M A L E   A L T O S

(A N D   S O P R A N O S)
Male Altos (and Sopranos)

C A S T R A T I
These were fellows who had had things done to them at an early stage in their career which there is really no need to detail in conversation unless you happen to be talking to a musical medic. Anyway, the voices that resulted soared to a stratospherically high range with a quality somewhat similar to the voice of an innocent choirboy : when there were such things. Although the sound achieved was of unsurpassed purity and clarity and of greater voluptuousness and strength than the average soprano's, and consequently in great demand, there was never a very big queue for the necessary operation, certainly not on a voluntary basis, and the occupation went out of fashion. Those composers who still wanted to write for castrati were told to go and do it themselves so they quickly gave up the idea. Instead women were allowed to dress up as men (popularly known as breeches boys) to play youthful parts like Cherubino or Prince Orlofsky. The last castrati disappeared in the early 1900s, leaving no descendants.
SOURCE: Peter Gammond, The Bluffer's Guide to Opera (London: Oval Books - Copyright © Oval Projects 1985)

The voice of a castrato does not disgust us, despite the cruel mutilation that is its condition: it has grown sweeter....
SOURCE: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Will to Power

The man was born at Naples, where they castrate two thousand boys a year. (During this period, musical pieces were written for the castrato voice. Castratos were children who were castrated to prevent them from attaining puberty, at which time their voices would change. Thus, a boy soprano might become a tenor or baritone. A castrated boy soprano would become a castrato.) Some of the children died, some attained great fame with their beautiful voices; others became prime ministers.
SOURCE: Voltaire, The Candide

Castrato: A gentleman who had been arranged in such a fashion as to allow him to keep his voice unbroken throughout his life. Boys who were the best singing trebles would be selected for castration and as they grew up so their treble voices grew up with them. This class of singers is extinct although there is still just available a recording of the last of the performing castratos which sounds like distant caterwauling and is thererefore not helpful. There is a ghoulish interest in the study of the castrato who as late as in Mozart's day was the star name in the cast. Today it is impossible to imagine a male soprano "with a voice like a bull", an expression used by the good Dr. Burney during his musical travels in Europe in the 1770s.
SOURCE: Sir Denis Forman: The Good Opera Guide (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 1994 - Copyright © 1994 by Denis Forman)

In 1773 the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française gave this definition to the word castrato: "A man who has been castrated so that his voice may preserve a quality similar to that of women. There are many castrati in Italy." This small addendum showed fairly clearly how France, as well as every other nation, saw Italy as the country par excellence of the eunuch singers. Angels for some, monsters for others, the castrati represented a musical, social and cultural phenomenon without precedent in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They were protected by the Church but carried along most of all by the early opera which led to their blossoming followed by their disappearance from the musical stage with the dawn of romanticism, when the world of illusion, artifice, disguise and vocal ambiguity began to lose its meaning.
          There is no point today in reopening the case so often brought in the past against castration and those who practised it or underwent it. How can we judge a medical procedure which influenced the whole of western music for more than two centuries, now that we are so far removed from the conditions prevailing in the baroque period? How can the "modern" mind, moderately influenced by the nineteenth century, understand how a particular period dared to seek pure and "gratuitous" Beauty trhough a mutilation so "costly" to the individual who was subjected to it? Above all, how can we adopt an attitude towards emasculation when no great castrato has confided his deepest feelings to us? Was the operation inflicted on him felt as a tragedy? Was it not sometimes sanctified by a voice and a "nature" which overturned the traditional plan of the masculine or feminine condition? We know, for example, that when people expressed pity for them the castrati Carestini and Salimbeni burst out laughing: were they exceptional or fairly normal?
          For the historian only one thing matters: the presence and triumph of the castrati for nearly two hundred and thirty years on the stages of Europe, and still longer within the Roman Catholic Church. The Italians were of course the promoters and the greatest "consumers" of these singers. It was the Italians too who most admired and honoured these unusual singers who suited so well their taste for artifice, their sense of the festive and their quest for sensual pleasures. The vocabular used by the Italians certainly remains the most respectful towards them: while the French muttered about "artificial men", "eunuchs", "cripples" or "capons", the Italians preferred the terms musico or virtuoso, reserving the term "eunuch" for the young castrati, the pupils in the conservatoires, wihtout using it in this case in any pejorative sense. The descriptions primo uomo and "sopranist", as opposed to prima donna or female "soprano", were widespread, while the use of the term "castrato" remained much more common in other countries than in Italy.
          At this stage of our knowledge of the castrati we lack many pieces of the puzzle, beginning with the fascinating beauty of their voices - those, that is, of the greatest singers, which were in a way everything that we cannot hear today - a highly frustrating fact when we reread the enthusiastic praise of their contemporaries. We also lack the memoirs of these singers, which, if they could have been written down during their lifetimes, would have informed us about their origins, their childhood, the circumstances of their operations and their studies. True, we have archive documents and contemporary accounts, but they are often coloured by partiality and based on polemic. This was because the problem surrounding the castrati extended beyond the strictly musical domain and becamse also a social, moral or political problem, especially outside Italy. Lastly, the lack of information can also be explained by the fact that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the castrati were so much a part of the musical scene that they were considred perfectly normal: they were "natural voices" like the others, and certainly not "circuls animals", which might have provoked many long discussions. As a result it did not occur to anyone to make a separate study of them, other than what is done on women singers, tenors, composers, performances and theatre audiences, all topics on which people like to air their views.
          The present-day revival of baroque music has to some extent driven the castrati out of reality instead of placing them at the front of the stage. this is the principal obstacle encountered by anyone attempting to revive the music of Cavalli or Alessandro Scarlatti in the absence of these singers for whom it was composed. This undeniable void and the different ways of filling it with other voices even provoke interminable polemics in the musical world today. Such arguments would have amused Gregorio Allegri who, as early as the seventeenth century, foresaw the death of bel canto (in the baroque sense of the term) when the castrati finally disappeared. Whatever the outcome of these discussions, the audiences of today, thanks to the new vogue for baroque music, at least have the advantage of fascinating intellectual discovery, the discovery of those singers who were "almost" like others, whose voices and astonishing personalities have left their mark on nearly three centuries of theatrical and religious music.
SOURCE: Patrick Barbier, The World of the Castrati (London: Souvenir Press, Ltd. - Copyright © 1996 Souvenir Press and Margaret Crosland)

