A CUT ABOVE THE REST
SOURCE: Michael Church, Independent (23 August 200 - Copyright © 2000 Newspaper Publishing PLC)
Castrati were poor boys brutally doctored to give pleasure to the rich: it would be perverse to regret their passing. Yet the frisson they provided must have been infinitely greater than that of mere cross-dressing, more akin to kabuki in present-dayJapan than to boys playing girls in Shakespeare. Men who were not men, erect but not potent, promising safe pleasures for women - a third sex whose voices were full of magic and mystery. As the pop stars of their day, they often became fabulously rich. Their voices drew sublime music from Handel and his contemporaries. The only one we have on record - a Sistine Chapel chorister - may convey disembodied passion, but can only have been the shadow of his 18th-century precursors.
How do we know? Well, here is one critic's assessment of Senesino, Handel's favourite: "He had a powerful, clear, equal and sweet contralto voice, with a perfect intonation and an excellent shake. He sang allegros with great fire, and marked rapiddivisions, from the chest, in an articulate and pleasing manner... His aspect and deportment were more suited to the part of a hero than of a lover."
According to countertenor Nicholas Clapton, who is professor of singing at Trinity College of Music, comparisons between castrati and modern falsettos - which is what most countertenors are - are otiose. "They produced their sound in a completelydifferent way because, as they never had a change at puberty, they retained the high notes of a boy's voice while developing the chest register of a tenor. This gave them a range with which we just can't compete."
Which makes Clapton's forthcoming exploit at Battersea Arts Centre all the more remarkable. For there he will attempt to recreate the voice and person of the greatest castrato who ever lived.
Farinelli - born Carlo Broschi - was in many ways remarkable, not least because he came from a noble family. Co-starring in 1734 with Senesino, then the reigning champ in London, he effortlessly reduced him to submission.
As an astonished critic noted at the time: "Senesino had the part of a furious tyrant, and Farinelli that of an unfortunate hero in chains; but in the course of the first air, the captive so softened the heart of the tyrant, that Senesino, forgetting hisstage-character, ran to Farinelli and embraced him."
As Clapton ruefully acknowledges: "Some of Farinelli's repertoire is beyond my range, which on a good day, with the wind behind me, goes up to a high B. And his flexibility was phenomenal - every bit as remarkable as that of the great coloratura sopranosof the 19th century. That man put trills where most of us haven't got room to put a single semiquaver."
Farinelli is now best known thanks to Gerard Corbiau's stylish 1994 film, in which the problem of Farinelli's range was solved by digitally splicing together a male falsetto for the low notes and a female soprano for the high ones. But in Farinelli the Castrato, the bloody operation and subsequent imaginatively dreamt-up amorous adventures obscured the more interesting fact that the most celebrated castrato in the world spent the best years of his life administering music therapyto a sad old king at the Escorial.
Ten years ago, Clapton was invited to star in a concert for a group of psychologists in Bologna, at which Farinelli's sojourn at the Spanish court of Charles III was to be musically dramatised. Charles was paralysed by depression, and, all other cureshaving failed, Farinelli's voice was deemed the last hope. And it worked: night after night he sang, and the king was roused from his lethargy. The Bologna concert was a success: five years later, Clapton was invited back to star in a fully stagedversion, in which he would play the young singer while an actor played him reminiscing in old age. Clapton was impressed with the piece, and saw it as an opportunity to redress a musical injustice. "We'd had the Handel revival, but it obscured the fact that there were dozens of other composers turning out wonderful stuff all over Europe at that time."He translated the script into English, and incorporated a lot of extra stuff he'd found, including a piquant episode in which a young Austrian boy came to seek the old man's advice on the voices he should use in his new opera - a boy named Mozart.
All accounts agree on Farinelli's character: cultivated, gracious, and - unusual for a castrato - sexually scandal-free.... "Farinelli had no sex drive, which left energy for things like literature and art."
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