THE CASTRATO ASCENDANCY
SOURCE: Richard Somerset-Ward, Angels and Monsters (New Haven: Yale University Press - Copyright © 2004 by Richard Somerset-Ward)
The province of Apulia is on the Adriatic side of Italy, in the southeast corner. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it accounted for a large part of the kingdom of Naples and it faithfully reflected the economic and social conditions of the time - widespread poverty, the dominance of the church, and an economy in which owning land was the only real source of security. These were also the conditions that gave rise to the phenomenon of the castrati, and it is not surprising that Apulia was one of the places from which many of them came, including Farinelli from Andria and Caffarelli from Bitonto.
Why would a family allow one of its sons to be emasculated in order to retain his childhood voice into adulthood? For many families it must simply have been a matter of money. Castrati could become very rich (perhaps one out of a hundred did so), but even those who didn't might be expected to support themselves and send money home to their families. In truth, very few of them - perhaps ten or fifteen out of a hundred - were able to do even this, but in largely impoverished communities those were attractive odds nonetheless. And unfavorable odds could be further discounted by the knowledge that the boys would be serving a "higher cause", the Church - they would be working "ad honorem Dei", as Pope Clement VIII's edict had put it. Naturally, the Church condemned the practice of castration, but everyone knew it as prepared to turn a blind eye so as to ensure that church and monastic choirs had a good supply of male soprano voices to take the place of the female voices it had banned. For some families, especially those that owned land, there was a further piece of contorted reasoning: celibacy was the most effective means of birth control, and enforcing celibacy on a younger son, who just happened to have a God-given voice, must sometimes have seemed an attractive way off safeguarding the family's property rights and avoiding the subdivision of land that would be necessary to support another family. Greed, desperation, and cruel calculation were frequently dressed up in practical or high-minded rationales.
It was never a widespread practice. Even at its height, between 1650 and 1730, there would not have been more than a few hundred castrati in the whole of Italy at any one time. But it was difficult to be a churchgoer (which most Italians were) and remain ignorant of this practice. It was part of the culture, and most Italians approved of it. Only in the middle years of the eighteenth century, when writers like Burney were investigating it and writing disparagingly, did it come to be questioned to any significant degree. By that time, in any case, it was in retreat. Economic revival had set in around 1730, prospects for younger sons were brighter, and Christian asceticism began to decline in most parts of Italy - church and monastic choirs were fewer and smaller, and there was less demand for castrati. By the end of the eighteenth century they were becoming a rarity, a shift aided by Napoleonic reforms and the Church's surrender of temporal power. It is true that Rossini and Meyerbeer both composed roles for them in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and it is true that a castrato could still be heard in the Sistine Choir as late as 1913, but these were exceptions. In the nineteenth century the idea was generally found repugnant.
If the Church was the chief sponsor of castrati, then it was opera that provided their most glittering showcase. It was pure coincidence that castrati had become a feature of the religious world at the very time that opera was coming into existence, but opera was very glad to have them. In the Papal States, which made up a large part of central Italy, they were a necessity because women were not allowed on stage at all. Elsewhere in Italy women were allowed to perform, but they were often thought of as courtesans, and treated as such; castrati were welcome substitutes.
Singing female roles was certainly not their principal raison d'être. Most of the time they were used to sing male roles. Tenors and basses were useful additions to a cast (playing small roles, villains and so forth), but they were not thought of as virtuosi - whereas castrati were. Only the very best of them got to perform in opera, of course, but those who did had considerable advantages over other singers. They had been trained from a very early age, with no interruption for puberty. Their larynxes had not moved downwards, as normally happens at puberty, and their training...had concentrated on the development of the muscular system around the vocal cords so that the high, flexible, and brilliant sound of the voice could be augmented by prodigious power and almost superhuman breath control. Such a voice could produce crowd-pleasing pyrotechnics, but it was also capable of great subtlety and shades of emotion that could move listeners to tears. We may think of the castrato voice as artificial, but it was undeniably a virtuoso instrument.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the form of opera in which the castrati shone was the most artificial and virtuosic form there has ever been - opera seria. Castrati had been a perceptible presence at the very beginning of opera, in the time of Peri and Caccini, but it was the arrival of opera seria in the last two decades of the seventeenth century that made them indispensable. The Italian castrato became an international phenomenon, and would remain one for the best part of 130 years. Siface and Pistocchi were among the first to become famous outside Italy.
High noon for the castrati, as well as for opera seria, was the first half of the eighteenth century. This was when singers like Nicolini, Bernacchi, Senesino, Farinelli, Caffarelli, and Carestini vied for supremacy with female stars like Cuzzoni and Bordoni, and generally had top billing. It was also the time when the most prolific composers of opera seria - Scarlatti, Giovanni Bononcini, Vinci, Leo, Handel, Hasse, and Porpora - were writing major roles for them in almost every opera they composed.
The second half of the century was hardly less glorious. Guadagni, Pacchierotti, and Marchesi were as famous as most of their predecessors, and a generation of new composers led by Jommelli, Galuppi, Traetta, and Gluck continued to write for them, but there were signs that the tradition was ending. From about 1730 onward, opera seria had had to compete with opera buffa. Audiences liked comic opera: it was more realistic, less artificial, less demanding. But opera buffa did not generally involve castrati, who specialized in portraying noble and heroic characters - essential to high-minded opera seria but virtually unknown to opera buffa unless they were being sent up rotten. Opera seria was still where one went for virtuosity, to hear the greatest singers performing the most dazzling and most moving arias, but the Metastasian format for opera seria, which had always been stylized and rather predictable, quickly became ossified. It was a vehicle for singers, not for drama, and Gluck, who had been one of its most distinguished exponents, had the necessary eminence and foresight to put on the brakes and eventually to institute reforms that spelled the end.
But not quite the end, because it was still a format that princes and wealthy sponsors liked to patronize. Why venture into risky and irreverent opera buffa when a reliable Metastasian libretto was always available to be set yet again? Haydn, Mozart, and Rossini added a last luster to the genre - and some of its greatest examples - and major composers like Piccinni, Sarti, Sacchini, Salieri, Paisiello, and Cimarosa, made very successful careers in both opera seria and opera buffa. so the last of the great castrati, among them Crescentini and Velluti, were able to perform into the nineteenth century - but they were becoming an oddity, and audiences tended to view them as such. "The manly British public should have been spared the disgust of such an appearance as that of Velluti," thundered the London Times in 1825.
