THE AGE OF THE CASTRATO VOICE
SOURCE: Friedrich S. Brodnitz, M.D., The NATS Bulletin (1974)
Castration of adolescents and adults has been practiced since antiquity for a variety of reasons. Young prisoners of war in Greece were castrated as slaves for male brothels. Eunuchs served in large numbers on Oriental courts and in the imperial establishment of Byzantium. Some of them rose to positions of great influence. The eunuch Narses in Constantinople became the greatest army leader of the sixth century. Only under Mosaic law were eunuchs excluded from the "congregation of the Lord" (Deuteronomy 23:1)
Castration has been administered for punishment or for cruel revenge of which the great Abelard is the best known example. It has been done out of religious fervor, from Origen (second century) who castrated himself out of zeal for spiritual purity to the strange sect of the Skopzen in Russia and Rumania that numbered thousands of adherents until the nineteenth century.
The castration of children for the sole purpose of producing a special type of voice is a historic phenomenon of unusual interest. It has been described by Haboeck (1921), Duey (1951), Heriot (1956), Moses (1960), Luchsinger and Arnold (1965 pps. 189-191), and Melicow and Pulrang (1974). The use of castrato singers goes back to the Eastern churches of the Middle Ages. Following St. Paul's dictum "let your women keep silence in the church; for it is not permitted for them to speak" (1 Corinthians 14:34) female singers were not used in church choirs. The attitude of church authorities toward castration was somewhat ambiguous. While some popes threatened castrators with excommunication, Clement III permitted the use of castrati "ad honorem Dei." Castrati were still singing in the Sistine Chapel in Rome until the end of the nineteenth century when Leo XIII officially condemned their employment. The last of them, Moreschi, died in 1922 and even left a gramophone recording that is a rare collector's item.
The great age of the castrato singer began with the appearance of opera as a new and exciting art form. Starting in 1597 in the house of a rich amateur. Jacopo Corsi, as a musical experiment of the "Dramma per Musica" it developed quickly into a formalized type of composition. The performance of Peri's Euridice in 1600 is the first recorded example of a complete opera. It reached perfection by the genius of Monteverdi for whom the first opera house was built in Venice. The new musical movement spread fast, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century all European courts competed in building opera houses as centers of elegant entertainment. Most operas written during the seventeenth and eighteenth century contained parts for castrati. During his work as opera impresario Handel used castrati extensively. Gluck wrote his Orfeo for a castrato, and even the young Mozart used the castrato del Prato for the part of Iadamantes in his opera Idomeneo.
Castrati became the great superstars of the epoch. Commanding fabulous salaries they traveled all over Europe celebrated like the film stars of our time. This artistic vogue together with the demand for church choirs created a great market for castrati. At the height of the period literally thousands of poor parents in Italy sold boys to castrators who wielded the coltello, the little knife. Of course, only a small percentage of the victims later developed voices that were good enough for church choirs, and even fewer of them made the grade as successful opera singers. It is sad to contemplate the fate of the many who had to go through life as eunuchs who never achieved artistic success.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century the role of the castrati declined slowly, but the acquired taste for their type of singing lingered on. Napoleon was so impressed by the performance of the castrato Fitis in Crescentini's Romeo and Juliette that he bestowed on him a high decoration. In 1814 the famous German choir leader, Zelter, visited the cathedral in Cologne and wrote to his friend Goethe: "in such an auditorium music without male sopranos will always be moderately effective." In opera the last castrati were heard in London in 1844.
The procedure of castration was usually performed at the age of seven to eight years. The boy went then through puberty without the physiologic growth of the larynx that is stimulated by the gonads. Most of the castrati became very tall, some with fat breasts and buttocks. But quite a few remained slender with long arms and legs, elongated chests and necks. In 1909, Tandler and Gross of Italy had the unusual chance of dissecting the body of a 28-year-old castrato. The thyroid notch was barely visible and the whole larynx was strikingly small. The length of the vocal cords amounted to only 14mm, which corresponds to the vocal cords of a coloratura soprano.
The castrati sang with the lung power of an adult and the larynx of a child. This enabled them to spin out long musical phrases in a single breath. With growing age their voices slowly dropped from soprano to alto, but they always maintained a peculiar character that differentiated them from the typical timbre of normal adult male or female voices. The one existing recording that was mentioned above gives only a poor impression of the castrato sound because of the limitation of sound reproduction at the beginning of this century. The so-called countertenors who sing today with groups that perform baroque music come nearest to castrato voices but they lack the "natural" childlike quality of the genuine castrati.
As soon as he reached adolescence the castrato underwent a rigorous training that produced voices of technical perfection that was probably greater than anything we hear today. For years they were made to repeat the same complicated vocal exercises until they were able to sing with the agility that baroque arias required. The castrato voice fitted perfectly the type of music that was written in the baroque and rococo. The opera audience of that time was not interested in the realism of action and of stage figures that we expect today. When Handel wrote his Giulio Cesare he did not envision to present on the state a masculine great leader of soldiers; he used a castrato alto for the part. Today this role is sung by a baritone. Handel and his audience preferred a singer who could sing to perfection the complicated coloraturas of Caesar's arias.
