CASTRATI
SOURCE: John Rosselli: Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession (Cambridge University Press, 1992)
For a century of more, castrated male singers dominated Italian opera. This well-known fact has long been an embarrassment.
That people should have castrated substantial numbers of boys, not in antiquity or in another continent but in early modern times and at the heart of Western Christendom, arouses fear, distaste, sometimes a prurient interest. That at least is how most onlookers have reacted since the mid-eighteenth century, both in Italy and outside. Comments have been jocular or hostile, concerned with the eccentric and the grotesque. Jokes have kept he castrati safely on the margin of everyday life. Awareness of our own feelings should help us to see that, on the contrary, they were for many years accepted at the heart of social life in the courts and towns of Italy, and played some part in that of areas under Italian cultural influence, particularly southern Germany and the Iberian peninsula.
About the castrati there is much we do not and cannot know. We cannot hear their voices; the few recordings made in the infancy of the gramophone only hint at a sound now lost. We cannot interrogate them; this is true of many people studied by historians, but even when there were still castrati living, scholars were too embarrassed to ask them searching questions. We do not really know how they were operated on or what the operation did to human characteristics other than the voice. Nor do we always know who were or were not castrati; so we can make only a rough estimate of how many there were at any time.
Such knowledge as we have is largely back to front: it comes from the late eighteenth century, when castrati were on the way out. Much of it comes from a few sources like the musicologist Charles Burney, who visited Italy in 1770. He and other travellers reported Italians as deeply ashamed of the practice; they built up a myth according to which Naples was the centre of opera, with its orphanages (conservatorii) the chief source of musical education, and its surrounding Kingdom of Naples the main provider of castrati, whom they saw as in the first place opera singers: castrati singing in church choirs Burney dismissed as "the refuse of the opera houses". Yet if one thing is clear about castrati it is that most of them were church singers, who might or might not sing from time to time in opera.
Nor do we know much about the physiology and psychology of castrati. Some things are clear. Males castrated before puberty had high voices, lacked secondary sexual characteristics such as facial and body hair and early baldness, and were more likely than ordinary males to grow to an unusual height. Some - not all or even most - attained an unusual vocal power, range, and length of breath, because an enlarged thoracic cavity combined with an undeveloped larynx allowed a mighty rush of air to play upon small vocal folds. The resulting tone, in the best singers, was felt as extraordinary, at once powerful and brilliant; it did not sound like what we hear from most counter-tenors. At the extreme, Farinelli united this power and brilliance with highly-trained flexibility and a range said to be above three octaves (from C to D in altissimo): no wonder a woman in a London audience exclaimed - the story is apt though perhaps untrue - "One God, one Farinelli!"
Other characteristics are as unclear now as they were in Burney's day. Writers of the time were content to repeat a farrago of notions drawn from ancient authors such as Hippocrates: castration cured or prevented gout, elephantiasis, leprosy, and hernia; castrati tended to have weak eyes and a weak pulse, lacked fortitude and strength of mind, and had difficulty pronouncing the letter R. Burney, from personal knowledge, denied that castrati were cowards or lazy, but could not supply a full alternative account. Males castrated before puberty clearly cannot father children; but the question was often raised: can they none the less experience the sexual drive and engage in sexual intercourse? The only "authority" available then or now on the practice of castration is outstandingly muddled: its implied answer is at one point "yes", at another "no". The answer "yes" was current in the ancient world and in early modern Europe; twentieth-century medical opinion, for what it is worth, tends to say "no".
It seems best, then, to forget the clichés that litter books on opera, and look at the whole phenomenon of castrati afresh.
The rise of opera coincided with but in no obvious way caused that of the castrati. If anything, the taste for the castrato voice antedated opera. Nor did it at once dominate the new form. A castrato sang the prologue and two female parts in Monteverdi's L'Orfeo at Mantua in 1607, but the lead part was sung by a tenor. Of Monteverdi's two other surviving operas, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (1640) uses normal male voices, but L'incoronazione di Poppea (1642) allots two male leads to castrati. Vocal casting then and for another 200 years was determined by which singers were available: castrati, it seems, were not yet always at hand or perhaps always wanted.
There seems to be no evidence of castrato singers in Western Europe before the 1550s. Some of the earliest came from Spain, perhaps because of previous Moorish rule there. One entered the Papal (Sistine) Chapel choir in 1562, though he and others were not formally described as castrati until 1599. At St Peter's the Pope officially authorized the recruitment of castrati in 1589.
By the early seventeenth century there were castrati employed all over Italy as the court singers of ruling princes, in chamber or chapel or both. They also flourished in Germany - first in the southern capitals (Munich, Stuttgart, Vienna), then, by mid-century, in Dresden. So far as we can tell they were all Italians or at any rate had been castrated and trained in Italy, except for some in Germany who were locally produced and who seem to have been employed only in their ruler's chapel; Spaniards faded out. From then on castration for artistic purposes remained a practice known to be carried out almost exclusively in Italy and associated with Italian music. It had spread quickly. Why?
The explanation has to be looked for in church. Women were forbidden (in line with St Paul's teaching) to utter there. This was a necessary but not a sufficient cause, since boys and falsettists (male altos) could sing the higher parts. Contemporary comments show that people became dissatisfied with choirboys because they were no sooner trained than lost, with falsettists because their sound came to seem weak and reedy; the castrato voice in contrast was described as "natural" and "genuine" (sincera) - terms obviously applied to the quality of sound rather than to the means that produced it.
People were besotted with the high, in particular the soprano, voice: its special value called for the exotic powers of castrati. This value may have lain in an association with youth: in opera, castrati were to sing the parts of young heroes. It may also have had to do with superiority. "Soprano" means "higher", a notion not taken lightly by a society that was at once hierarchical-minded and used to displaying hierarchical order in forms perceived by the senses. A composer in charge of a church choir, writing when the system had been going for a long time, assumed that higher voices took precedence of lower - and that a "natural" alto (a castrato) must as a rule take precedence of a falsettist. This superiority found practical expression in the new public opera houses: the fees paid to high voices in leading parts (castrati and women) were almost invariably higher than those paid to tenors and especially to basses. In church choirs the matter was complicated by seniority, but there too the high voices (castrati and tenors) were generally paid better than basses, the commonest male voices.
We still need to explain why a preference, even a craze, for high voices should have led ordinary people to undertake (and people in authority to condone) so drastic a step as castration. One possible answer is that the cultivation of the solo voice in the new genres of the early seventeenth century - opera, cantata, and oratorio - required a new professionalism uncalled for in the age of polyphonic music that had gone before; and that the castrati - thanks to unbroken study from childhood, less hampered by social custom than the education of girls - were best able to meet this new demand. This is of some help. Yet we still need to ask: was the step taken as drastic as we think?