So the castrati disappeared from opera leaving us with no reliable record of what they actually sounded like. (The recordings made in 1902-03 by Alessandro Moreschi, one of the last castrati in the Sistine Chapel choir, are no yardstick by which to measure the likes of Farinelli and Caffarelli.) But there is no doubting the importance of the castrati. For the first two centuries of opera's four-hundred-year existence they were a major presence, and for over a hundred of those years they were generally its principal attraction. From Dublin to St. Petersburg, from Naples to Stockholm, they were the film stars of their time. And even if we cannot hear them, then at least we can judge something of their virtuosity and technical ability from the music the great composers wrote for them. Today, when this music is generally performed by female sopranos and contraltos, we get almost no idea of what it sounded like three hundred years ago. Only when it is performed by the most talented of male countertenors can we get an echo (and that a distant echo) of the other-worldly quality, the ethereal beauty, with which the great castrati invested it.
Even while they pursued fame and fortune in the opera houses of europe, most of these castrati kept up their church connections. Nicolini constantly returned to Naples to sing in the churches where he had made his reputation as a teenager; Caffarelli remained a lifetime member of the Naples royal chapel; Gaetano Guadagni was sacked from the choir of San Antonio in Padua at the age of sixteen because of his repeated and unauthorized absences, yet he kept up a barrage of please to be readmitted, and finally succeeded, eighteen years later, when he was already famous as Gluck's Orfeo. Singing in church was a basic activity for almost all the castrati: it was where they began, and where most of them ended their careers. It was probably an insurance policy as well, because the life of a touring castrato was no easier, and no more secure, than that of a prima donna.
Few of them suffered the misfortune that eventually overtook Giovanni Francesco Grossi in 1697: he was assassinated by the relatives of a Modenese widow with whom he had had an indiscreet affair. Castrati may have sounded effeminate in their singing, and many of them looked somewhat incongruous because of the aftereffects of the operation (the Frenchman Charles de Brosses, traveling through Italy in 1739-40, wrote that "most sopranists become big and fat like capons, their mouths, their rumps, arms, breasts, and necks rounded and chubby as in women"), but this was not universally true - Carestini, Crescentini, and Marchesi were handsome men, the matinee idols of their day. And it was certainly not true that castrati were incapable of having sex (the fact that it was "safe" sex often made it more tempting for their lovers).
That said, Giovanni Francesco Grossi was not an attractive man, either physically or in any other way. He was known as Siface - a nickname he had acquired at the age of eighteen when he sang Syphax in Cavalli's opera Scipione Africano. That was in 1671, when opera was still in its infancy and the public theaters of Venice were less than thirty-five years old. Castrati like Antonio Cavagna were already making names for themselves and were demanding large fees, but Siface and his contemporary Domenico Cecchi (known as Cortona) were the first to become superstars. It was not easy - there was no career ladder to climb - and Siface had to fall back on singing in the Papal choir for three years in his early twenties, but his career eventually took off when he became an employee of the Duke of Modena in 1677. The next year he sang the title role in Carlo Pallavicino's Vespasiano at the grand opening of the new S. Giovanni Grisostomo theater in Venice.
Siface's career over the next twenty years was a commentary on the growth of opera at the end of the seventeenth century. for the first time, there was a network of opera houses that a singer could take advantage of - in Venice, Rome, Florence, Modena, Reggio d'Emilia, Naples, and several other cities - and international fame was suddenly a consideration, too. Siface's employer, the Duke of Modena, was the brother of the Queen of England (James II's wife): Siface was sent to London in 1687 as a "present" to the queen. But success had gone to his head. Already in 1683 there had been an infamous contretemps with the French ambassador in Rome, as a result of which the Duke of Modena had felt obliged to place Siface under house arrest for several weeks (he had sung for the ambassador but afterwards he had demanded "doubloons for his singing, and not merely ices, which was all one ever got from the French"). In England, he behaved no better. The diarist John Evelyn, who heard him at Samuel Pepys's house and much admired his singing, wrote that he was "a mere wanton, effeminate child, very coy and proudly conceited...much disdaining to show his talent to any but princes."
Siface's career bridged the gap between what one might call "early opera" (Cavalli) and the arrival of opera seria near the end of the century. Because of his premature death, and because of an unexplained gap in his career in the early 1690s, probably caused by ill health, it is hard to judge his true importance. But it is clear that he was the first castrato to win genuine start status for himself. Alessandro Scarlatti recognized that as early as 1684, when he adapted the tenor role of Mithridates in his opera Pompeo so that Siface could sing it in Naples - it was a huge success. queen Christina of Sweden was another of his admirers. From her adoptive home in Rome, where she orchestrated the movement that became, just after her death, the Arcadian reforms of the 1690s, nd that led almost directly to the full flowering of opera seria, she held a special brief for the castrati, and particularly for Siface and Cortona. She kept a number of lesser castrato on her personal staff and waged constant warfare against the papacy to keep the Roman theaters open and the castrati performing in them - Innocent XI, popularly known as Papa Minga ("minga" being the word for "no" in Innocent's native Milanese dialect), was one of several popes who were determined to close the theaters but eventually admitted defeat when faced with Christina's vitriolic campaigns.
Siface had some accomplished contemporaries, particularly Cortona and Matteuccio (who spent several years in the middle of his career at the Spanish court singing for the half-mad Carlos II - a portent of the way Farinelli would end his career half a century later), but the one who made the greatest impact, as a teacher if not a singer, was Francesco Antonio Massimiliano, known as Pistocchi. Until Mozart appeared on the scene a century later, Pistocchi was widely thought to be the greatest musical prodigy there had ever been. He was a published composer by the time he was eight, a contralto castrato in the cathedral choir of Bologna in his early teens, and an opera singer of repute for more than twenty years. He wrote at least five full-length operas, though very little of them survives. His great contribution, however, was to found his own school for singers in Bologna. Among those he taught were the castrato Gaetano Berenstadt, who would sing for Handel in London, and one of the very few tenors to make an impact on the eighteenth century, Annibale Pio Fabri. But his greatest pupil was Antonio Maria Bernacchi, a castrato blessed with amazing technique and the ability to perform vocal acrobatics like no other. Pistocchi was not particularly amused by this - "My sadness is that I taught you to sing and you want to play" - but had he still been alive in 1727 (he died the previous year) he would doubtless have felt a certain pride in Bernacchi's performance during the vocal duel that ensued when he and Farinelli appeared on the same stage. Bernacchi was forty-two, Farinelli twenty years younger, yet there is no doubt from contemporary accounts that the older man won the day, first imitating Farinelli's ornamentations, then adding much more astonishing ones of his own - and this was five years after Farinelli had won his equally famous contest with the German trumpet player in Rome. An unexpected outcome of the duel was that the two castrati became firm friends, and remained so to the end of Bernacchi's life.