The castrati: Most vocal teachers were castrati, the semi-mythical creatures who dominated the world of opera until 1800. Castration enabled them to retain the beauty, range, and flexibility of voice of a youth, but with an adultÕs physical strength and lung capacity. Operatic castrati such as Porpora, Caffarelli and Farinelli became the greatest known technical singers. Many became equally legendary as teachers, and vocal manuals by Tosi, Mancini, and Porpora set out the rules for bel canto and good vocal training. With time, voice classifications became more meaningful. Sopranos of the calibre of Cuzzoni, Bordoni, Durastani, and Strada, the bass Boschi, and tenors Pio Fabbri and Borosini were prototypes of their modern counterparts.
          The excesses of vocal virtuosity faded with the arrival of Gluck's Reform operas, which returned to classical values and a simplified vocal line. Though more sophisticated, Gluck's work may be seen as a vocal prolongation of the French tragédie lyrique style of Lully and Rameau. The strongly declaimed French manner had nothing in common with the legato, portamento, and cantabile Italian style, whose first building block was the mezza voce. The Italians referred to the French style as canto di urlo (shouting-singing) and deplored such French developments as the high tenor voice called haute-contre.
SOURCE: Richard Turp, "The Evolution of the Voice" (La Scena Musicale, Vol. 6 No. 3 1 November 2000)

Background to Behavioural Endocrinology: Hormones were only discovered in the 20th century, but their effects had been discussed for many years. For example, the physical and behavioural effects of castration - reduction in aggression, territoriality, dominance, loss of secondary sexual characteristics etc., were well known; and this was the most common manipulation of the endocrine system.....
          The similar effects of castration on humans were also well understood, if a male was castrated before puberty then he did not develop sexual behaviours (which is why eunuchs acted as guards in harems) and showed characteristic physical features (no facial hair, short stature, long arms etc)..
          Another key physical effect of early castration was that the vocal cords did not thicken at puberty and so the ÔcastratiÕ displayed exceptional singing voices. The last great castrati singer Giovanni Velluti retired in 1849.
SOURCE: Nick Neave, "Hormones & Behaviour"

