THE COUNTERFEIT VOICES
SOURCE: Robert Rushmore, The Singing Voice (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. - Copyright © 1971 Robert Rushmore)
The development of the singing voice as we know it today very much parallels the development of man as we know him today. With the coming of the Renaissance and the socalled Age of Humanism, men really began to emerge as individuals. Until then they had mainly been as members of a unit, as were their voices, since vocal music was almost entirely polyphonic. When individual man began to assert his uniqueness, the singing voice responded with its special claim to uniqueness too.
In 1600 Jacopo Peri, himself a singer, wrote what is generall conceded to be the first opera, Euridice, and there commenced in Italy a golden age of singing, which some look back upon and rue will never come again. Peri took his example from the Greeks, as did many artists of that period, and composed a delcamatory kind of music in which the sense of the word was all-important. The greatest master of this kind of vocal writing was Claudio Monteverdi. His full-length opera, L'Incoronazione di Poppea, which has been produced and recorded in recent times, is a work that seems strangely modern to us today, telling a story of a very real, passionate people wonderfully characterized by the music. No display of the voice of any kind if introduced; if there are repeated notes or embellishments it is purely for emphasis. the voice is the complete servant of the word and never has it been used in a more human way.
But as a taste for the baroque gathered this almost austere vocal music gave way to display, ostentation and artificiality; to lines that were long, serpentine and highly ornamented. The singing voice, as it was uniquely capable of doing, led the way in creating this style of music, mainly through the performances of the celebrated castrati, who initiated what is generally thought of as the first golden age of bel canto.
"Viva il coltello" - "Hooray for the knife" - audiences sometimes shouted after a particularly remarkable performance by one of these tall, full-chested male singers who produced the sound of a woman's voice. For the development of this curious vocal taste the Church, ever a force over the destinies of the singing voice, must take the perhaps not so unwitting blame. Having banished the sexually arousing sound of the female voice from services it now had to rely on the capabilities of boys to cope with the higher ranges that rightfully belong to women. When by the end of the fifteenth century a number of polyphonists began to emerge - particularly in the Netherlands - who composed highly complex and glorious music that required voices of power and stamina, it soon became evident that the voices of boys were inadequate. At best, boys had never been totally satisfactory; after years of careful musical training and practice their voices, maddeningly, might break overnight, and all their valuable instruction and experience be instantly lost. Unless....
Tampering artificially with the sex of a male and his ability to procreate was definitely interfering with one of the basic works of God, and the Church promised excommunication to anyone participating in such a crime against nature. Nevertheless the Church also took the attitude that if a husky male well-trained musically and in vocal production, from whom emanated a voice with a female range, appeared on the doorstep, so to speak, this was the will of God. Accordingly the singer would be promptly accepted into the choir to gain honor, wealth and, above all, security in this most insecure of times. As a result, all over Italy, mainly among desperate peasant familiies, boys displaying any kind of singing voice and musical talent were put to the knife. Most of them never made careers and were left to finish their lives as eunuchs - the targets of mockery and derision.
Shame, indignation, revulsion have generally been the reactions of people towards the unsexing of a man by surgery for the sake of retaining his boy's range and quality of tone. "Can British matrons take their daughters to hear the portentous yells of this disenfranchised of nature, and will they explain the cause to the youthful and untutored mind?" demanded the London Times when one of the last celebrated castrati, Giovanni Velluti, appeared in the English capital in 1825. Here, however, is a modern view on the castrating of boys to preserve their singing voices which I came across in a letter to Stereo Review, November 1966, from a lady in California:
"I do not believe the practice of producing castrati for their special musical purpose 'ghastly' or 'shameful' when the operation is performed on the initiative of the individual, as was often the case, nor do I regard the castrati themselves as being 'mutilated'...I have many friends, some of them quite prominent in musical ciricles, who agree with me that if there is to be a serious and widespread revival of Baroque and bel canto opera, there must necessarly be a return of the castrati to sing the roles they alone can handle with dramatic and vocal legitimacy.... I defnitely do not advocate force, but if a young singer should possess a fine voice which he wishes to preserve, I can sympathize with no reason for discouraging him. Children in general are far more reasonable, intelligent beings than most adults want to believe, and a gifted child is a thorough pragmatist to whom nothing is more important than his talent."
From appearances in church the next obvious step for the castrati was to invade the more glamorous and exciting theaters and opera houses where they were at greater liberty to indulge themselves in what they were most adept at - embellishments and interopolations of highly elaborate cadenzas into their music. Certainly from a vocal point of view the knife created a unique physical situation. During puberty a man's vocal cords or folds lengthen to an average of seven-twelfths of an inch and also thicken; so do a woman's, only less so. For this reason a woman's voice is more flexible. The vocal folds of a boy are proportionately smaller and thinner still, and these by one stroke of the knife were placed in a male body with male strength, stamina and above all lung power. An examination of the music in which castrati excelled usually shows that they were able to execute tremendously long, elaborate phrases in one breath.
The vocal feats of the castrati are legendary and with all such tales perhaps subject to some disbelief. Johann Quantz, the flautist, who heard many of the great singers of this first golden age of bel canto, tells us that Farinelli had a range the same as today's lyric or dramatic sopranos - that is, slightly more than two octaves ranging from A below middle C to the high C or even D [two octaves above]. Yet when one examines excerpts of the music that he is supposed to have sung, replete with an infinite number of trills, runs and other complicated embellishments, it appears that he lacked comfort and ease above the G below high C, nor does the music go lower than the D just above middle C - a range in fact of eleven notes. Difficult as these fast-moving, scale-like figures, runs, jumps and rapidly repeated notes are to execute, I do not think they would hold any terrors for Joan Sutherland, though she might require a greater number of breaths to sing the same amount of music.
Contemporary accounts of the castrati also sometimes proudly point out that the intonation of such and such a singer was good and that he always sang in tune. This mention of the ability (or lack of it) to sing on pitch also frequently occurs in descriptions of the great vocalists of the pre-recording days in the nineteenth century, suggesting that audiences in both eras seemed to have been far more tolerant of out-of-tune singing than we are today.
Would we have admired the vocal art of these strapping, often gawky men who appeard in female parts, lavishly gowned and adorned with jewels? Certanly sexual inconsistency does not worry audiences in opera houses of today when a well-busted woman puts on the breeches of amorous youths like Octavian and Cherubino. But would we have reacted with the same adoring adulation that English and Italian audiences gave to these artificially created vocal anomalies? (The practical French, incidentally, never had a taste for the singing of the castrati.) Naturally it is almost impossible to judge. Certainly we would have been impressed by their remarkable vocal technique just as we are amazed and delighted by the coloratura abilities of a Sutherland or Berganza today. On the other hand I wonder how we would react to the actual quality of the voice of a castrato. Contemporary accounts often speak of its sweetness and the pathetic quality that it possessed, but into more than one description creeps the word "shrill". Certainly these voices lacked (literally) any sexual quality and were without the warm, pulsating vibrato that we expect to hear in today's voices. On the other hand such is the diversity of vocal tastes that the lady from California whose letter I have quoted and others besides would undoubtedly welcome the return of this counterfeit voice.
Back to Castrati