Chapter 3. The Era of the Adult Virtuoso
THE UNNATURAL MALE TREBLE VOICE
SOURCE: Leslie Clutterham, A Chronology of the Treble Voice in Choral Ensembles (England - Part I)
A discussion of the increased dependence upon the unnatural male voice beginning in the Middle Ages and continuing through the Classical period becomes necessary to an understanding of the historical treble voice. There were two basic types of male sopranos: those contrived by physical control, the falsettists; and those altered males, the castrati. Social custom fluctuated in its acceptance of the latter so that, before 1600, many an acclaimed falsettist may have been, in fact, a castrato (Heriot 10).
Falsettists, males capable of controlling the size of the aperture of the vocal cords so as to approximate the female soprano range, had first been noted in liturgical choirs before A.D. 1100 (Henderson 43). By the sixteenth century Spanish falsettists were said to have accomplished great feats of artistry (Henderson 135). Eighteenth-century music historian Dr. Charles Burney noted the presence of a "falset" in the trio of a "premodern" Amsterdam Ashkenazi synagogue around 1775 (qtd. in Henderson 60). In the twentieth century Father Finn, the great choral pedagogue and master of the Paulist Choristers of New York, continued a tradition of utilizing boys as sopranos but falsettists as altos (1:148).
Constantinople had always used the castrato (syn. musico, evirato) in its liturgical music, and Rome would have been aware of this (Heriot 10). Children first may have been castrated in Rome specifically for singing in the late second century (Heriot 9), but the Vatican papal choir is not noted as employing its first castrato until 1562, in the guise of the Spanish "falsettist" Padre Soto (Heriot 11). Although there is no specific reference to when falsettists were first heard in Roman choirs, Heriot postulates that, for those ears used to the timbre of the boy soprano, the falsettists' quality may have been aesthetically unpleasing and the arrival of the musici in Rome welcomed (10). The presence of castrati in the papal choir in Avignon was noted (Finn 1:119), although French authorities much later banned all castrati as well as all Italian singers, equating both with excessive ornamentation and a decadent life style (Heriot 13).
The elaborate a cappella style which commenced in the 1450s called for a greater virtuosity and wider range than that possessed by the boy treble (Heriot 10). The castrato's juvenile sound, remaining pure and elastic for decades, commanded these qualities and suited the impersonality of church music (Henderson 138-39). Orlando di Lasso employed six castrati in his choir in Munich during the 1560s and 1570s (Heriot 11). In 1599, the first two admitted castrati joined the Pope's choir; in 1687, papal authorities ordered a castrato to sing alto (Heriot 11). Boys were still being castrated as late as the 1880s in the Vatican and other Roman churches, and the last castrato retired from papal choral service in 1913 (Heriot 21-22).
Castrati also made their mark in secular music. Castrato Loreto Vittori (b. 1588) was first a famous opera star before joining the papal choir in 1622 and later singing for Monteverdi (Henderson 140). Vittori and many of the castrati of the following century were highly trained musicians who devoted their careers to the study and performance of music; in this respect they generally eclipsed the women opera singers of the same era (Heriot 30). Their virtuosity shown in the marketplace of the Italian opera, and, after 1600, castrati openly acknowledged their condition (Heriot 11-12).
The fame of the castrati led them to performance excesses. In mid-eighteenth-century England, Handel found that the use of native female singers was sufficient in the non-liturgical oratorio form and wrote for and used castrati only on limited occasions (Dean 107). Caffarelli and Farinelli, the two greatest male castrati sopranos of Handel's era (Henderson 144), were not reported as having had any artistic disagreements with the even greater composer.
Rossini, half of a century later in 1814, reportedly furious at the castrato Velluti for further ornamenting an already florid Rossini song, vowed never again to write for or employ a castrato (Heriot 20-21). Although undoubtedly other composers had made that promise, and the last castrato was heard in London in 1844 (Heriot 20-21), it was more likely the "tumultuous elemental passion" introduced into Italian opera after the Handelian era which caused the demise of the adult male trebles (Henderson 151). Drama requires a range of volume which neither the delicate size of a child's vocal mechanism in a child's or an adult's body nor the controlled mechanism of a falsettist can produce; the increased size of the Romantic orchestra also demanded a greater treble vocal volume which only women could provide.
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