We have noted the severe economic crisis that struck Italy about 1620. The city of Venice apparently managed to keep much of its industry going in spite of increasing rigidity and lack of competitiveness. In many other places, however, deindustrialization - followed by war and by the two great plagues of 1630 and 1656 - confirmed the upper classes in their retreat into landholding as their main source of income; sometimes the retreat was accompanied by a new imposition of feudal tenures or by a strengthening of entails to safeguard the line of descent. With it went an increase in the numbers of monks and nuns, probably most marked in the period 1580-1650: by the 1670s they seem to have accounted for some 5 percent of the population of Florence and Catania, for about 9, 10, or 11 percent in decayed Central Italian towns such as Siena, Pistoia, and Prato; in more populous cities - Venice, Rome, Naples - the proportion was lower but absolute numbers higher, with monks alone numbering well over 3,000 in Rome, 4,000 in Naples.
For rich families, getting a son or daughter into a monastic order cost less than setting up the son in an official career or than marrying off the daughter; in a lean time it could bring privileges such as tax concessions. For many middling or poor people a child who became a monk or a nun held out the hope of security in troubled times, not just for the individual but for the family. Such decisions about a child's future were a matter of family strategy. Material explanations of this kind need imply no denial of the intense religious feeling common in baroque Italy - itself stirred by a sense of danger and decline. These conditions broadly held through the whole of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries.
Monks, according to a late eighteenth-century German writer, were "so to speak, castrati who had not been operated upon". They were celibates, not always of their own choice. A castrato could be thought of as an enforced celibate with an unusual chance of securing for his family an income, perhaps a fortune. There were castrato monks who sang in or directed church choirs: one took part - though only after Mazarin had spent six years using diplomatic pressure on the Pope - in the Paris performance of Cavalli's opera Ercole armante (1660), singing the part of a woman disguised as a man. Some other castrati became monks late in life; many more became priests. But no vows were needed for the castrato's "vocation" to have something in common with that of a monk.
We need to stand as far as we can away from modern assumptions. Central to these is the right of human beings to sexual fulfilment. The tradition of Christian asceticism began to decline even in Southern Europe from the mid-eighteenth century; it is nearly lost. But around 1600 it was still strong. Renunciation of sexual life could seem not just possible but ideal. Sexuality could anyhow be a burden when (as happened in at least parts of Italy) celibacy was on the increase between 1600 and 1750 owing to economic hardship and the efforts of families to safeguard property, while the vigilance of those same families probably did much to prevent sexual relations outside marriage. Celibacy was a means to birth control. According to a foreign observer in eighteenth-century Naples, the practice of castration "attracts no notice in a country where the population is huge in relation to the amount of work available". To become a castrato - still more, to make your son become one - need not in these conditions seem a total misfortune.
Nor was it a step condemned by the Church. Theologians held that we are caretakers, not owners, of our bodies. Most thought castration licit only to save life, on medical advice and with the boy's consent. A minority, however, held that on a balance of advantage castration for artistic purposes could be licit if the benefit to the community (to the effectiveness of church services or the supposed needs of rulers) outweighed the damage to the individual. Among Italian theologians it was discussed until about 1750 as a matter finely balanced between "probable" and "more probable" opinions, and even when opposition began to build up Pope Benedict XIV advised (1748) against a proposal that castration should be forbidden by all bishops - essentially on prudential grounds: it was better to avoid disturbance and work for a compromise that would bring about gradual change.
The operation itself may have been relatively mild and safe. We know little about it. According to the dubious source already mentioned, the testicles might be removed, or they might be caused to wither through pressure, maceration, or the cutting of the spermatic cord; none of these methods amounted to the horrific "total castration" (removal of the penis as well as of the testicles) said to have been inflicted mainly in Africa on slaves intended for Turkish and Persian harems, and to have killed most of them. An account of the cost of castrating a Modenese boy, drawn up - probably in the 1670s or 1680s - by an experienced person, assumed "about thirteen days" as the time needed for the operation and the period of convalescence. This does not suggest a very grave wound. People gossiped about operations that had supposedly failed to castrate a boy fully. One such is documented: the boy had been "castrated on one side only", so that as he turned fourteen his voice broke. We do not hear of deaths caused by castration. They may have occurred, and may have gone unreported in times when early death, and death through medical error, were common. But the impression one gets is that the operation was a routine one.
This impression is strengthened by the wording of apprenticeship contracts between boys' families and teachers, of boys' own applications for financial help in having themselves castrated, and of comments on them in government archives. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, there was little attempt at euphemism or concealment; some persons in authority had no compunction about approving or even paying for castrations.
Many contracts survive that bind young Italians to a singing teacher as, in effect, apprentices. Some of these notarial contracts (public documents, to be deposited in an official archive) openly set as a condition that the boy should be castrated.
The parents and uncle of Paolo Nannini, of Viterbo, in 1671 understood to have him castrated within a few weeks at the teacher's expense, so that he "may learn music and keep his voice". A contract of 1697 effectively sold an eight-year-old Apulian boy to Nicola Tricarico (a well-known contralto singer of comic parts) who was to have him taught by his brother, a canon and cantor of Gallipoli Cathedral; the boy's father, it explained, had "resolved, for the greater benefit of [himself], of his family, and of [his son] to have him perfectly taught the profession or art of ornate singing, and in due time to have him castrated", but he lacked the necessary means: the decision to have the boy operated on was left to the Tricarico brothers to make sometime in the coming six years, clearly depending on the promise he showed in the meantime. A much later contract of 1773 provided that the teacher would pay for the castration of Domenico Bruni, son of an Umbrian building worker; Domenico became one of the last famous castrato opera singers. The teacher, incidentally, was musical director to the religious confraternity of which the boy's father was a member, so this was almost a family affair. A slightly different type of contract, an eighteenth-century one providing for a boy to be taught and boarded at the school attached to the basilica of San Francesco in Assisi, stated that if the boy was to be castrated the father should pay.
In yet another type of contractual arrangement, the ten-year-old Gaetano Majorano's grandmother gave him in 1720 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 boy was to become famous under the name Caffarelli. A little later, the retired castrato Filippo Balatri named, in a poetic "will", the surgeon who had operated on him as a boy; he did so in a spirit of burlesque rather than denunciation.