Partly because Pistocchi was much loved and universally respected, and therefore not much criticized in Italy, it is hard to know quite what he taught his pupils. Pier Francesco Tosi, whose treatise on singing was published in 1723, during Pistocchi's lifetime, wrote of him as the defender of a "pure" style of singing, not necessarily devoid of ornamentation (which he said should be worked out by the singer, not written down by the composer), but certainly not obsessed with technique at the expense of all else. Others, taking their cue from Bernacchi's fireworks, assumed that Pistocchi was responsible for the corruption of the pure style and the encouragement of the singers to add more ornamentations and more of their own improvisations. Whatever the truth of the matter, the divide between "pure" and "corrupt" is a faithful reflection of the argument that continued in opera until the time of Gluck and even beyond. For most of the castrati, it was more tempting to rely on technique and try to thrill their audiences with their leaps and trills. It was also the easiest way to silence a generally noisy auditorium. The alternative - attempting to engage the emotions of the audience - was much more difficult and could only be achieved by the greatest singers. Farinelli's career was a good example of how such a singer matured. As a young man, rejoicing in his powers, he liked nothing better than to perform breathtaking feats of vocalism that would get the audience screaming in the aisles, but not long after the confrontation with Bernacchi (and acting on the advice of the Emperor Charles VI), he changed his style radically: he began to play on the emotions of his audiences, often using pathos where once he had relied on vocal agility. It required just as much technique, and a lot more dramatic commitment.
Bernacchi remains something of a mystery. To judge from the parts Handel wrote for him in London (Arsace in Partenope, for instance), he had a low alto voice with a range of about two octaves. No one seems to have regarded the voice as in any way remarkable - certainly not when they compared it with Senesino's, which was slightly lower and of much greater natural beauty. But almost everyone commented on his technique, and not always admiringly. There were those who said he used it in an instrumental way, "imitating flutes and oboes and other agile but inhuman agencies." To these critics Bernacchi was an acrobat, not an artistic singer, one who could excited his audiences but rarely move them. Eventually, however, after a thirty-year career as one of Europe's leading castrati (and this was during the "high noon" period when Senesino, Farinelli, and Caffarelli were at the zenith of their careers) he chose to follow in the footsteps of his teacher Pistocchi: he too established a singing school in Bologna.
The school appears to have owed more to Pistocchi's teaching than it did to Bernacchi's athletic style of singing - certainly, his best known pupils were renowned for refinement rather than explosiveness. One of them, the castrato Tommaso Guarducci, was admiringly described by Burney as "the plainest and most simple singer of the first class I ever heard." another, the great German tenor Anton Raaff, for whom, in his sixty-seventh year, Mozart would compose the title role in Idomeneo, was renowned for the smoothness of his legato technique - and legato, it seems, was the central theme of Bernacchi's teaching. It means "bound together" or "connected". A singer achieves it through portamento - the ability to carry the sound smoothly from note to note, without any break.
This legato technique was one of the defining characteristics of the style of singing that sopranos, male and female, brought to opera during the first century of its existence. We call the style, in retrospect, bel canto, and we can date it more or less from the introduction of opera seria in the late seventeenth century. Even today, there is a tendency to think bel canto can only be achieved by a display of astonishing agility and technical virtuosity. Like the young Farinelli, Bernacchi may once have thought that, but in his teaching, at least, he placed legato high on the list of priorities, and it would remain there right through the nineteenth century, through the era when Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti added new luster to the genre by composing what are often known as "the bel canto operas". The fact that such works could be composed, and that there were singers trained and ready to perform them, was testament to the tradition of bel canto that had been established more than a century earlier by the men and women who taught the sopranos their intricate art - and taught that legato was an essential part of it.
Bernacchi was about the same age as Senesino, twenty years older than Farinelli and Carestini, twenty-five years older than Caffarelli. His career overlapped with all of them and there is evidence that he gave lessons to both Farinelli and Carestini. These five were the greatest stars of the greatest age of the castrati.
They were often simply identified as "sopranists", but most of them had voices that were slightly lower in texture and range than the true female soprano. Like Caffarelli, they would be described nowadays as mezzo-sopranos. Others, like Senesino and Bernacchi, were lower still - altos or contraltos. Farinelli's high soprano was truly exceptional, though Carestini started out as "a powerful and clear soprano" (in Burney's words), only later becoming "the fullest, finest and deepest counter-tenor [contralto] that has perhaps ever been heard". Nor were they famed for their acting skills. Of the five, only Carestini, a very handsome man, was renowned for his dramatic interpretations, though Senesino was generally thought to be "graceful" in his movements, and Farinelli (another quite handsome man) was a striking presence on stage, if somewhat statuesque and immobile. What they all had in common was their musicianship, a produce of their long and intense training from a very early age - and it was, of course, their voices that made them extraordinary. Although we have no recordings of those voices, and the first-hand descriptions that have come down to us are often highly subjective and don't tell us a great deal about the improvisations and ornamentations the singers interpolated, what we do have are the scores that were written for them by the great composers of the time. From these, we can get a very good idea of the singers' range and the composers' expectations of their voices.
Porpora's pupils, Farinelli and Caffarelli, were widely believed to be the most accomplished. Farinelli's astounding range (three whole octaves) was unmatched by any singer of the time. Few composers actually wrote for that range, of course (why write a part that would be impossible for any other interpreter?), but the flexible format of the da capo aria gave the singers ample opportunity to show off their wares in improvised cadenzas. In Farinelli's case, however, there was one composer who was always prepared to write for him, and him alone. Riccardo Broschi was Farinelli's brother, not a composer of the first rank but an able technician. His opera Idaspe, written for Carnival in Venice in 1730 and starring his brother, contains an extraordinary aria ("Qual guerriero in campo armato") that required Farinelli to explore all three octaves in a series of leaps, trills, and slides that would have been unthinkable for any other singer. Later, in London, Broschi wrote another aria, "Son qual nave che agitata", that was designed to show off his brother's messa di voce. This was the technique, beloved of castrati, that began with a pianissimo note, swelled it to a climax, then slowly allowed it to die away. Even if we allow for a little exaggeration in reports that Farinelli could hold such a note for a whole minute, it must have been an amazing effect. But the messa di voce that introduced "Son qual nave" was only the beginning: it went straight into fourteen consecutive bars of vocalises, ending with "an interminable trill" - and all of it performed "without any obvious signs of breathing".
