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Department of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College New York, New York, USA
1Correspondence: Department of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College, 525 East 68th St., New York, NY 10021, USA. E-mail: wafrosc{at}med.cornell.edu
Like comets, the great castrati (surgical sopranos) emerged from the dark of the middle ages, enjoyed a relatively brief, glorious blaze in post-Renaissance Europe, then faded and disappeared. Their trajectory was influenced by economics, religious belief, and aesthetic fashion of the day. They may well have been the greatest singers ever known; we certainly will not hear their like again.
The importance of the male genitals for both procreation and pleasure must have been recognized early in human prehistory. Certainly, by the time of early records, we find evidence for this in the Greek worship of Pan and in Indian reverence for the Lingam. Another measure of its perceived importance, deprivation through amputation, can be seen in an early Egyptian relief in which a scribe tallies the number of penises taken from enemy soldiers captured and/or killed in battle (1)
. Eunuchs also appear in the Bible, both Old and New Testaments. For example, "When Joseph was taken down to Egypt, he was bought by Potiphar, one of Pharaoh’s eunuchs, the captain of the guard, an Egyptian." (Genesis 39:1)
Castration appears to have been done for a variety of reasons: to humiliate those captured in battle; to punish criminals; to avenge adultery or other crimes; to create guardians of the bedchamber or other loyal and helpful servants and staff, including high ministers of state; to treat medical conditions; or to consecrate oneself to God(s), pagan or Christian. Despite what must have been high morbidity and mortality, the procedure was widespread throughout the Byzantine world, the succeeding Ottoman Empire, and more recently at the Chinese Imperial Court in order to provide slaves who could guard harems without sexual struggle or seduction. At least some of these "keepers" also achieved considerable political power at both the Ottoman and Chinese courts. The emphasis on asceticism and sexual celibacy in early Christianity led some to castrate themselves, [e.g., the priest Origen (born 185 in Alexandria, deceased c254 in Tyre), an advocate of strenuous asceticism, who castrated himself so as to work freely teaching women without the possibility of creating scandal (2)
].
It is not clear when it was recognized that one could maintain certain desirable traits of young animals by crushing the testicles, bilateral vasectomy and cutting of the blood vessels, or by removal of the testes prior to sexual maturation. However, geldings and oxen (castrated stallions and bulls, respectively) appear early in ancient iconography and literature. We can safely assume that, in the distributed rural population of the premodern world living close to their animals, the effects of castration were widely known. What is not known is when it was realized that destroying testicular function before puberty might preserve a child’s high pitched voice while permitting physical development that would give it body and strength. However, it is rumored to have been known in Imperial Rome, and likely to have been true in the Christian Byzantine Empire: by 1000 CE, castrati seem to have sung in the churches of most Eastern countries (3)
. According to Burney (4)
, Signor Santanelli, Maestro di Capella in the mid 1700s, said that "Father Girolamo Rossini of Perrugia, priest of the Congregation of the Oratory, flourished in the seventeenth century. He was an excellent singer, in soprano, and was the first Evirato employed in the Pontifical Chapel, in which, till then, the soprano, or treble part, was sung by Spaniards, in falset ... (He) was admitted ... in 1601, and died in 1644." They are documented in Italy as early as 1550–1560, and their presence in papal choirs was later acknowledged in registers of the Papal Choir [e.g., "Petrus Paulus Folignatus Eunuchus" and "Rosinus Perusinus Eunuchus." (5)
]. This was despite the Church’s post-Origen outcry against mutilation, even in the service of reinforcing the wish for chastity and celibacy.
Pope Sixtus V’s Bull, Cum pronostro pastorali munere (1589), reorganizing the body of clerics and singers of the Capella Giulia at St. Peter’s Basilica, said that the choir should contain "... for the voice which is called soprano, four eunuchs if skilled ones can be found; if not, six boys." (6)
This change was presumably approved by Palestrina who was then master of the Capella Giulia singers. His contemporary, Lassus, already had six castrati in the Ducal Chapel at Munich (6)
. It was also supported by succeeding Popes: as late as 1748, Pope Benedict XIV advised against bishops forbidding castration: "... the wise bishop will not remove the castratos but will rather take care that theatrical fashions are not adopted by church choirs ..." (7)
.