Openness and family strategy were combined in the fortunes of the Melani family of Pistoia. Domenico Melani was appointed bell ringer of Pistoia Cathedral in 1624, when the eldest of his seven sons was one year old; he kept he job for the remaining twenty-five years of his life. Of the seen sons - all born within fifteen years of his appointment - at least three were castrated and became singers; three more became composers or singers and there is some question whether one of them may not have been a castrato too. Only the fourth son's marriage produced children and perpetuated the family; this son inherited the bell ringer's post. Several of the musician sons had distinguished careers; some engaged in international diplomacy, and the next generation climbed into the Tuscan nobility. There were also two Melani cousins, born about the same time as the seven brothers, who became castrato singers. It is inconceivable that the cathedral authorities in Pistoia did not realize what their bell ringer's family was up to.
Of another church establishment, the music school attached to the collegiate church of Santa Maria Maggiore, Bergamo, we know that in 1650 it paid a substantial sum to have one if its choirboys castrated; the surgeon was one of its own string players and the payment was authorized by the governing council of the important charity that was responsible for the school.
After all this it is not surprising to find an orphaned Roman boy in 1613 reported as having voiced "a great desire to have himself castrated" so that he could serve the Duke of Mantua. Another Rome agent in 1661 told the then Duke of a promising by of thirteen, not yet castrated - but "that can be done".
Later in the century, at least two boys petitioned the Duke of Modena for financial help in getting themselves castrated; one got it, the other probably got it, and an account detailing the costs of castration (for which boy is unclear) gives the fee for the operation as five doubloons "in conformity with what was done on other occasions by order of His Most Serene Highness". Both boys stated that they were afraid of losing the quality of their voice if it was allowed to break; both pleaded poverty. Silvestro Prittoni asked discreetly "to be made to be without those instruments" that "might" cause his voice to break. Rinaldo Gherardini stated his resolve "to have himself castrated through Your Highness' goodwill, so as to make progress in [the singing] profession and give much better service both to Our Lord and to Your Highness"; he also wished to become a priest, and implied that this was suitable in terms of family strategy by pointing out that he had two married brothers. When the Duke authorized payment of four doubloons to Silvestro "for the aforementioned purpose" the only precaution used was to state in the order to the treasurer that it was issued "for reasons known to us". Rinaldo spent his life in princely service; Silvestro appears in opera in Venice at least once, singing a small part.
This kind of frankness became less acceptable in the course of the eighteenth century. More castrations were explained as having been necessitated at an early age by illness or by an unspecified "need". A favourite cause was the bite of a wild swan or a wild pig. According to a well-known satire of 1720, the hangers on of a castrato opera singer would explain away his condition with one or the other of these tales, and in 1784 the Franciscan biographer of Farinelli sent round a questionnaire virtually asking to have his subject's voice explained in the same way; the cause he was supplied with was a fall from a horse. By the mid-nineteenth century the surviving castrati of the Sistine Chapel had apparently all fallen victim to pigs.
Yet even in a more shamefaced age boys could still allege that they had consented to, even begged for castration. The eleven-year-old Angelo Villa did so in 1783, and - even in a Lombardy where "enlightened" reform was at its peak - succeeded in having his teacher and adoptive father Pietro Testori let off five years' hard labour; Angelo went on to make a fair career in opera under the name Testori. We need not take the boys' petitions at face value. But they - and their acceptance by rulers - show that for many years castration was almost a routine matter, calling at best for perfunctory concealment.
What sort of people allowed their sons to be castrated? We do not know. Most of the boys operated on - it is reasonable to suppose - came of modest but not necessarily poverty-stricken families. Farinelli's parents were said to be of noble descent, but impoverished; his father was a minor government official. Other castrati were the sons of tradesmen, of a shoemaker, of a midwife, of an immigrant German timpani player, of a wandering valet-cum-fencing and dancing master. Yet others, as we have noted, were the sons or grandsons of winegrowers or building workers. These few known examples probably define the range of social origin among the very many we do not know about.
They came from all over Italy. The Kingdom of Naples as the main source of castrati is a legend - the result of over-concentration on the Naples conservatories, where indeed most pupils came from the hinterland. Recent research has shown that castrati were trained in many other institutions, typically orphanages or choir schools attached to important churches, monasteries, or seminaries; many studied privately with individual teachers.
How many castrati were there at any one time? We cannot tell with any precision: all the statistics we have raise insoluble problems. What we can do is to use such figures as there are (for Rome) to work out some notion both of castrati numbers in particular areas and of changes over time.
One a conservative estimate, some 100 or so castrati were probably living in Rome in 1694, nearly all of them primarily church singers, of whom eighty or ninety were active; in Rome choirs high voices outnumbered low in a ratio of about four to three. Half a century later, in 1746, the ratio was significantly reversed: higher voices were already harder to find, total numbers had fallen, and, within the total, the number of castrati had fallen faster than that of normal male voices. Allowing for a greater number of opera singers by this date without a church connection, we may guess that there were then living in Rome some fifty or sixty castrati - at best, two-thirds or so of the 1694 total. Nor should we take the 1694 numbers to represent a peak: some rome choirs were already in decline in the latter half of the seventeenth century. We might therefore guess at a total (and probably an historical maximum) of 120 or so castrati in the Rome of about 1650.
Rome was not necessarily typical. Fragmentary evidence from Bologna suggests that castrato numbers there may have peaked rather later, sometime between 1670 and 1720. What is beyond doubt in Bologna as well as Rome is that castrati declined, both in absolute numbers and as a proportion of all singers, from about 1740; there remains a possibility, even strong likelihood, that the decline had set in earlier.
Besides Rome and Bologna, important centres for the employment of castrati were the great pilgrimage churches at Padua, Loreto, and Assisi; capital cities with both court and religious establishments (Turin, Milan, Parma, Modena, Florence, Naples); many religious institutions up and down the peninsula; and Venice with its public opera houses. There were, besides, court establishments in many seventeenth-century European states (even in England, where the castrati in Queen Catherine of Braganza's chapel disappointed Pepys), later followed by opera houses.
All that can be said is that at any time between about 1630 and 1750 there must have been living several hundred castrati, nearly all Italians, with a marked decline setting in about 1740-50. In Naples, Rome, Bologna, and Venice (all but the first with less than 160,000 population in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and in some smaller towns (Padua, Assisi, Loreto) there were groups of castrati large and stable enough to be a feature of everyday life.
The career pattern of castrati changed over time, but slowly. Castration, actual or in prospect, implied a total commitment to the singing profession: as an eleven-year-old applicant to one of the Naples conservatories put it, "since he is a eunuch, music...is the only profession to which he wishes to apply himself".