Farinelli's career was short - only seventeen years on the stage - but that was of his own choosing. He retired at the end of his London contract in 1737, still at the height of his powers, in order to accept an invitation to go into the services of Philip V, the King of Spain. He remained at the court of Madrid for twenty-two years, becoming a very rich and powerful man in the process. His initial task was to sing for the melancholic king - reputedly the same four arias every night - but he gradually assumed other duties, both for Philip and his successor, Ferdinand VI. He was in charge of a scheme to divert the River Tagus; he redesigned the royal opera house, and he produced a long series of opulent stagings of operas for which he recruited the best Italian singers and composers. His influence on the court was enormous, but never, it seems, sinister. When he finally retired to the villa he had built outside Bologna he became a popular guru and éminence grise. His visitors book contained the names Gluck, Mozart, Casanova, the Emperor Joseph II, and many others.
Tastes in singing varied. Porpora, who taught them both for several years, thought Caffarelli was better than Farinelli. Another good judge, Handel, thought Carestini was better than Farinelli: in 1733 he heard both of them sing in Bologna, then chose Carestini to be part of his London company (this may have been because Handel generally preferred lower voices, like Senesino's). Londoners had the opportunity to compare all four of them during the next few years, with Carestini, and later Caffarelli, singing for Handel, while Farinelli and Senesino were employed by the rival company, the Opera of the Nobility. Senesino's relationship with Handel had been lengthy but never very friendly, so it was hardly surprising that he was now one of the chief proponents of setting up the new company in opposition to Handel's. His expectations of being the main attraction were given a nasty jolt when Farinelli was engaged as well. The first time they sang together, however, Senesino was so overwhelmed by the beauty of Farinelli's singing that at one point, early in the first act, he actually stopped the performance to rush over and embrace his fellow castrato - an action that did not go down well with the audience, which thought it was watching an implacable tyrant (Senesino) refusing to grant mercy to an enslaved prince (Farinelli).
Senesino was always best as hero or tyrant: he was much less effective as supplicant or lover. He was a large, imposing man who naturally dominated the stage - Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and King Richard I of England were the sort of roles he thrived on; Admeto and Orlando, both of them deceived in love, were less to his liking. Johann Quantz, who would later be Frederick the Great's court composer, was in London in 1727 when Senesino was at his best: "He had a powerful, clear, equal, and sweet contralto voice, with a perfect intonation and an excellent shake [trill]. His manner of singing was masterly and his elocution unrivalled. Though he never loaded adagios with too many ornaments, yet he delivered the original and essential notes with utmost refinement. He sang allegros with great fire, and marked rapid divisions, from the chest, in an articulate and pleasing manner. His countenance was well adapted to the stage, and his action was natural and noble. To these qualities he joined a majestic figure."
It was a peculiarity of Senesino's career, of course, that he sang so little in Italy. We hear of him first in 1707 in Venice, and he was certainly a star in Naples by 1715, when he was creating roles for Scarlatti. But in 1717 he went to Dresden, and from there to London, where he remained for seventeen years until the breakup of the Opera of the Nobility, with only occasional visits to Italy. When he did finally return there in 1737, the Naples audience found that he sang "in an antique style", and he had little success. In the interim, however, it had been his good fortune to be the castrato of choice during the period of Handel's greatest productivity. In all, he sang twenty roles for Handel, of which seventeen were written specially for him. The compass of these roles was quite narrow - mainly within an octave and a half - but they always contained opportunities for him to show off the brilliant coloratura for which he was famed in the great heroic arias, and the equally brilliant mezza voce in what were known as "pathetic" (or slower) arias.
By contrast, Caffarelli was not a success in London. He arrived in 1738, aged twenty-eight, with a twelve-year career in Italy already under his belt, and a huge reputation. Aside from the fact that he took an instant dislike to the climate, his timing was unfortunate. Although the Opera of the Nobility had recently collapsed, the English public had just spent three years listening to, and deifying Farinelli - "One God, one Farinelli!" as an enthusiastic female supporter had shouted from her box one night. There was no way the newfound god was going to be deposed in favor of another. What made it worse was that Farinelli had already left for Madrid, so Caffarelli found himself competing with a legend rather than a singer. He stayed only one season, just long enough to create two title roles for Handel, Faramondo and Xerxes. The music the composer wrote for him tells us something about Caffarelli's voice. It may have been categorized as mezzo-soprano rather than soprano, but it was certainly a high mezzo. Handel gave him a range of almost two octaves and some very beautiful music, including what is generally known as "Handel's Largo" - Xerxes' aria to the plane tree, "Ombra mai fù".
Angel or monster? The stories about Caffarelli's ugly behavior were legion and they preceded him wherever he went, but so did reports of his angelic singing. Baron Grimm, writing in 1782, recalled hearing him at the Louvre on King Louis' name day: "It would be difficult to give any true idea of the degree of perfection to which this singer has brought his art. The charm and love which can convey the idea of an angel's voice..., combined with the finest execution and suprising facility and precision, exert over the senses and the heart an enchantment which those least responsive to music would find it hard to resist."
Very occasionally, Caffarelli came up against someone whose need to be respected was as great as his own, and it is not surprising that Gluck was one of them. The two men clashed in Naples in 1753 when Gluck conducted his opera La Clemenza did Tito. Caffarelli demanded that Gluck pay him his humble respects before rehearsals began. Gluck declined and said that, on the contrary, Caffarelli should pay respects to him. Amazingly, that is what happened: the castrato, sensing perhaps that Gluck's determination was even greater than his own, offered to pay his respects to "the divine Bohemian", and the two of them became fast friends! We do not know what happened when Caffarelli met Farinelli in Madrid three years alter, but there is no reason to believe there was not a considerable amount of respect between them, too.
The bookends to Caffarelli's career provide interesting insights into his determination to control his own destiny. It seems likely that he was originally castrated at his own insistence. A contractual agreement of 1720, when he was ten years old, stated that his grandmother had given him the income from two vineyards so that he could study grammar, and especially music, "to which he is said to have a great inclination, desiring to have himself castrated and become a eunuch". The end of his opera career was no less remarkable. He was in Lisbon in 1755 and would probably have been a victim of the great earthquake that devastated the city had he not chosen that day to visit Santarém. It was in thanksgiving for his escape that he made the decision to retire from the opera stage immediately, though he was only forty-five and continued singing in churches for another fifteen years.
Of all these great castrati, Giovanni Carestini may be the least known to posterity, but that does not mean he was any less famous than the others in his day. He clearly created excitement wherever he went - partly because he was exceedingly handsome and had remarkable stage presence, partly because his idea of his own importance was at least as great as Caffarelli's (greater, in fact, if his demand to be paid eight hundred doubloons for appearing in Naples was anything to go by: he was passed over in favor of Caffarelli, who wanted only five hundred). Carestini was the same age as Farinelli and appears to have started out with the same type of high soprano voice. In 1721, when he was seventeen, he was singing opposite the contralto Bernacchi in Scarlatti's La Griselda in Naples. Two years later he was in Prague as the star attraction in one of the greatest operatic productions there has ever been - Fux's Costanza e Fortezza, staged for the coronation of Charles VI with a cast of two hundred singers and a hundred musicians, in a magnificent outdoor auditorium that seated four thousand people. During the next few years he was clearly thought of as a phenomenon. Johann Adolf Hasse, for whom he sang in Naples in 1728, said of him: "He who has not heard Carestini is not acquainted with the most perfect style of singing."
