maria – alto
 Bernardi, Francesco (Senesino) – alto
 Broschi, Carlo (Farinelli) – soprano
 Carestini, Giovanni – soprano
 Cecchi, Domenico (Il Cortona) – soprano
 Conti, Gioacchino (Gizziello) – soprano
 Crescentini, Girolamo – soprano
 Dal Prato, Vincenzo – high mezzo soprano
 Ferri, Baldassare - soprano
 Grimaldi, Nicolò (Nicolino) - alto
 Grossi, Giovanni Francesco (Siface) – soprano
 Guadagni, Gaetano (Cosimo) – alto
 Guarducci, Tommaso – soprano
 Majorano, Gaetano (Caffarelli) – mezzo-soprano
 Manzuoli, Giovanni (Siccianoccioli) – soprano
 Marchesi, Luigi –
 Martini, Andrea (Senesino) –
 Millico, Giuseppe – soprano
 Monticelli, Angelo Maria – soprano
 Pacchierotti, Gasparo – soprano
 Pistocchi, Francesco Antonio –
 Rauzzini, Venanzio – soprano
 Roncaglia, Francesco – soprano
 Rubinelli, Giovanni Maria – alto
 Salimbeni, Felice – soprano
 Sassani, Matteo (Matteuccio) – soprano
 Scalzi, Carlo – soprano
 Tenducci, Giusto Ferdinando (Senesino) – soprano
 Velluti, Giovanni Battista – soprano
Guide to operatic roles & arias

1. Voice Categories
2. A close look at each voice category
3. Voice categories to roles
4. Operas to roles