So as to concentrate on his training, the pupil generally boarded with a teacher or an institution. Castrati had, in comparison with other male singers, an early start and a period of training uninterrupted by puberty - though whether this allowed them a longer career as fully fledged professionals is unclear; the advantage lay in the chance of steadily developing musical knowledge and vocal agility. Another advantage was the favourable treatment they got in religious institutions such s the Naples conservatories, originally orphanages, and other schools up and down the peninsula. Because they were deemed essential to the church functions on which the schools relied for part of their income, they were relatively cosseted and were sometimes admitted to free places even though not orphans, or else had their admission fees reduced.
Whether in an institution or not, these boys were being trained for careers as, in the first place, church singers. The church work they were destined for was in part liturgical routine, but also oratorio, which in some towns until about 1750 was "the most accessible and pervasive genre of dramatic music" on offer. From then on, opera engagements multiplied and opera became more feasible as a chief occupation for some; Rome and most of the Papal States, where women were forbidden to appear on stage down to 1798, supplied engagements for young castrati to sing women's parts.
How the change affected the outlook of castrati on the threshold of a career may be seen from the cases of Felice Altobelli and Bartolomeo Pierotti.
Altobelli in 1736 had been studying for two years in Bologna with the great musicologist Padre Martini; he ran out of money, could find no local post because there were already too many male sopranos in the city, and was sent by his teacher, with a strong recommendation, to the Franciscan school at Assisi; there he spent eight months, just enough to learn to read music in several clefs, before the offer of a theatre engagement at Verona enticed him away. Here opera looks like an overmastering diversion from a course presumably meant to lead to a church post.
Pierotti in 1755 had just finished seven years' apprenticeship to a well-known teacher and wished to go to Bologna "to seek his fortune", but also wished "first to be assured of a place in a chapel" there. since Bologna was by then the chief market for opera engagements we may assume that opera was Pierotti's goal; for a singer described as having "middling" but "pleasing and flexible" voice, a post in a chapel had become something to fall back on.
The changing balance between church and theatre in the careers of castrati can be documented in two different ways: by looking t the patterns of some individual careers - necessarily those of the best-known - and by asking how groups of more modest singers divided their time.
Two famous early castrati based in Rome, Loreto Vittori and Marc'Antonio Pasqualini, both served full twenty-five-year terms as members of the Papal Chapel; both were composers as well as singers; both sang from time to time in opera, always given under monarchical or noble patronage and before an invited audience; both generally worked in Rome in the service of the Barberini and other Papal families, occasionally abroad when one or the other was lent out to a foreign magnate. The mainspring in the career of each was Barberini patronage: if they absented themselves from the chapel, as they often did, it was as a rule because a pope or papal favourite chose to use them in an opera (or indeed to take one of them hunting, as Cardinal Antonio Barberini took Pasqualini) rather than in church. Through the influence of opera-minded popes, Urban VIII Barberini or Clement IX Rospigliosi, other well-known castrato chapel singers were given leave in the mid-seventeenth century to appear in operas for some of which Rospigliosi or his nephew had provided the text; one, Giuseppe Fedi, sang a woman's part. Now and then the chapel services were suspended because of these and like absences.
Such behaviour was shortly to be disapproved by more austere popes; but we should not see the careers of Vittori, Pasqualini, or Fedi as divided between religious and secular. The operas they appeared in were often on sacred subjects; their careers were integrated, first by allegiance to a patron and secondly by the interpretation of religion and spectacle characteristic of baroque Rome.
Some other castrati based or trained in Rome at this time followed a similar career pattern, mainly abroad. Giovanni Andrea Angelini Bontempi sang first in St Mark's, Venice, and then for some thirty years in the chapel of the Elector of Saxony, where he became for a time deputy to the great Heinrich Schütz as kapellmeister and composed three operas. Seven castrati who entered the chapel of the German Jesuit college in Rome between 1617 and 1645 found partly overlapping employment in the Imperial Court Chapel in Vienna, and, in Rome, in the Papal Chapel, in Barberini-patronized operas (some also given in Paris), and in the service of Queen Christina of Sweden, which included singing in a dramatic oratorio or near-opera. Once again opera appears as an incident, though an important one, in careers taken up largely with church music and the service of princes.
In these decades, the 1640s and 1650s, opera in the Venetian style was making its way in many parts of Italy. Venetian opera meant works on non-Christian themes, often treated so as to bring out their erotic aspects, with women singers in some of the leading parts and performed in "mercenary" conditions, that is, before a paying audience. Castrati took part in them, though some of the most highly regarded castrati objected at first to doing so, especially those who served the leading chapels and magnates of Rome and Naples. "Every castrato singer was held to be infamous" - so a well-informed gossip explained the reluctance of three singers from the Naples royal chapel to take part in Cesti's La Dori, an opera of Venetian type - "if he mixed in those companies in the public mercenary theatre". What the three objected to seems to have been not a "mercenary" performance (it was being given in the Viceroy's palace) but "mixing in those companies", particularly having to deal with women singers some of whom were still courtesans, the prima donna in this 1675 La Dori being a notorious example. A few years later, in Rome (where women on stage were in practice tolerated now and then in the semi-privacy of noble palaces), papal officials objected to the loan of a contralto from the Sistine Chapel to the Duke of Bracciano, not because he was to sing in opera but because he would appear alongside two women.
This helps to explain why some famous seventeenth-century castrati never sang in a theatre. Even Matteo Sassani (Matteuccio), a royal church singer at Naples, Madrid, and Vienna from 1684 until 1711, did not appear in opera until 1697 and then only for scattered seasons. At his stage debut he replaced Grossi (Siface), who had just been murdered. Grossi's career showed how a celebrated castrato could now take advantage of the network of theatres that had developed in the last third of the century. The high fees available to leading castrati began to push the balance of their activities further towards opera.
Francesco Pistocchi apologized in 1702 for having to miss Holy Week at San Petronio, Bologna, where he was due to sing, because he was obliged to stay on in Milan and sing in opera during the coming visit of Philip V of Spain, then ruler of the state: "believe me, though staying on is extremely profitable to me, it hurts me to the very soul, but one must be patient". We need not doubt Pistocchi's sincerity, but priorities were changing. The slightly younger Nicola Grimaldi (Nicolino) began (but for a brief operatic appearance at the age of twelve, in a small part) as the leading church singer in Naples; from the age of twenty-four his triumphs in the operas of Alessandro Scarlatti set him on an international stage career that included five years in London. Yet he kept on with his church and chamber singing and concentrated on it exclusively in the last eight years of his life. when he was in Naples he would give an oratorio at his house on St Joseph's day, to celebrate the branch from the Glastonbury thorn bush (supposedly grown from the staff of St Joseph of Arimathea, who buried Christ) which he had been given in England.
