by Martin Pearlman
One of the great gaps in our knowledge of "original instruments" is in our lack of experience with the castrato voice, a voice type that was at one time enormously popular in opera and religious music but that completely disappeared over a century ago. The first European accounts of the castrato voice, the high male soprano or alto, come from the mid-sixteenth century, when it was heard in the Sistine Chapel and other church choirs where, due to the biblical injunction, "let women remain silent in church" (I Corinthians), only men were allowed to sing. But castrati quickly moved beyond the church. Already by the beginning of the seventeenth century, they were frequently assigned male and female roles in the earliest operas, most famously perhaps in Monteverdi's L'Orfeo and L'incoronazione di Poppea. By the end of that century, castrati had become popular stars of opera, taking the kinds of leading heroic roles that were later assigned to the modern tenor voice. Impresarios like Handel were able to keep their companies afloat with the star power of names like Farinelli, Senesino and Guadagni, despite their extremely high fees, and composers such as Mozart and Gluck (in the original version of Orfeo) wrote for them.
The most successful castrati were highly esteemed throughout most of Europe, even though the practice of castrating young boys was officially forbidden. The eighteenth-century historian Charles Burney described being sent from one Italian city to another to find places where the operations were performed, but everyone claimed that it was done somewhere else: "The operation most certainly is against law in all these places, as well as against nature; and all the Italians are so much ashamed of it, that in every province they transfer it to some other."
By the end of the eighteenth century, the popularity of the castrato voice was on the decline throughout Europe because of moral and humanitarian objections, as well as changes in musical tastes. Following Napoleon's conquests in Italy, the French, who had never developed a passion for the castrato and found both the voice and the operation distasteful, banned the hiring of castrati and prevented them from studying in Italian conservatories. Although a few operatic roles were still written for them in the early nineteenth century (most notably by Rossini and Meyerbeer), castrati disappeared from the stage. Judging from unflattering descriptions by Mendelssohn and others, the technical level of their singing declined along with their popularity. In 1878, Pope Leo XIII banned any new hiring of castrati by the church, and they were entirely eliminated from church choirs by 1903. Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato in the papal choir retired ten years after that.
What did it sound like, this voice for which so much great music of the Baroque and Classical periods was written? We know that it was quite different from the falsetto voice of a counter-tenor. The true chest voice of a castrato was in the soprano or alto range, just as it is for a woman, and he would have had a high speaking voice, unlike falsetto singers. Descriptions from the time make it clear that this was a sound unlike that of a woman or any other type of voice, a sound that could be extremely powerful due to the male lung capacity and that could be hauntingly beautiful. The best castrati were capable of extraordinarily agile coloratura and ornamentation.
The few brief pieces recorded by a castrato come from 1902-04, when Alessandro Moreschi, the last survivor of a long tradition, sang into some early recording equipment. The recordings are full of noise and hiss, but what we do hear is a soprano with the male lung power that was such an attraction to earlier audiences. Nonetheless, a contemporary who heard Moreschi sing in person commented that he had lost some of his range by this time and that the primitive recording equipment did not fairly capture his sound. Indeed, the voice seems no longer to be under technical control and does not show the kind of coloratura or steady tone that eighteenth-century commentators describe in the castrati of their day.
Another interesting. though artificial and highly speculative recording is in the soundtrack to Gérard Corbiau's movie Farinelli about the life of the great eighteenth-century castrato. Here he attempts to create a plausible castrato sound by electronically mixing the voices of a female soprano and a counter-tenor.
There have have been just a few male singers in modern times whose voices never developed into the lower range of the typical male voice and remained in the soprano register. Michael Maniaci, one of the best known of these modern male sopranos, performs music that was written for castrati but that is typically sung by sopranos today, giving us a chance to hear something that could perhaps be closer to the descriptions of old than anything we may have experienced in our lifetimes.
When Moreschi's recordings from a century ago were recently remastered for a CD, the producers remarked that it was difficult to engineer the sound, because no one knew what that kind of voice actually sounded like in live performance. Similarly, for Boston Baroque's recording with Michael Maniaci, it was a challenge for Telarc's sound engineers to find the best way to record his voice, since it is a unique sound for our time and needed to be captured differently from the voices of female sopranos. In this case, they were able to compare their recorded sound with the original, but exactly how close this is to the true sound of the castrati of old, a sound for which composers such as Handel and Mozart wrote, remains a matter of some speculation.