The Spanish falsettists, who had supplied the highest voices in the Vatican, were soon replaced by Italian castrati. The castrati quickly spread to other cathedral and church choirs, presumably stimulated by the desire for stronger and lasting soprano (and contralto) voices, and in obedience to the Pauline injunction against women singing in church: "Let women be silent in the assemblies, for it is not permitted to them to speak." (1 Corinthians 14:34) Although their appearance as singers antedated the "invention" of opera, by the end of the century, they had also permeated this still new art form. This was particularly so in Rome, where the Pope forbade the appearance of women in the theaters. (Sardou and Puccini notwithstanding, Tosca would not have been permitted to sing at the opera in Rome.) In the rest of Italy they were heard from Naples to Florence, and in Venice where they performed in one of its six or seven semi-commercial opera houses. They appeared in Vienna, Salzburg, Dresden, and Hamburg; castrati became a fixture of the French court’s chapel; they traveled north to Stockholm; east to Warsaw and St. Petersburg; west to Spain, London, and Dublin. Between carnival seasons, the castrati would gather at recruitment centers looking for new engagements. "At this period Bologna was the mart to which actors [and singers] from all parts of Italy resorted, to make their future engagements. ... it was really amusing to see them swarm round a manager the moment he entered (8)
.
They were indeed the stars of their day: Farinelli was swooned over like Pavarotti. A woman is reputed to have cried out during a performance: "One God, one Farinelli," and then she fainted. This episode, real or imagined, is echoed in Hogarth’s painting (and print) of The Countess’s Morning Levee. A castrato, presumably Farinelli, is in a corner singing; a woman in the center is fainting. Fans of one castrato battled with fans of another over their respective merits, as seen more recently between the fans of Callas and Tebaldi. The best of them were remarkably well paid: for a short carnival season in Turin, the Primo Uomo, the lead castrato, received at least as much as the Prime Minister did in a year (9)
, and certainly considerably more than the composer of whatever new opera in which he was appearing.
Their creation, as singers to the greater glory of God (and, somewhat later, in the re-creation of Greek theater that we know as opera), was primarily an Italian phenomenon, with small contributions from Spain and southern Germany. A number of factors seem to have come together in Italy in the late 1500s that resulted in this development. Certainly a central factor was the increasingly complex demands being made on the professionalism of singers by highly polyphonic (as many as 16 parts) and unaccompanied church music. Boy sopranos "matured" out of their voices; and social constraints made it difficult to begin the training of women intensively when they were young. (See Origen’s concerns about propriety noted above.) In addition, there appears to have been an increasing demand for high voices. (Soprano means higher, and they are called "sopranos" because the first great high voices were men; had they been women they would have been called "sopranas", with a feminine ending to the word.) In a highly hierarchic society, "high" was experienced as "best", and took precedence. The top line was the heard melody. Higher voices then, as is generally true now, earned more. It has also been suggested that this preference for the high voice echoed other aesthetic choices of the time [e.g., the light palette of Tiepolo’s frescos and of rococo architecture (10)
]. This bias toward the top may also be seen in the fact that after the disappearance of the castrati from the opera stage early in the 19th century, the leading male parts were initially taken over by women in trousers, the origin, perhaps, of the "trouser" roles in operas by Mozart (Cherubino), and by Johann and Richard Strauss (Prince Orlovsky and Octavian).