These two and, in the next geneatin, Carlo Broschi (Farinelli) and Gaetano Majorano (Caffarelli) did most to establish the legend of the castrati as virtuosos astounding above all for their performances in opera.
From about 1680 to 1700, increasing vocal specialization in the theatre brought in the reign of the castrato as leading man (primo uomo) with at his side female soprano of increasingly high range. At the same time opera split into two branches, serious and comic: serious opera with its heroes drawn from ancient history or myth was recognized as the medium for the best castrato voices to work their astonishing powers. Castrati appeared now and then in comic opera, but (outside the Papal States) not as a matter of routine.
In spite of the greater chances opera now held out, some leading castrti still took trouble to keep on their regular salary from a church choir, however many leaves they took abroad (like Caffarelli, a lifelong member of the Naples royal chapel), while others' church engagements were brief and intermittent. Even in the period of decline some castrato opera stars (like some normal male singers down to the late nineteenth century) regarded a church appointment as insurance.
Gaetano Guadagni, a sixteen-year-old pupil in the choir of St Anthony's, Padua, was dismissed in 1746, soon after his appointment, because of his unauthorized absences on theatre engagements. He tried for a year to get himself reinstated, still kept up with his old teacher, and won his place back after eighteen years (during which time he had created Gluck's Orfeo); he accepted a moderate salary, and it was understood that he would still from time to time sing in opera outside Padua. After another eight years he retired to Padua for good and from then on was continuously active both in the chapel and in the musical life of the town, not just as a singer but as a composer and an artistic innovator inspired by "enlightened", perhaps Masonic ideals. Somewhat later, Domenico Bruni achieved the same end while avoiding conflict with the cathedral choir of Perugia: appointed to it in 1792, when he was already famous, he did not for some years sing there but, by agreement, made over at least half his salary to a substitute; this amounted to a trade-off of a small profit for Bruni against reflected glory for the choir. He eventually sang with the choir during his comfortable retirement.
The choirs themselves came under increasing pressure from theatres, at different times according to the spread of opera in their recruitment area. Venice with its six or seven public opera houses was the front line of competition. The choir of St Mark's between 1660 and 1725 - we have seen - was already losing some of its importance as a creative musical centre. Nearly forty regular members of its choir (of all voice types) sang in Venice opera seasons as well; most were singers of less than the first rank, for whom a post in the choir, combined with the chance of local theatre engagements in secondary parts, held out the prospect of a reasonable living. When first-rate castrati were appointed they went off on an extended series of leaves or else, like Pistocchi and Stefano Romano (Il Pignattino), shortly departed altogether; since visiting stars were needed for high days such as Christmas, these two came back at fees, for a single appearance, equivalent to between an eighth and a quarter of a choir member's annual salary.
In Rome, the rearguard action of two popes held back public opera houses and even for a time closed them down. But by 1728-9 the Papal Chapel was recruiting three castrati all of whom had spent the previous few years singing in opera, t least some of the time in women's parts or in comic opera. Two of the three went on appearing in Rome opera houses at various times in the 1730s, but always - more respectably - in serious opera and in men's parts. This gave a paying audience - part clerical, part aristocratic, part tourist - the indulgence the Barberini had assumed for themselves and had granted certain other noble patrons by allowing chapel singers to appear in non-"mercenary" opera performances. On one occasion the Pope himself overrode objections and granted the best known of these castrati leave to appear at the Teatro Argentina "so that the city should not lack for respectable entertainment, of a kind that general fends off others more perilous".
Pressure of competition must have been great when the authorities at St Peter's had to threaten dismissal for any singer who absented himself without leave to sing in opera; the threat was directed particularly at sopranos and the critical time was carnival, which by then had established itself as the busiest and most fashionable season for opera in most Italian towns. At mid-century, Pope Benedict XIV forbade all church singers who were clerics (including all members of the Sistine choir) to appear on stage. With the spread of public theatres and secular opera libretti, a career straddling church music and opera could no longer be integrated, anyhow for those formally committed to a religious life. In baroque Rome, many activities could be held religious, because religion entered into everything; but the old baroque synthesis had broken down.
The Pope's action did not deter church singers outside Rome from putting further pressure on their employers. In the 1740s and 1750s the chapel at Loreto had to grant repeated leaves to fifteen of its singers (seven of them castrati) to sing in opera. Most of these sang in minor seasons in nearby towns such as Camerino or Fermo, with an occasional foray to Perugia or Rome (still within the Papal States); two sopranos went further afield and eventually departed to German courts. The singers who entered the Loreto chapel from about 1760 had, most of them, locally circumscribed theatre careers, though the soprano Gerolamo Bravura won but - because of the Napoleonic wars - could not take up an engagement in London; he eventually disappeared into Moravia. The practice of granting leave to sing in opera went on through the whole of the nineteenth century; the last castrato take advantage of it, Eugenio Boccanera, sang minor parts at La Scala and Florence in 1813 and 1817 and then left for the Perugia Cathedral school.
The choir of Santa Maria Maggiore, Bergamo, sometime about 1700 began to allow its singers annual leave during a local autumn holiday so that they could perform elsewhere, whether in opera or in church functions. By 1779 it was reduced to offering any good young soprano the whole of carnival off "and even much of Lent if he wants to work in the theatre"; the traditional autumn holiday was still available as well, up to All Saints' Day, and the soprano could have All Saints' off too if he had an opera engagement "so long as he provides the church with some weak tenor [sic] as a substitute". Moreover, his salary would be continued through all his leaves. Nothing could illustrate more clearly the dearth of good castrati, the spread of opera, and the decline of church music in the latter half of the eighteenth century.
Gifted castrati now found their career pattern leading them most of the time round the opera houses - but there were very few gifted castrati left. Of the dwindling numbers that still entered church choirs, many singers of, at best, modest competence: not all of them "the refuse of the opera houses" (some, as we have noted, still appeared in local theatres of equally modest pretensions), though others fell below the standards even of seasons at Camerino. And all this happened before the coming of the French in 1796, the temporary banning of castrati from the opera stage, and the Napoleonic dissolution of many monastic orders (and choirs) on top of those already dissolved by "enlightened" sovereigns. The withdrawal of the ban, and Napoleon's cultivation of the great Girolamo Crescentini, could make no difference. G.B. Velluti went on until 1830 as virtually the only castrato still before the European public, and the only one for whom leading composers still wrote parts (Rossini in Aureliano in Palmira, 1813, Meyerbeer in Il crociato in Egitto, 1824), though in faraway Montevideo the little-known Marcello Tanni, who with his brothers and sisters had found a niche there, sang in opera for one more year after Velluti had fallen silent. The few castrati operated on after 1796 could have as their destination only a small group of Rome choirs.
