CULTURAL PERCEPTIONS
SOURCE: Deborah Rohr: The Careers of British Musicians, 1750-1850: A Profession of Artisans (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 2001 - Copyright © 2001 Deborah Rohr)
During the eighteenth century the evolution of new gender roles and beliefs [in England] found expression in misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, and more restrictive definitions of masculinity and femininity. An obvious focal point for such anxieties about otherness was provided early in the century by the full-scale importation of music and musicians for the Italian Opera. Thomas McGeary has identified the intricate and pervasive cultural, national, and gender anxieties that were stirred by the Opera, including the persistent notion that the enterprise was intrinsically feminine.
The castrato singers presented especially complex gender ambiguities. English fears of opera in general, and the castrati in particular, included the possible feminizing effects on listeners; beliefs that homosexuality had been imported from Italy along with the Opera and that the practice would spread; and fears of the attractiveness of castrati to women. The high fees paid to the singers were described by one critic as the Italians "cuckolding" the nation. In sum, the effeminate Opera threatened the masculine basis of British culture, and "questioned and threatened the stability of those gender distinctions essential to maintaining stable institutions". In fact, such fears encompassed an entire complex of class, gender, national identity, religious, and cultural associations. An aristocracy spending large sums of English money to import homosexuality, castrati, Catholicism, and music into London threatened masculine, Protestant "British sense, reason, wit, and virtue".
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