The most important of the factors that permitted the emergence of the castrati was "... the profound and lasting economic crisis that stuck Italy about the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries ...," a period of deindustrialization followed by war and plague (11)
. This occurred in a setting of continuing belief in Christian asceticism and accompanied a "... surge in the numbers ... joining monastic orders. ... [Becoming a castrato was a] ... specialized form of the celibacy imposed by a monastic vocation ... one more likely to bring financial security." (11)
In the words of a late 18th century German journalist, monks were "... so to speak, castrati who had not been operated upon." (12)
It was cheaper to get a child into the clergy than any of the alternative possibilities, and also often brought tax concessions. The great singing teacher of the early 1700s, Tosi, distinguished between "... the rich, that learn’d musick as an accomplishment, and the poor, who studied it for a livelihood." (13)
A convenient hypocrisy (perhaps on occasion the truth) was that the operation was requested by the child himself. The Church required that the operation have the consent of the child. Absent this particular fiction of "request," it was often claimed that the child had been injured in an accident. There were a surprising number of children who were attacked by wild swans or geese, gored by wild boars, or who were kicked or fell in ways that damaged or destroyed their testes. However, there are also indications of a clandestine "trade" as witnessed by contracts and contemporary accounts.
Contemporary documents suggest that the usual age of castration in order to preserve the voice was between eight and 10, with outer limits of seven and 12. It was foolish to do it earlier since it was then too difficult to predict the long-term quality of the boy’s voice and its potential for development, and to know his willingness to do the kind of work necessary to learn the techniques and master the essential musical knowledge. If the operation was done too late, the voice was already changing in pitch and timbre, and the chance of becoming a soprano lost. As described earlier, the testes were either crushed, their blood supply cut, or they were removed surgically. At least some of these procedures were carried out in what were, for the times, reasonable settings. For example, the archives of the Santa Maria Nova Hospital in Florence records castrations carried out there by a doctor, Antonio Santarelli, in about 1715. Fees were higher for the surgeon than if the operation was done by one of his assistants. There was a designated eight-bed room for postoperative recovery which usually took about 13 days for the operation and the period of convalescence (14
, 15)
.
However, being castrated did not produce a great singer. Even if only the talented were operated upon, hard work and good teaching were essential to the process of developing both the voice and the other attributes of professional musicianship, and for those who went on to the opera house, of learning the dramatic art[s]. Raguenet describes the conservatories where "... The Italians learn Musick as we do to Read; ... by the time our Children are able to Read true, and without any Hesitation, Theirs have been taught to Sing with the same Judgment and Facility." The young music student was typically apprenticed for ten years (16)
to an institution, such as one of the Naples conservatories (often attached to a religious establishment), or to an individual teacher, such as Tosi, Porpora, or Alessandro Scarlatti. They rose early, prayed, played, and studied until dark. In addition to music theory, individual students would study singing, composition, and instruction in keyboard, string, wind, or brass instrument performance. They were also "taught ... humanities, grammar, rhetoric, religion, and philosophy ..." (17)
. Bontempi says that "The morning included three hours of classes, an hour of singing ... [an hour of] literature, and a final [hour] rehearsing ... vocal exercises in the presence of the maestro and in front of a mirror ..." (18).
And then they disappeared, first from the opera houses and later from the Vatican chapel. Perhaps this change was in part spurred by the introduction of the Napoleonic code into Italy; but more importantly an improving economy and diminished attraction of the monastic life and of ascetic celibacy were the major factors, along with the increasing acceptance of women in the theaters and opera houses. The last significant castrato opera singer was Velutti, for whom Meyerbeer wrote Il Crociato in Egitto in 1824. He retired in 1830, and died at 80 in 1861. It should, however, be noted that the role of Klingsor in Wagner’s Parsifal was written for Domenico Mustafa, a castrato in the Papal Choir, but nothing came of this (19)
. The last of the papal castrati, Alessandro Moreschi, entered the Choir of the Capella Sistina (the Pope’s personal chorus) in 1883, at the age of 25. He was described as "Possessed of a voice of exceptional beauty, ..." and "...he received the title "l’angelo di Roma" (20). He retired in 1913, the last of his line. His death was the end of a glorious aesthetic experience and unfortunate social experiment. The castrati may have been the world’s most glorious singers. Like Tosca, they had given at least their parts, if not all of their lives, to art.
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FOOTNOTES
The opinions expressed in editorials, essays, letters to the editor, and other articles comprising the Up Front section are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of FASEB or its constituent societies. The FASEB Journal welcomes all points of view and many voices. We look forward to hearing these in the form of op-ed pieces and/or letters from its readers addressed to journals{at}faseb.org.
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