Even successful castrati had to reckon with the time when they would no longer be able to perform satisfactorily. Church posts were long-term appointments and offered as a rule the prospect of some kind of pension - though even here wars could stop payment for years. Castrati who worked for rulers could become in effect civil servants, like Angelini Bontempi, who in his thirty years at Dresden became an official historian; even Farinelli's position at the Spanish court (1737-59), shorn of legend, was that of a master of the revels who also sang for the King in private. For a few, diplomacy was another resource: Atto Melani, son of the Pistoia bell ringer, acted in various courts for his employer Cardinal Mazarin and, later, for Louis XIV; Domenico Cecchi (Il Cortona) is said to have carried out more shadowy missions for the Emperors Leopold I and Joseph I, and was eventually allowed a sinecure as pension. These diplomatic tasks concerned, as much as anything, the personal relations and intrigues of sovereigns, and are not easy to tell apart from the rest of the singer's obligations as ruler's dependant. Leading castrati were probably thought suited to them because they got about and mingled with the great, and also because, like monks, they had no children to advance.
Serving a ruler over long period did not necessarily bring exalted position. For Farinelli in Spain it did mean the Order of Calatrava, wealth, portraits that showed him as a near-regal figure, and - at a new reign - honourable discharge followed by luxurious retirement to a villa outside Bologna. There he went to a good deal of trouble to secure privileges reserved for nobles, in particular that of having Mass said in his house; the portraits in his gallery included one pope, two emperors, one empress, five kings, two queens, two crown princes, one crown princess, and one royal prince, most of them his former patrongs and all hung in his billiard room.
For the little groups of castrati who performed sacred music for Louis XIV and his successors it meant something more modest. They never sang in opera, though some appeared in Paris concerts (as did starrier castrati who were passing through). Several lived together, quietly and comfortably, in a house one of them had built at Versailles about 1704; there were still castrati living there in 1748. Both among this group and, about 1780, among a later group of Versailles castrati, several left each other their modest property in their wills, after providing a small income for their one servant.
This kind of quiet routine, ending in tidy testamentary dispositions, was perhaps more typical of castrati in retirement than the eccentricity and display attributed to them by legend. True, even some famous singers ran through the vast sums they had earned and, like Pasqualino in 1752, stunned everyone by dying penniless. A commoner fate was that of the Cavaliere Valeriano Pellegrini (Valeriani), a Veronese who sang in the Papal Chapel, travelled Europe in the service of various rulers, lost his voice, became a priest, and died destitute in 1746, aged eighty-three, after having for some years lived on charity. The teacher Pier Francesco Tosi had had a successful career in London and Germahy, but by his death in 1732 that was long past; his most valuable possessions were a bed, a shotgun, and a silver watch, and his net estate amounted to little.
A number of successful singers, on the other hand, lived well on estates or in large town houses which they had bought with their savings: Matteuccio, Nicolino, Francesco Bernardi (Senesino), Pistocchi, Caffarelli, and Giovanni Manzoli, as well as Farinelli and, later, Bruni and Velluti. Some (Matteiucchio, Caffarelli) acquired titles; Bruni, after some initial resistance by the nobility of his home town of Fratta, was admitted to patrician rank in the town council and eventually made gonfaloniere (a post akin to mayor); his contemporary Cristoforo Arnaboldi bought former noble lands from the revolutionary government of the Cisalpine Republic, so enabling his nephew later to marry into the restored Piedmontese aristocracy.
Nephews and nieces were indeed the usual beneficiaries, though Pistocchi, in a fussy will, left his considerable estate to his servant of twenty-four years, Angelo Maria Sarti, on condition that he added the name Pistocchi to his; in the nineteenth century some Sarti Pistocchi were eminent lawyers in Bologna. This stipulation was a practice found here and there when a castrato had no nephews to carry on the family name; Domenico Bruni settled half his landed property on his niece, provided that not only would her husband take on the surname Bruni but all their children would be given names beginning with D.
Because castrati underwent long training, sometimes including a fair literary education, some developed bookish interests which they could pursue into retirement. In the early eighteenth century the celebrated Antonio Maria Bernacchi, as well as the less prominent Gaetano Berenstadt and Andrea Adami, were all bibliophiles and dealers in books. This was still a luxury trade, addressed to a tiny public and manageable as a sideline; Berenstadt's reltion to his patrons was not markedly different whether he provided singing, books, or (another line of his) antiques. The leading singers Francesco Bernardi and Filippo Elisi (described as a well-bred person) corresponded with the celebrated musicologist Padre Martini and with his colleague Girolamo Chiti; Elisi helped Martini with his researches in libraries.
For men of this stamp, teaching was an obvious resource, both during and especially after a singing career. It could be carried on at all levels, from the authoritative position of Bernacchi at Bologna or, later, of Crescentini at the Naples conservatory to modest small-town instruction in keyboard playing as well as singing: many castrati could double as instrumentalists. Bernacchi in retirement stood at the centre of Bologna musical life, head in effect of a small singing school who lived in each other's pockets (he liked to refer to his pupils s his "brigade"), taken up with the internal politics of the Accademia Filarmonica, friend of Padre Martini, correspondent of Metastasio, general busybody and go-between. Crescentini's position and salary at Naples were so exceptional as to make for undying hatred between him and the director of the conservatory, the composer Niccolò Zingarelli.
A more representative career combining singing, teaching, and a position at the heart of urban musical life was that of Antonio Maria Giuliani (1739-1831). He was based throughout at Modena, where he served the cathedral choir for over half a century as singer and then as director. He had previously served the Duke, in his chapel as first soprano and in his orchestra as harpsichord player, while also taking occasional opera engagements at Venice and elsewhere: on the opera market he was a minor but no doubt reliable artists, who sang as primo uomo in small towns and secondo uomo in bigger ones. Before directing the cathedral music he spent a quarter-century as chief répétiteur of the leading Modena opera house, and composed one opera for it. He also taught the harpsichord in several noble households. Through his long life he accumulated a large library of books and prints; he is said to have been highly cultivated, particularly in French literature, and much loved and respected in the town.