For reasons that are unknown, the high soprano of his early years turned into a low contralto in mid-career - still a very beautiful voice and still accompanied by astonishing technique that enabled him to perform prodigious feats. The German composer Johann Quantz heard him in the 1730s and later recalled: "He had extraordinary virtuosity in brilliant passages, which he sang in chest voice, conforming to the principles of the school of Bernacchi and the manner of Farinelli." In London, Handel composed exceedingly brilliant parts for him, including the title role in Ariodante and Ruggiero in Alcina. The extended arias and great duets of these operas gave Carestini the sort of opportunities to shine that all singers crave. Not the least of them was Ruggiero's aria "Verdi prati", which Carestini at first rejected as being insufficiently brilliant: like Francesca Cuzzoni before him, he wilted before Handel's famous temper and performed it as written, with huge success.
Carestini, Caffarelli, Farinelli, Senesino, and Bernacchi were just the most oustanding castrati of the first half of the eighteenth century. Many more names (perhaps thirty or forty) could be added - singers who were not quite in their league, but close enough to sing regularly in Italian and other European houses. It was a hard life. Traveling was a necessity, and that meant long, uncomfortable, and sometimes dangerous stagecoach journeys across Europe. the health of the voice was a constant worry: drafts and diseases were difficult to avoid. And there was always the audience to worry about - would it be friendly or hostile? Would it be noisy or attentive? Would it be dominated by hostile factions? Yet, when all was said and done, this was a wonderful time to be a singer. A leading soprano, male or female, could normally expect to sing six or eight separate arias during an evening, all of them da capo, with multiple opportunities to ornament, improvise, and show off. With all their years of training, and the assured techniques it had given them, the castrati were in their element.
The end of the castrati supremacy was signaled by the premiere of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice in Vienna in 1762. It was the first of his "reform operas". One of his purposes, as he later declared in the preface to Alceste, was to "divest [opera] entirely of all those abuses, introduced into it either by the mistaken vanity of singers or by the too great complaisance of composers, which have so long disfigured Italian opera and made of the most splendid and beautiful of spectacles the most ridiculous and wearisome". Orfeo had no da capo arias, no strict alternation of recitative and aria, no "dry recitative" accompanied only by continuo. Instead, it was written as a dramatic whole, with fully orchestrated recitatives containing much passion and color, and strategically placed arias that were essential prts of the drama, rather than the customary "exit arias" in which singers halted the action while they contemplated the beauties of nature and often gave gratuitous demonstrations of their virtuosity. In Gluck's later operas the chorus, and to some extent the ballet, assumed roles almost as important as those of the principal singers.
Gluck's intention was certainly not to put the castrati out of business - his reforms were aimed at all singers, not just some of them - and one of the many interesting things about Orfeo was that its initial success owed a great deal to Gaetano Guadagni, the alto castrato who sang the title role at the first performance (indeed, he would go on singing it, or versions of it, for the rest of his professional life). In 172 he was thirty-two years old and his credentials of the part of Orfeo could not be denied. He had just come from an extended period singing at the enlightened court of Parma, where Tommasso Traetta was maestro di cappélla. In many ways, Traetta had as much right as Gluck to be called the prophet of reform: he disliked the vainglorious attitudes of opera seria and he had begun to merge features of the French tragédie lyrique with the more aria-centered tradition of Italian opera. Caterina Gabrielli, then the most celebrated prima donna in Italy, and one with whom Guadagni was widely suspected of having more than just a professional relationship, was Traetta's principal muse.
Guadagni's training, or what we know of it, was unorthodox - indeed he may have had very little formal instruction. He joined the choir of San Antonio in Padua when he was sixteen but was sacked a year later (for absenteeism - he was away in Venice singing minor parts in opera houses). At nineteen, he went to england as primo amoroso (male lead) in comic opera company, and it was while he was there that he found favor with Handel - not as an opera singer (by that time Handel had left all that behind him), but in oratorio. Burney, who knew Guadagni well in London, said he was "more noticed for his singing in English than Italian", and claimed to have helped the young man study parts in Samson and Messiah, which Handel had originally written for Susanna Cibber, a femal soprano, and now adapted for Guadagni. Handel also wrote a completely new part for him - Didymus in Theodora. Just as important, perhaps, was the fact that Guadagni came under the influence of the greatest actor of the age, David Garrick, who coached him in acting and directed him at Drury Lane in a production of The Fairies, a musical version of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
By the time he arrived in Vienna to sing for Gluck, Guadagni was thus singularly well equipped to provide the composer with both the musical and dramatic performance he was looking for. Much of the contemporary evidence suggests that the opera's initial reception was moderate, but Guadagni's performance caused a sensation. His alto voice was a thing of beauty, and his impressive acting was a revelation to the Viennese audience, especially in an opera whose every note was intended to convey a development of the action.
No one who heard them ever compared Guadagni with Farinelli or Caffarelli. True, they were all castrati, but Guadagni was different kind of singer. If he had the technique and breath control to perform the brilliant cadenzas and high-flying ornamentations for which his peers were famous, then he rarely displayed them. His skill in comic opera, his Handelian training, and, most of all, the virtues he was taught by Traetta and Gluck disposed him to be a dignified, dramatic singer who thought it preferable to make his audiences laugh or cry than to have them standing on their chairs hollering for an encore. Indeed, he often infuriated people by declining to sing encores at all - on the grounds that they interrupted the flow of the drama. Burney, hearing him again in his post-Orfeo phase, marveled at the way he used suggestive pauses in extemporary solo passages to create meaning and emotion. "I frequently tried to analyze the pleasure he communicated to the audience, and found that it chiefly arose from his artful manner of diminishing the tones of his voice like the dying notes of an Aeolian harp. Most other singers captivates a swell or messa di voce; but Guadagni, after beginning a note or passage with all the force he could safely expert, fined it off to a thread, and gave it all the effect of extreme distance."