The subjects of baroque operas were mostly mythological events. The impersonal desexed voice of the castrato was ideally suited for the gods and the mythological figures. Everything about the staging was done to create an atmosphere of artificiality. Stage sets and costumes were not intended to recreate the world of Greece or Rome. Rather they followed the taste of the period as one still can see it in baroque paintings: the men wear costumes of female richness, elaborate long-hair wigs, and helmets with wallowing plumes. In this connection it is interesting to look for a moment of the further development of operatic styles. In Mozart's later operas it is the baritone with his deep masculine voice who takes the center of the stage and "gets the girl." Figaro and Don Giovanni (the all-time symbol of triumphant male sexuality) are both baritones. Only later begins the reign of the tenor with his high voice that often has distinctive female undertones. And then again the crossover of the sexes appears: Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier is sung by a soprano who is victorious over the very male basso, Ochs von Lerchenau.
A deeper-reaching attempt to explain the significance of the castrato age has been made by Moses (1960) in an interesting paper on the psychology of the castrato voice. He interprets the emergence of this vocal fashion as the fulfillment of an age-old dream wish of bisexual hermaphroditism. Even if one does not follow Moses in some of his somewhat overdrawn conclusions, there is left enough of a solid basis for his theory. Hermaphroditic mythology plays an important part in cultural history. In collections of primitive art one sometimes see sculptures of idols each with female breasts and a penis. Even in the mythology of classical Greece, Zeus, who otherwise pursues women with great vigor, gives birth to the goddess Athena who emerges from his head in full armor. In the Renaissance the long hair and the cult of the male leg have decidedly female undertones in a period that otherwise celebrated brutal male aggressivity.
Voices mirror not only individual characters but the spirit of a period as well. In this sense the voice of the castrato personifies the bisexual ideal with its unity of a female voice in a man's body. In the mythological atmosphere of the baroque opera the castrato portrayed gods and mythological persons who presented male and female characteristics in a vocal hermaphroditic combination.
In an unfinished book that Paul Moses left at his death he predicted, over ten years ago, quite correctly the approach of another age of crossover of the sexes. The young generation of today favors fashions that obliterate the differences between the sexes. Girls wear pants, and young men sport girlish long hair and wear necklaces and bracelets. The classical love song of the nineteenth century, the love-centered operettas, and the popular songs of the "June-moon" variety of the first half of this century have given way to the harsh rhythms of rock and roll of the unisex generation. And the phoniatrist sees among his patients an increasing number of young adult males who do not use the deep masculine voice that the pubertal growth of the larynx offers but continue to speak in an artificial high pitch of almost female sound.
The history of the castrato opera stars is full of colorful and interesting periods. In spite of their lack of some of the attributes of male sexuality, these celebrated artists were quite attractive to women. Their affairs were eagerly discussed as are today those of famous entertainers and prizefighters. It has been suggested that their successes with women may have been due, at least in part, to the certainty that such affairs could not lead to unwanted results. Tenucci, one of the greatest of the castrati, eloped from Dublin with a girl from a prominent family and even married her.
The most interesting story is that of Farinelli because it is a well-documented example of music therapy. After a brilliant career in opera he went to Madrid where he became a confidant and an influential figure at the court of Philipp V and of his successor Ferdinand VI. He was called to Madrid to treat the king who suffered from "incurable melancholia" which, from its description, resembled severe schizophrenia. For twenty years, night after night, he sang the same arias for the king. The sexless, depersonalized, and instrumentlike voice of the castrato had a calming influence on the king's sick mind. One is reminded of David playing the harp for the disturbed King Saul. Among the many roles that castrati played in baroque society, this one as the healer is the most fascinating one.
The discussion of such an interesting period as the age of the castrato voice transcends the description of a vocal curiosity. it reminds us that a "normal" voice is only a physiologic term. Tastes and fashions vary from culture to culture. The high falsetto of an Arab singer is normal for Oriental ears that have become conditioned to it. And the voice of the castrato was normal for audiences through many centuries.
The vocal ideal of the castrato voice was the expression of a musical image that was formed by cultural undercurrents that have surfaced recurrently throughout the history of mankind and continue to do so. There is hardly a greater contrast imaginable than between the coloraturas of the castrato and the frenetic warble of the pop singer. But both fashions of singing, as has been shown above, may spring from the same cultural archetype. Thus, the contemplation of the castrato age may help the speech clinician to understand better and to deal more effectively with the emergence of new styles of vocal use.
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REFERENCES
Brodnitz, F.S. Keep Your Voice Healthy, (Charles C. Thomas , Publisher, Springfield, Illinois, 1973).
Duey, P.A. Bel Canto in Its Golden Age. (Columbia University, New York: King's Crown, 1951).
Haboeck, F. Die Kastraten and ihre Gesangskunst. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1921).
Heriot, A. The Castrati in Opera. (London: Secker and Warburg, 1956). Reprinted by New York: Da Capo, 1974).
Luchsinger, R. and Arnold, G. Voice-Speech-Language. (Belmont, Calif. Wadsworth, 1965).
Melicow, M. and Pulrang, S. "Castrati Choir and Opera Singers" (Urology, vol. 3 pp. 663-670, 1974).
Moses, P. "The Psychology of the Castrato Voice" (Folia phoniat. vol. 12, pp. 204-215, 1960).
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