Many castrati became priests - not in itself very significant (of other than education) in the Italy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which was full of unbeneficed clerics. To become a monk was a more decisive step, a withdrawal from the world that, as they grew older, attracted a few of these childless men. Nicolino did not become a monk but, at the end of a blameless life, had himself buried in a Franciscan habit in a specially austere service. Balatri did enter a monastery in Bavaria after learning of his brother's death. He stuck to it, but Giovanni Antonio Predieri and Pistocchi flitted in and out of the Franciscan and Oratorian orders: Predieri, a distinguished composer, singer, and teacher, was a restless, difficult person, while Pistocchi (who was said to have brought "gaiety" into the community) may have been no more than lonely - as an Oratorian he did not take vows, and was entitled to leave. A touch of melancholy recurred among some castrati: the celebrated Gasparo Pacchierotti regretted near the end of his long life not having realized earlier "that all that once moved my weak senses was mere vanity and illusion".
What then remains of the stereotype of the castrato as opera star, colossally vain, extravagant and temperamental? It had some basis, though a slender one. The tension of singing in public - of bringing off an extraordinary performance wholly dependant on one's own powers - makes artists susceptible: in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries castrati were the most prominent singers, and had their share of susceptibility. A few castrati really were "impertinent and haughty": such behaviour was held to account for Siface's murder, while Caffarelli was the original badly behaved castrato - vulgar, quarrelsome, and exhibitionistic (in 1741 he was put under house arrest for making obscene gestures on stage, joking with the audience at the expense of his fellow-singers, and refusing to join in ensembles). Most castrati, however, seem to have been of average conscientiousness or better. Even the physical stereotype of the gigantic, clumsy castrato with overdeveloped thorax and breasts was not universal or perhaps even common: all we can say is that some fitted it, some did not.
The contradictions between the stereotype and what we know of the real thing are best explained by a deep ambiguity in contemporary attitudes, not unlike the ambiguity with which the dominant groups in European society have at various times looked upon alleged inferiors who seemed in some way potent or attractive - Jews, say, or women. As with Jews and women, a good many castrati played into these attitudes, no doubt to propitiate hostile neighbours but with the effect of confirming them in their hostile stance.
Two startling seventeenth-century examples show how far ambiguity could go. Angelini Bontempi's theoretical work on music, based on contemporary philosophical formulas, likened the power of song to that of semen - this from a singer whose own generative power had been destroyed before it could appear. Bontempi may have been parroting clichés and blinding himself to their significance, but this cannot have been true of our next subject. A monody entitled Il castrato set a text in the first person, a cascade of double-entendres based on the common notion that castrati could perform sexually all the better for the loss of testicles, and deploying the usual imagery of tree trunks, cannonballs, keys, etc.; the person who sang it was a castrato, well aware of how unfounded it was.
Those who wished to insult castrati had means ready to hand. "Castrone" was the pejorative term used by satirists - by Salvator Rosa in the mid-seventeenth century, and by Giuseppe Parini in the late eighteenth. "Cappone" (capon) was a variant. "Coglione" meant both "testicle" and "fool": Zingarelli, reminded by Crescentini that their salaries in the Naples conservatory were equal, snapped back "You're right, Maestro, you've found in Naples those you left outside". Yet even satirists could be ambiguous. Another satire of Parini's begins by declaring his abhorrence of "a singing elephant" who on stage emits "a thread of tone"; it then attacks the castrato's corrupt parents, warning them (inaccurately) that their son will turn against them so that they will go begging while he sits, singing and belaurelled, by the side of kings - his defects apparently now forgotten. Parini himself wrote the libretto of Ascanio in Alba (set by Mozart for castrati among others) and left uncompleted the libretto of an opera seria that would likewise have required castrati.
To a minor composer of the 1740s the castrato G.B. Mancini was "that castrone" (because he was supposed to have slandered the composer and owed him money), but the same letters sent polite greetings to "il signor Antonio [Bernacchi] and his pupils". "Some of my best friends are castrati" sums up this attitude. Not even Padre Martini or his fellow-musicologiest and friend Chiti were free of it. A castrato copyist who did a poor job was only showing the ignorance typical of his kind, he had "left his humanity behind in his castration"; when a young singer showed himself lacking in courtesy "one must," Marini wrote, "feel sorry for him because he is a castrato, but much more because he has sung women's parts on stage." Yet both Martini and Chiti were close friends of castrati.
Castrati themselves joined in the fun. Balatri in his burlesque autobiography referred to himself as a "cappone" - rhyming with "castr..." [sic]. Senesino (Francesco Bernardi) when in England exchanged suggestive doggerel with the poet-librettist Paolo Rolli: the burden of it was that other castrati were capons but Senesino was a "cock" pursued by English "hens"; he pretended to have been worn out by all the girls who "hanker after my tree that gives no fruit", so that he could no longer "hoist a sail", etc. Rolli began it; Senesino may have felt obliged to respond in kind, like a heroine of a Shakespearean comedy joking about maidenheads before an audience for whom the loss of maidenhead was, in their own families, far from a joking matter.
The most surprising instance of this kind of humour occurs in Metastasio's letters to Farinelli. Metastasio was a man of delicate feeling, a precise user of language, and a great friend of Farinelli, whom he called his "twin". Yet his letters now and then included sexual jokes mild enough in themselves but scabrous when addressed to a castrato. If he was pestered by his "twin" to write an opera libretto, he suspected Farinelli of being pregnant, "for that is never a masculine longing"; if he was asked to cut one of his earlier libretti, he described the task as "circumcision" and then as "castrating oneself with one's own hand"; if he used the expression "the flesh is weak" he hinted that this must not be taken to mean that he was impotent. Farinelli's letters are lost: we do not know what he made of the jokes. They were not inadvertent.
As he continually voiced tender affection for this "twin" Metastasio now and then pretended to fear that their love for one another might be thought sinful. This was mere teasing. But the sexual lives of castrati were matter for gossip right through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many were said to have affairs, homosexual or heterosexual. We need not rehearse most of these stories: their truth cannot be determined. They are, however, of interest as symptoms. We may also be able once or twice to understand something of the emotional lives of castrati.
Many castrati, especially famous ones, were said to have had affairs with women. Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci married an Anglo-Irish girl of good family who later gave birth to two children; the marriage was in the end annulled at her family's insistance. More interestingly, two less well known castrati were allowed to marry in Germany, Bartolomeo Sorlisi in 1668 and Filippo Finazzi in 1762, after much official and theological dleiberation - Finazzi only because he had broken both legs; they stayed married. We are used to the sexual feelings popular singers can rouse; those least suitable as sexual objects may rouse the strongest feelings. Baroque Europe had its groupies. But the position of women in it suggests a more complex answer.