None of this is to say that Guadagni was not highly effective interpreter of opera seria, but Orfeo was a Rubicon from which he could never retreat. When Gluck adapted and enlarged the opera for Paris in 1774, the title role had to be rewritten for an haute contre (high tenor) - castrati were still not acceptable in France - but Guadagni was almost always in demand to sing the Italian version, and he himself reworked the aria "Men tiranne" and often used it in pasticcio evenings ("pasticcio" literally means "jumble" or "hodge podge": a very popular practice in the eighteenth century was to plaster together a number of different musical excerpts, generally chosen by the singers, and commission a rough and ready libretto to link them: the story of Orpheus was a frequent victim of this practice. Guadagni himself compiled a complete pasticcio of Orfeo, based on Gluck but using additions and alterations by Bertoni, J.C. Bach, and himself). Guadagni may have come across to his colleagues, and even to audiences, as more than a little pompous, but he was a genuine and good man, and in his last years a mystical one. He amassed a fortune, gave it all away, and died impoverished in Padua just as few weeks before Mozart suffered the same fate in Vienna.
There were many other reasons for the decline of the castrati besides the reforms of Gluck. Many things were questioned during the Age of Enlightenment, and since many of the era's leading philosophes - Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, d'Alembert - were as interested in music and the arts as they were in politics and the rights of man, it was inevitable that opera should come under fire. The rigid, formalized structures of Italian opera seria and French tragédie lyrique were disparaged as "moribund", "antidramatic", and "repetitive"; they were compared unfavorably with the lively, bubbling genres of opera buffa and opéra comique that had become popular all across Europe. A little piece by Pergolesi, La Serva Padrona, composed in Naples in 1733 for two singers and a non-singing actor, had taken Italy by storm and moved on to France. In the 1750s it precipitated the guerre des bouffons - a Parisian pamphlet war in which the philosophes, the court, and even the public took sides for and against the competing styles. An increasing number of people agreed with Gluck that the singers were out of control and that it was time to call for order.
Societal changes also played a part. The economic depression in which most of Italy had been sunk for more than a century came to n end in the 1730s, and with it came a steady decrease in the number of young boys being castrated. This was partly because the monastic orders began a long period of retrenchment, but it was also because it became fashionable to question the practice of castration. Many of the most influential writers of the mid-century - Burney, de Brosses, Brydone, Grimm - were either skeptical or downright opposed. While it was true that most of these writers were non-Italians, it was also true that Italy was peculiarly susceptible to foreign opinion - it was not a unified country, any more than Germany was: it had Spanish, Austrian, and French rulers, not to mention the papacy, and only its geographical position prevented it from being the almost constant battlefield the German territories had become.
All these factors were at work in the late eighteenth century, but they did not stop the castrati from having a last and rathe brilliant fling. The greatest of them were Gasparo Pacchierotti, Luigi Marchesi, and Girolamo Crescentini. Increasingly, they found themselves singing with tenors - Crescentini had a famous partnership in Naples with Giovanni David, one of the first of the great virtuoso tenors - and they found, too, that many of the parts that might once have been written for castrati were now being assigned to female sopranos. Their rivalries were not so much among themselves as they were with prime donne - Pacchierotti with Anna Lucia De Amicis in Naples; Marchesi with the Portuguese mezzo-soprano Luisa Todi in Venice (he once discovered he had been contracted to sing in a season that was officially publicized as "anno Todi"); and Crecentini with Josephina Grassini, the Italian contralto who, like Crescentini, was a favorite of Napoleon.
Most composers - among them Gluck, Salieri, Sarti, Martín y Soler, Mozart, Zingarelli, and Cimarosa - continued to write occasionally for castrati, but they were as often writing opere buffe as they were opere serie, and castrati were virtually excluded from the former. Nevertheless, the vast majority of theaters were still under royal or aristocratic patronage, and as the Age of Enlightenment ended in flames in Paris and in terrifying declarations of democracy in other places, conservative patrons often preferred to hand a composer an opera seria libretto by dear old Metastasio (he died in 1782) than to run the risk of commissioning an opera buffa in which all sorts of subversive doctrines might surface. That was certainly why Mozart, in the last year of his life, was given Metastasio's La Clemenza di Tito to set for the Emperor Leopold II's coronation in Prague, and why he wrote the role of Sesto for a castrato.
Comparing singers of one generation with those of another was a fruitless but popular game in the twentieth century, made possible by the existence of recordings. It was just as popular in the eighteenth century when there were no recordings. Burney was too young to have heard Farinelli sing (though he met him in Bologna in his retirement), yet he did not hesitate to say: "Such execution as many of Farinelli's songs contain, and which excited such astonishment in 1734, could be hardly thought sufficiently brilliant in 1788 for a third-rate singer at the opera." When he wrote this, Burney was doubtless under the spell of Pacchierotti, whom he said unequivocally was the greatest singer he had ever heard. Another good judge, Lord Mount Edgcumbe, agreed: "Pacchierotti's voice was an extensive soprano, full and sweet in the highest degree: his powers of execution were great, but he had far too good taste and good sense to make a display of them where it would have been misapplied. Such was his genius in his embellishments and cadences, that their variety was inexhaustible. He could not sing a song twice in exactly the same way; yet never did he introduce an ornament that was not judicious and appropriate to the composition. His shake (then considered an indispensable requisite, without which no one could be esteemed a perfect singer) was the very best that could be heard in every form in which that grace could be executed.
Whether or not Pacchierotti was the greatest singer of them all, his performance onstage was handicapped by his appearance - he was very tall and thin, and renowned for his clumsiness. His range was reputed to be almost three octaves, not as high as Farinelli's but remarkable for its low notes. Burney said he could sing tenor arias made famous by David in their original pitch, and he could go down "sometimes as low as B-flat or the second line in the bass". Not surprisingly with this sort of range, Pacchierotti was particularly famous for what was called "the pathetic style" of singing. Patrick Brydone, who heard in him Palermo as early as 1770 (when Pacchierotti was already thirty but only four years into his late-starting stage career), commented that "he speaks truly to the heart, while nearly all those who sing today intend merely to divert the imagination". Brydone also heard him sing with Caterina Gabrielli, "the greatest singer in the world", and described how Pacchierotti, the most modest and diffident of men, was so intimidated by her virtuosity that he fled the stage in tears. Persuaded to return, he won over both the audience and the prima donna with the tenderness an expressiveness of his singing.
