Notes
I wish to thank both the Center for Humanities and
the Arts at the University of Colorado, Boulder and the
Woodrow Wilson Foundation for generous support during the
period this essay was written. I also wish to express my
gratitude to Timothy Morton, Paul Youngquist, and
particularly Jeffrey N. Cox for their comments on drafts of
this essay.
1 These lines
are quoted from John Milton, Samson Agonistes, lines
94-96.
2 In his study
entitled The World of the Castrati (1996), Patrick
Barbier describes this frenzy, arguing that it was
particularly rampant in female listeners: "ladies displayed
boundless transports of delight: they threw tributes on to
the stage, laurel wreaths, couplets or passionate sonnets,
and went nowhere without a portrait of their favorite
castrato over their hearts" (137). He also recounts a
famous incident relating to Farinelli, in which a female
audience member spontaneously cried out during a
performance, "One God, one Farinelli!" (183).
3
Giovanni-Battista Mancini (1714-1800), a castrato soprano
contemporary with Farinelli, was also the founder of a
Bolognese singing school based on the precepts of his
teacher, Pistocchi. In 1774, Mancini published an
influential treatise on vocal training entitled Pensieri
e riflessioni pratiche sopra il canto figurato, which
was revised in 1777. (Practical Reflections on the
Figurative Art of Singing. Trans. Pietro Buzzi. Boston:
Gorham, 1912. Compared, trans., and ed. By Edward Foreman.
Champaign IL: Pro Musica, 1967.)
4 According to
Angus Heriot, "one Spanish singer in the papal chapel,
Padre Soto, first heard of in 1562, is referred to by Della
Valle as one of the earliest of the castrati, but appears
in the Vatican records as a falsettist, and another singer,
Giacomo Spagnoletto (engaged in 1588), is in a similar
position: but the first admitted castrati at Rome were
Pietro Paolo Folignato and Girolamo Rossini, who appear in
the books for 1599 (not 1601 as Burney has it)" (12). Pope
Clement VIII, Heriot continues, was much impressed with
these castrati singers; once sanctioned by the highest
authority in Christendom, castrati rapidly became more
numerous.
5 It is often
supposed that the rise of castrati in Italy was caused by
the rise of opera. According to John Rosselli, however,
castrati were not so much caused by opera as coincidental
with it, nor did the taste for the castrato’s voice
immediately dominate the new form. According to Rosselli,
"Chronology, if anything, might suggest that the popular
taste for the castrato voice reflected in the singers
chosen for opera was largely created by church practice. .
. . 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. Several decades were
to go by before the custom became established of having a
castrato singing the protagonist’s part" (147).
6 Castrati
singers were heard in England as early as the last third of
the seventeenth century but were confined at that time to
private settings and did not seem at first to meet with
great enthusiasm. Samuel Pepys, for instance, records
having seen two Italian castrati perform at a party given
by Lord Bruncker, but without much interest in 1667. He
writes, "Nor do I dote on the Eunuchs; they sing endeed
pretty high and have a mellow kind of sound . . . their
motions, and risings and fallings, though it may be
pleasing to an Italian or one that understands the tongue,
yet to me it did not . . ." (Barbier 180). Interestingly,
Londoner John Evelyn reported to have heard the castrato
Siface in 1687 in Pypys’s own drawing room, which
leaves one to speculate whether Pepys altered his opinion
of the singers. It wasn’t until 1707 that the first
castrato sang in public (Valentino Urbani at Drury Lane
Theater), followed closely by the acclaimed Nicolino at the
Queen’s Theater in 1708, which marks the English
acceptance of the castrato.
7 According to
Christian Gaumy, the last documented performance of a
castrato in London was that of Paolo Pergetti in 1844,
though according to Angus Heriot, it had been so long since
London audiences had seen a castrato by that point (the
last had been Velutti in 1829) that "by then he must have
been almost a freak, a kind of abominable snowman or wooly
mammoth" (21).
8 Up until
recently, according to James R. Oestreich, the New York
City Opera produced only one noted Handel opera ("Guilio
Cesare" in 1966). In recent years, it has presented
"Agrippina," "Ariodante," "Flavio," "Partenope," "Rinaldo,"
"Serse," and "Alcina," among others. Moreover, the "Handel
boom" extends far beyond New York, including a great number
of new recordings of Handel operas. One example among many
are the two recent recordings of "Rinaldo," one conducted
by Christopher Hogwood (sung by Vivica Genaux, a
mezzo-soprano) and the other by René Jacobs (sung by
countertenor David Daniels). There have also been a slough
of recordings of music written for the castrato singer,
including but not limited to Handel, including Music
from the Age of the Castrato, Handel Arias for
Castrato, Castrato Arias and Motets, Arias
for Farinelli, Castrato Voice and the First
Divas, and Art of the Castrato, as well as
recordings by such countertenors as David Daniels and
Daniel Taylor and female sopranists Ewa Podles and
Stephanie Blythe. Finally, along with his film about the
life of Farinelli (1705-1782), Gerard Corbiau released a
sound track (Music Direction by Christophe Roussett) that
includes the representation of the standoff between
Farinelli and the trumpeter. To approximate the voice of
the famous castrato, Corbiau combined the voices of soprano
Ewa Mallas-Godlewska and countertenor Derek Lee, digitally
remastering recordings of both voices singing the same
music to create what Naomi André has termed "a new
hybrid voice."
9 Useful
sources to consider regarding dates and particular castrati
performers of Italian opera in London include Frederick C.
Petty’s Italian Opera in London 1760-1800
(1972, 1980); Angus Heriot’s The Castrati in
Opera (1975); Naomi André’s Voicing
Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman; and
the New Grove Dictionary of Opera.
10
Youngquist’s work on monstrosity and romanticism is a
recent contribution to a longstanding critical conversation
on and interest in the idea of monstrosity, including such
as Georges Canguilhem, Felicity Nussbaum, Barbara Johnson,
Alan Rauch, Peter Brooks, and others.
11 Two of the
"monstrous bodies" Youngquist analyzes are Caroline
Crachami, a Sicilian dwarf, and Charles Byrne, an Irish
giant, both of whom were haunted during their lifetimes and
subsequently "acquired" for anatomical research by the
anatomist and physician John Hunter upon their deaths.
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