Of Matteuccio, a Neapolitan diarist wrote that he was "loved by all, particularly by the ladies, as much for his being a handsome young man and a eunuch as for his sweet and sonorous voice". The diarist may have meant something boring about eunuchs being thought safe and hence available for sexual intrigue. But when we recall the assumption under which Pepys operated, let alone a late seventeenth-century Neapolitan - that almost any women was available for fumbling at the first opportunity - we may well imagine that some women found a castrato's company restful, and some fell in love with him.
In the theatre a woman performer - of all women a target for sexual advances - might fall in love with a castrato because he could give her musical guidance as well as affection. Caterina Gabrielli, a prima donna who later showed great sexual and personal independence - is said to have fallen in love with Guadagni during rehearsals for her debut at seventeen, and to have been physically transformed from a thin, fretful girl into a beauty. A similar teacher-pupil relation probably explains the ménage à trois tht Giuseppe Jozzi formed with the young German singer Marianne Pryker and her sponging husband, a violinist. The novelist Stendhal, who knew a great deal about the opera world at the turn of the nineteenth century, explained this kind of relationship by the superior musical attainments of the castrati: "Out of despair, those poor devils became learned musicians; in concerted pieces they kept the whole company going; they lent talent to the prima donna, who was their mistress. We owe two or three great women singers to Velluti." What "mistress" meant we cannot tell; it probably stood for real feeling.
For the castrati, the chief hazard in life was probably loneliness. A family of brothers, sisters, nephews, and nieces was not always enough, and anyhow might be far away. Balatri's autobiography records a bittersweet return to Pisa: father, mother, elder brother, and nurse fall on his neck, but the brother asks if there is a present for him, the servants expect large tips, the town, after Vienna, seems empty and poor.
A castrato sometimes formed a close relationship with a young man - often a favourite pupil - whom he treated as an adoptive son. What we hear about such ties generally amounts to malign (and unverifiable) gossip. One case is well documented, anyhow on the surface.
Pistocchi seems to have had no close relations who could inherit the family name, something that mattered to him. In 1701-2, shortly after he had got back to Bologna from a long engagement in Germany, he formed ties with no fewer than three potential adoptive heirs. He was then in his erly forties, at or just past the peak of a career that had made him one of the most famous singers in Europe. He had brought with him from Germany a young pupil, the violinist "Rinaldo" [Reinhold?] Bulmein, whom he referred to as "my Rinaldo", "my son Rinaldo"; when he had to be away from Bologna he would write back to make sure that Rinaldo was getting all he needed by way of money, schooling, and (if need be) shoes and socks.
About the same time, however, Pistocchi started sharing a house (largely built and furnished by himself) with a slightly younger man, Francesco Antonio Oretti, a doctor of philosophy and medicine and a lecturer at Bologna University. He lent Oretti's father - another doctor, of noble status - and Oretti himself "considerable sums" without charging interest, so that they could deal with unspecified but urgent family needs; in 1702, the year when the father died, Pistocchi was also making the son an allowance. In 1704 Oretti junior entered into a contract establishing total community of property between him and Pistocchi. In it he acknowledged Pistocchi as his "brother" and residuary legatee. If Oretti died first, leaving legitimate children, Pistocchi was to stand to them in the relation of father; he was to provide them with dowries or with shares in the estate (determined by the Oretti family entail); he was to look after Oretti's widowed mother or make her a fixed allowance. For the rest, he was free to do as he wished with the estate, and to pass on the joint surnames; if he chose to bequeath both estate and surnames to a descendant of the Oretti family in the female line it would be much appreciated, but he was not bound to do so.
A third person who entered Pistocchi's life about 1701-2 was the servent Angelo Sarti. After 1704 the story shows gaps. Rinaldo went back to Germany. Oretti went on teaching at Bologna University; he was to outlive Pistocchi by twenty years, but meanwhile he and his declared "brother" may have fallen out. In 1715 Pistocchi became for the first time an Oratorian. His will, drawn up in 1725 and revised shortly before his death the following year, mentions neither Rinaldo nor Oretti. The residuary legatee was Sarti. One of his qualifiecations, perhaps the most important, was that he had children. Pistocchi's "descendants" might at one time have been patrician Oretti Pistocchi; they were now to be bourgeois Sarti Pistocchi.
Besides pledging Sarti to have masses said for him (twenty-four a year for twenty-four years - as many years as Sarti had been in his service), Pistocchi bequeathed some valuable objects, about the precise disposition of which he was a good deal bothered, to three well-known castrati. A few years on, Tosi was to leave such estate as he had to a younger castrato, whose proxy for legal purposes was a relative of Bernacchi. The closest ties of some castrati may well have been with other castrati. It was, after all, naturals for birds of such uncommon feather to flock together.
By the time of Pistocchi's death it apepars from a slightly earlier satire on the opera world that younger castrati were beginning to make excuses for their condition. Shortly afterwards, Voltaire began his recurrent satires on castration as an institution, part of his attack on the Catholic Church. By Burney's visit to Italy in 1770 the sense of incongruity and shame appears to have been general among the educated. But the immediate reason why castrati numbers were already in full decline was a series of decisions by Italian parents not to have their sons operated upon even though they had fine treble voices; these decisions were taken while Voltaire wrote, about 1730-40 (and some may have been taken earlier), by people few of whom had ever heard of Voltaire or of any other satirist of "enlightened" thinker, but whose equivalents in 1630-40 had opted for castration without seeing it as a problem.
It is always difficult to explain why people do not do something; they may not even be aware of having made a choice. One general cause of parents' behaviour was probably the economic revival that began about 1730: though in a limited way, prospects for their sons were improving. In parts of Italy important demographic changes took place about the turn of the eighteenth century that are just beginning to be studied: kinship ties were becoming looser, so that large lineage groups within which people had intermarried were splitting into virtual nuclear families. Smaller family units may have allowed greater care for the individual destiny of sons - no longer subordinated to the fortunes of the lineage as a whole.
Probably the most important cause was the gradual decline of Christian asceticism, manifested through the eighteenth century in the falling membership of religious orders. If decision to make one's son a castrato meant for most people a decision to make him a church singer - a more drastic, greedier, or riskier version of enrolling him in a monastic order - such a choice became less attractive as choirs dwindled or vanished. this, together perhaps with some sense that the enlightened and educated were beginning to disapprove, helps to explain why the number of castrati fell just as employment in opera was expanding. To gamble a son's virility on success as an opera singer was immensely risky; to stake it on his finding a tenured post as a church singer had been reasonably likely to bring him and his family a lifelong return, both in financial security and (while the ideal of Christian asceticism still held) in status. It is thus fitting that the handful of castrati who survived into the early twentieth century should have been concentrated in a few ancient church choirs at the heart of Catholic Christendom.
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