Great artist though he was, Pacchierotti could not compete with Luigi Marchesi when it came to audience appeal. Marchesi was fifteen years younger, a matinee idol with a voice and range almost as great as Farinelli's, but with very little interest in the tender and pathetic arias that were the hallmark of Guadagni and Pacchierotti. His opinion of himself was summed up by the way he invariably made his first entrance, here described by Patrick Barbier, a modern historian of the castrati: "He insisted that the impresario and composers should allow him to make his first appearance, whatever the opera, at the top of a hill, carrying a sowrd, a gleaming lance, and wearing a helmet crowned with white and red plumes 'at least six feet high', as Stendhal described it. Marchesi insisted too on beginning with the words 'Dove son io?' ('Where am I?') and then after an inevitable trumpet fanfare he would sing loudly 'Odi lo squillo della tromba guerriera!' ('Hear the sound of the warlike trumpets!'); after that he invariably sang his 'portmanteau aria', 'Mia speranza pur vorrei', composed by Sarti and later included in Achille in Sciro. Slowly the singer would descend the steps to the stage, his weapons gleaming and the plumes on his head nodding, and come down to the footlights to receive the ovations of the jubilant spectators."
Marchesi could get away with this sort of behavior because of the extraordinary effect he had on audiences, and particularly on women. His youthful beauty ("beauty" was a word often used in descriptions of him), his bravura approach to every part he played, and the wonderful agility of his voice appear to have sent quite staid and respectable matrons into ecstasies. Stendhal reported that female members of the Viennese court wore medallions bearing his portrait around their necks, on their arms, and sewn into their shoes. In Milan, a group of wealthy ladies formed a society, the insignia of which was a sash worn round the waist with the initials LM embroidered on it. And everywhere he went, Marchesi played to the audience: "He relished ornamenting a melody in a hundred different ways,...his specialty being passagii with sixteen double crotchets to a bar, adding vibration to the first in each group of four and expressive nuances to the remaining three." Nothing like him had been seen since the young Farinelli had arrived on the scene sixty years before.
Aside from his voice, Marchesi had more in common with Caffarelli than he did with Farinelli. His behavior may never have been quite as outrageous, but their beginnings and their endings had remarkable similarities. As young boys, both of them were apparently castrated on their own insistence (in Marchesi's case, with the help of his teacher and against the wishes of his father, who was a professional trumpeter), and in retirement they both appear to have used their enormous fortunes in philanthorpic ways - Caffarelli for the Church, Marchesi to establish the Pio Istituto Filarmonico to support the widows and orphans of musicians.
If anyone could have competed with Marchesi as a popular hero, it would probably have been Girolamo Crescentini, the handsome young soprano from the Marches around Urbino (though, unlike Marchesi, Crescentini did not age well: by the time he was forty he was decidedly portly and heavily jowled). He had a high soprano voice, pure and sweet, with slightly less range than Marchesi's but with much greater expressiveness. Although he did not finally retire until 1812, his most productive period was between his debut in 1782 and his arrival in Paris in 1806. these were the last years in which opera houses regularly used castrati. After about 1807 cast lists show a sudden falling off in the number being employed, even in Italy. Crescentini was probably not though of as an oddity (as Velluti, eighteen years younger, certainly was), and there were still just enough composers writing opere serie to ensure a fairly constant supply of new roles - Cherubini, Cimarosa, and Zingarelli all wrote for Crescentini - but it was clear to most observers that he was a representative, albeit a very fine representative, of a dying breed.
Crescentini was a musician first and foremost: he specialized in the expressive patetico style of singing that was generally more fashionable at the turn of the century than Marchesi's constant bravura. Artur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher, heard Crescentini sing in Vienna in 1805 and wrote in his diary: "His supernaturally beautiful voice cannot be compared with that of any woman: there can be no fuller and more beautiful tone, and in its silver purity he yet achieves indescribable power."
Schopenhauer was not the only listener to be enthralled by Crescentini in Vienna. Napoleon Bonaparte was another, and it was not long before the castrato was installed in Paris as singing teacher to the imperial family and the emperor's favorite performer. Napoleon's attitude toward castrati was somewhat paradoxical. On the one hand, he had done much to erase the practice of castration by dictating new legal codes for the regions of Italy his armies had conquered; on the other hand, he was literally moved to tears by Crescentini's singing, and never more so than when he performed Romeo in Zingarelli's Giulietta e Romeo, with the contralto Josephina Grassini as Giulietta. these were roles the two singers had created together at La Scala on the eve of the French army's invasion of Milan in 1796. (Grassini was singing there again in 1800 when Napoleon entered the city after his victory at Marengo: she sang the Marseillaise at a concert that night and so bewitched Napoleon that she spent the night with him and was soon installed in her own house in Paris: long after the affair had ended, Napoleon would invite Grassini to sing at the Tuilleries, and especially with Crescentini). Romeo became Crescentini's most famous role, his calling card wherever he went. Within it, he inserted an aria allegedly written by himself - "Ombra adorata aspetta". It began with a messa di voce that allowed the castrato to float a note of extraordinary purity - very quietly at first, then swelling it to a great volume, then diminishing it again to pianissimo. This aria almost always made Napoleon cry, and he loved to hear it, even if most of his courtiers were bored out of their minds (their boredom turned to fury when Napoleon awarded Crescentini the Iron Cross of Lombardy, a decoration previously reserved for military heroes).
The uncertainty of the castrati's hold on opera at the beginning of the nineteenth century is graphically illustrated by the role of Romeo in Zingarelli's opera. within a few years of Crescentini's retirement from Paris in 1812 there were two equally famous Romeos in Europe, Giuditta Pasta and María Malibran. The great female sopranos moved swiftly and ruthlessly to colonize the territory that was being vacated.
Crescentini himself spent the last thirty-four years of his life as a celebrted teacher, first in Bologna, then in Naples, where Isabella Colbran was one of his pupils. He was not the last great castrato - that was the fate of Giovanni Battista Velluti - but it is probably accurate to say that Crescentini was the last that truly lit up the world of opera. Velluti's career, by contrast, though it began well, became increasingly lonely, and by the time he retired in 1830, an anomaly.
In 1807, Rossini, then a fifteen-year-old student at the Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna, heard Velluti sing. He was highly impressed (though maybe not quite so impressed as he was by another singer he heard that same season - Isabella Colbran, who would become one of his most important muses, and his wife). Six years later, when he was already an established composer with the likes of Tancredi and L'Italiana in Algeri under his belt, he was given the libretto of Aureliano in Palmira to set for La Scala, and he was required, against all the custom of the time, to set the role of Arsace for a castrato. It was an experience Rossini came to regret, since Velluti, exercising the traditional freedom of his predecessors, insisted on providing his own ornaments and embellishments to the composer's score. Rossini was furious, and he never again allowed a singer to improvise on his work: what ornamentation was needed he wrote into the score himself. It wasn't that he was against the use of ornamentations - he frequently devised them for his favorite singers, and not just for his own operas but quite often for those of other composers too! Where his own operas were concerned, though, he was determined to keep control.