I Cantanti Castrati fra Seicento e Settecento: Dal IV secolo la Chiesa proibì alle donne di cantare nei luoghi di culto, rispettando il principio di San Paolo secondo il quale "Mulieres in Ecclesiis taceant" (le donne in Chiesa tacciano). Le parti acute di soprano e contralto, caratteristiche della voce femminile, vennero di conseguenza eseguite da voci bianche maschili o da uomini che cantando in falsetto emulavano la voce femminile e dei fanciulli. La voce bianca, caratteristica dei ragazzi, permane dall'età di sei o sette anni fino alla pubertà, avviene poi una mutazione della voce, tanto è vero che il registro bianco si trasforma in registro virile, la voce femminile, invece acquista un timbro più pieno e maturo. In sostituzione delle voci bianche le parti acute venivano eseguite dai falsetti artificiali, ma l'esigenza di disporre di voci più sicure ed espressive di quelle dei bambini incoraggiò, alla fine del Cinquecento, l'introduzione nelle cantorie dello stato pontificio di falsetti naturali o castrati.
     Le origini del fenomeno dell'evirazione risalgono alle pratiche rituali delle religioni mediterranee in cui i sacerdoti si sottoponevano volontariamente alla castrazione, poiché erano convinti che un corpo asessuato potesse meglio avvicinare l'uomo alle divinità, allontanando la tentazione della carne. Nel 325 il concilio di Nicea e nel II secolo l'imperatore Adriano vietarono l'evirazione e coloro che la praticavano. Ma il fenomeno, sebbene illecito, continuò ad essere eseguito per secoli nelle religioni cristiane e nell'area iberica. Nel Cinquecento, presso la Cappella Pontificia giunsero dalla Spagna i primi cantanti castrati, dopo il loro arrivo numerosi bambini italiani vennero "sacrificati" nell'intento di sostituire le infantili voci bianche con le più sublimi dei falsetti naturali: in quell'anno l'evirazione divenne di fatto una pratica legale. Molte famiglie, la maggior parte provenienti dal ceto più povero, decisero di sottoporre alla castrazione i figli dotati di una buona voce. Per garantire i diritti dei bambini era richiesta la presentazione di una domanda scritta da parte dell'interessato, il quale spesso era analfabeta e ignaro di ciò che lo aspettava e per celare la reale volontà della famiglia l'intervento veniva giustificato come un'inevitabile conseguenza di gravi incidenti che potevano causare gravi menomazioni del corpo del bambino. In alcuni casi questi cantanti potevano diventare famosi e arricchirsi facilmente (il caso più celebre è quello di Farinelli), ma il rischio era quello di formare cantanti falliti costretti così a recitare parti secondarie in opere buffe, accentuando il loro aspetto grottesco attraverso l'obesità.
     Dai teatri romani la richiesta di cantanti evirati si allargò ai teatri pubblici italiani e di gran parte dell'Europa. Il fenomeno fu ovviamente oggetto di critiche e denunce da parte di chi considerava questo costume barbaro e perverso, come per esempio Diderot e D'Alembert, i quali ne parlarono nella loro Encyclopèdie. Dalla metà del Settecento la fortuna nel melodramma iniziò un inesorabile declino e svanì completamente durante il XIX secolo. L'epoca degli evirati si chiuse definitivamente con Alessandro Moreschi, cantore della Cappella Sistina, detto l'"Angelo di Roma".

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C O U N T E R T E N O R S
Countertenors are the ones who are noteworthy for their inability to sound anything like castrati. Their efforts always have a strained quality and are a source of embarrassment to many people. It is supposed to be done naturally and without any hint of falsetto, but seldom is. It was a popular range of voice up to the 18th century and was commercially revived in recent times by Alf Deller. These singing shop assistants (as they are laughingly known in the trade) have now become quite popular again; in fact there were so many of them around that a lot of them have had to go into pop groups and the King's Singers.
SOURCE: Peter Gammond, The Bluffer's Guide to Opera (London: Oval Books - Copyright © Oval Projects 1985)

Countertenors and male altos can be frightfully refined singers but they are milk-and-water stuff in comparison to a real tenor, and however skilfully they pipe away in their head-voices or falsettos, it is generally much better to transpose the castrato part down one octave and give it to a tenor with balls and to hell with the purists. To give the part to a female is not a good option either, for who can believe in a female Roman emperor, general, or brigand? Also the sexual chemistry of the piece is destroyed by having two women who are clearly not lesbians making love to each other. Or if it seems they are lesbians, then it's even more confusing.
SOURCE: Sir Denis Forman: The Good Opera Guide (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 1994 - Copyright © 1994 by Denis Forman)

 The man who had charge of us boys was one of the counter-tenors, a dear little chap name Thickpenny - Roland Thickpenny. You know what a counter-tenor is? No, I thought not. You've lived a dreadfully meagre life, Mackilwraith. A counter-tenor is a male alto. He is a tenor who has trained and enriched his falsetto register so that he can sing in a lovely, clear voice, and fill in the alto part in the male choir in a cathedral. You can't have women in Church choirs; they sour the Communion wine, or something. They're damned nuisances, anyhow. Well, Thickpenny was a dear - a chubby, red-raced little fellow, with a lovely voice. Women in the States went wild over him. Wanted to see what made him sing like that. Thought he was a eunuch, or something.
SOURCE: Robertson Davies: Tempest-Tost

"What would you say to a haute-contre - you know, one of those high, unearthly voices?"
"A counter-tenor, you mean? What could be better? Makes him unlike any of the others."
"Yes, and very useful in ensembles. Those male altos are like trumpets, only strange -"
"The horns of elfland faintly blowing," said Powell.
SOURCE: Robertson Davies: The Lyre of Orpheus

Lady P. (crossing to him). And are you really Nisnardi?
Wood. (aside). I must brazen it out. (Aloud.) I am!
Lady P. Incomparable falsettist!
Wood. (aside). Good heavens, I'm a singer - a falsettist! Why, I'm a bad baritone!
SOURCE: W. S. Gilbert: Haste to the Wedding


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