Despite his experience with Velluti, Rossini was a great admirer of the castrati. He thought their passing had done irreparable damage to the art of singing, and as late as 1863, when he wrote his Petite Messe Solennelle, he listed its requirements as "twelve singers of three sexes, men, women, and castrati" (which wasn't what he got, of course). He spoke about castrati as "the bravest of the brave", and he had good reason to empathize with them. He once told the Belgian musicologist Edmond Michotte that there had been a terrifying moment in his own boyhood when one of his uncles, a barber, had suggested that his fine treble voice might profitably be perpetuated if the necessary operation was speedily performed. "My brave mother would not consent at any price," he recalled. But Rossini, like Mozart, had more profound reasons for admiring the contribution the castrati had made. Neither of them could be described as a revolutionary where opera was concerned: they saw themselves as prt of a continuum that stretched back at least a century (of the century before that they were mainly ignorant: it is probable that neither of them knew much, if anything, about Monteverdi). They took the traditions of the eighteenth century - opera seria, opera buffa and, in Mozart's case, German Singspiel - and changed them radically by the force of their genius, but they always recognized the debt they owed to their predecessors, and that included the extraordinary contribution of the castrati. That they both wrote for castrati, though neither much enjoyed the experience, was an important part of their own development and a vital step in the evolution of opera.
The same might be said of Meyerbeer, who had the distinction of writing the lst substantial role for a castrato, in 1824. Il Crociato in Egitto, with Velluti as Armando, the crusader knight, preceded Meyerbeer's grand opéra period in Paris, but not by much. It was the last and most successful of the operas he composed during his eight-year residence in Italy. "The composer," writes Patrick Barbier, "whose curiosity extended to everything, was trying out a vocal experiment which he knew would have no future." Originating at La Fenice in Venice, Il Crociato was restaged in Florence, Trieste, Padua, Parma, and London in little more than a year, providing Velluti with a triumphal tour and a last platform for the castrato voice in opera. But when it got to Paris in 1825, the role of Armando was rewritten for Giuditta Pasta, and a great age in the story of opera came to an end.
Velluti's fame was largely dependent on his being The Last Castrato. By the time he made his debut in 1801, Marchesi and Crescentini were fast approaching retirement (in 1805 and 1812 respectively, though Crescentini's last six years were spent in Paris singing almost exclusively for Napoleon). Velluti was lucky that there was still at least one significant Neapolitan composer, Giuseppe Nicolini, writing opere serie, and he had busy career in Naples, Rome, Milan, Venice, and other Italian cities. But the end was near. By 1815, when Rossini was contracted as resident composer in Naples, Velluti found himself with fewer engagements, and many of those were broad. At the end, between 1825 and 1830, he was in London (the first castrato to sing there in a quarter of a century) as an outright curiosity, singing only occasionally but managing the opera house with some success. He finally left when he lost a court case brought against him by members of the chorus, from which, it was claimed, he had tried to exclude women.
After that, if you wanted to hear a castrato sing, the only place was in a church - and after 1870, when the Church lost all sovereignty over temporal affairs in Italy, it was only the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. That, too, finally ended in the early years of the twentieth century, following Pope Leo XIII's 1902 edict banning the use of castrati in church music.
For two hundred years - half the span of opera's history - the castrati had been a hugely influential presence. Their ascendancy may be dated within a somewhat smaller period between 1660 and 1780. Their actual dominance (when they were quite simply indispensable) was even shorter - perhaps 1700-1750 - and that, not surprisingly, was when opera seria was at its zenith. This was a form of opera that was basically artificial, much more so than the original concept of dramma per musica that had been developed in Caccini's day. Caccini and his peers had wanted to do little more than augment the words by setting them in a form of "dry recitative" with very basic instrumental accompaniment. A century later, opera seria not only gave the music as much importance as the words, but it gave the singers a great amount of latitude within the written score. It made a virtue of virtuosity, and it was tailor-made for the greatest virtuosi of them all, the castrati.
At this distance of time, when we cannot know what they really sounded like and when we find the idea of castration abhorrent, it is easy to dismiss the whole era as an aberration, something we neither want nor need to know about. But it is not as easy as that - and not just because the castrati were an undeniable historical phenomenon: they also did much to form and define the art form that has come down to us today. They created a standard - a standard to which female singers of their own day aspired, and one that was implicit in the vocal teaching of the nineteenth century.
The castrati were intensely musical: their training from boyhood and their concentration on music at the expense of all other disciplines equipped them with the sort of technique and understanding we might normally associate with prodigies (which is exactly what many of them were). Moreover, so much was made of the excitement and audacity of their vocal acrobatics that it is easy to forget that they were also the most expressive and evocative of singers, capable of moving audiences to rapture, sadness, ecstasy, and even horror - in short, they could involve the audience in the action of a drama. That is a rare gift among opera singers. We think of them, too, as deformed or ugly: in fact, some of them were striking and impressive men, and some of them were tolerably good actors - but what they excelled at was vocal acting, the ability to use their voices to express emotion. Carestini's Xerxes, or Guadagni's Orfeo, or Crescentini's Romeo were characterizations that swept audiences along with them. Just as important, it was the voices of Carestini, Guadagni, and Crescentini that had inspired Handel, Gluck, and Zingarelli to write the roles in the first place, and the same was true of countless other operas.
Not many of these operas have survived, and fewer still can be heard in the modern repertory. That is partly because there were so many of them, mostly written to order and at high speed - the average time lapse between the delivery of a libretto to a composer and his deadline for completing the score was rarely more than four weeks, so many of them were not very good, and there was a regular industry in recycling music from one opera to another. But it is also because the vocal forces for which they were written no longer exist. As the castrati departed the scene in the early nineteenth century, their places were largely taken by female contraltos "in breeches", occasionally by high tenors like Adolphe Nourrit and Gilbert-Louis Duprez.
The nineteenth century made its own music: it had little need, and very little inclination, to revive operas of a forgotten era. Mozart, of course, was recognized for what he was - a genius (but Idomeneo, arguably the greatest opera seria ever written, was almost never heard throughout the century); and Gluck was much admired, especially among musicians. But Handel, Hasse, Porpora, Vinci, Pergolesi...all were forgotten, at any rate so far as their operas were concerned. When, eventually, the twentieth century began to rediscover them, the castrato roles were generally filled by female contraltos, though sometimes they were reset for tenors [or baritones], and very occasionally they were given to countertenors. Only at the very end of the century, when a number of talented countertenors began to appear, was it possible to hear an echo (still a very faint echo) of the original castrato sound. If, on the other hand, it was not the exact sound you wanted, but the agility, expressiveness, and purity of technique, then it was still possible to hear it in performances by female singers like Marilyn Horne and Cecilia Bartoli and male singers like David Daniels.
In truth, though, the castrato had no successors.
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