for a century or more, castrated male singers dominated Italian opera. This well-known fact has long been an embarrassment.
That people should have castrated substantial numbers of boys, not in antiquity or in another continent but in early modern times and at the heart of Western Christendom, arouses fear, distaste, sometimes a prurient interest. That at least is how most onlookers have reacted since the mid eighteenth century, both in Italy and outside. Comments have been jocular or hostile, concerned with the eccentric and the grotesque. Jokes have kept the castrati safely on the margin of everyday life. Awareness of our own feelings should help us to see that, on the contrary, they were for many years accepted at the heart of social life in the courts and towns of Italy, and played some part in that of areas under Italian cultural influence, particularly southern Germany and the Iberian peninsula.
Historical evidence
About the castrati there is much we do not and cannot know. We cannot hear their voices; the few recordings made in the infancy of the gramophone only hint at a sound now lost. We cannot interrogate them; this is true of many people studied by historians, but even when there were still castrati living, scholars were too embarrassed to ask them searching questions. We do not really know how they were operated on or what the operation did to human characteristics other than the voice. Nor do we always know who were or were not castrati; so we can make only a rough estimate of how many there were at any time.
Such knowledge as we have is largely back to front: it comes from the late eighteenth century, when castrati were on the way out. Much of it comes from a few sources like the musicologist Charles Burney, who visited Italy in 1770. He and other travellers reported Italians as deeply ashamed of the practice; they built up a myth according to which Naples was the centre of opera, with its orphanages (conservatorii) the chief source of musical education, and its surrounding Kingdom of Naples the main provider of castrati, whom they saw as in the first place opera singers: castrati singing in church choirs Burney dismissed as 'the refuse of the opera houses' (C. Burney, Music, Men and Manners, 1969, pp. 128, 63--64). Yet if one thing is clear about castrati it is that most of them were church singers, who might or might not sing from time to time in opera.
Nor do we know much about the physiology and psychology of castrati. Some things are clear. Males castrated before puberty had high voices, lacked secondary sexual characteristics such as facial and body hair and early baldness, and were more likely than ordinary males to grow to an unusual height. Some--not all or even most--attained an unusual vocal power, range, and length of breath, because an enlarged thoracic cavity combined with an undeveloped larynx allowed a mighty rush of air to play upon small vocal chords. The resulting tone, in the best singers, was felt as extraordinary, at once powerful and brilliant; it did not sound like what we hear from most counter-tenors. At the extreme, Farinelli united this power and brilliance with highly-trained flexibility and a range said to be above three octaves (from C to D in altissimo): no wonder a woman in a London audience exclaimed--the story is apt though perhaps untrue--'One God, one Farinelli!
Other characteristics are as unclear now as they were in Burney's day. Writers of the time were content to repeat a farrago of notions drawn from ancient authors such as Hippocrates: castration cured or prevented gout, elephantiasis, leprosy, and hernia; castrati tended to have weak eyes and a weak pulse, lacked fortitude and strength of mind, and had difficulty in pronouncing the letter R. Burney, from personal knowledge, denied that castrati were cowards or lazy, but could not supply a full alternative account. Males castrated before puberty clearly cannot father children; but the question was often raised: can they none the less experience the sexual drive and engage in sexual intercourse? The only 'authority' available then or now on the practice of castration is outstandingly muddled: its implied answer is at one point 'yes', at another 'no'. The answer 'yes' was current in the ancient world and in early modern Europe; twentieth-century medical opinion, for what it is worth, tends to say 'no'.
It seems best, then, to forget the clichés that litter books on opera, and look at the whole phenomenon of castrati afresh.
The rise of the castrati
The rise of opera coincided with but in no obvious way caused that of the castrati. If anything, the taste for the castrato voice antedated opera. Nor did it at once dominate the new form. 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. Of Monteverdi's two other surviving operas, II ritorno d'Ullisse in patria (1640) uses normal male voices, but L'incoronazione di Poppea (1642) allots the two male leads to castrati. Vocal casting then and for another 200 years was determined by which singers were available castrati: it seems, were not yet always at hand or perhaps always wanted.
There seems to be no evidence of castrato singers in Western Europe before the 1550s. Some of the earliest came from Spain, perhaps because of previous Moorish rule there. One entered the Papal (Sistine) Chapel choir in 1562, though he and others were not formally described as castrati until 1599. At St Peter's the Pope officially authorized the recruitment of castrati in 1589.
By the early seventeenth century there were castrati employed all over Italy as the court singers of ruling princes, in chamber or chapel or both. They also flourished in Germany--first in southern capitals (Munich, Stuttgart, Vienna), then, by mid-century, in Dresden. So far as we can tell they were all Italians or at any rate had been castrated and trained in Italy, except for some in Germany who were locally produced and who seem to have been employed only in their ruler's chapel; Spaniards faded out. From then on castration for artistic purposes remained a practice known to be carried on almost exclusively in Italy and associated with Italian music. It had spread quickly. Why?
The explanation has to be looked for in church. Women were forbidden (in line with St Paul's teaching) to utter there. This was a necessary but not a sufficient cause, since boys and falsettists (male altos) could sing the higher parts. Contemporary comments show that people became dissatisfied with choirboys because they were no sooner trained than lost, with falsettists because their sound came to seem weak and reedy; the castrato voice in contrast was described as 'natural' and 'genuine' (sincera)--terms obviously applied to the quality of sound rather than to the means that produced it.
People were besotted with the high, in particular the soprano, voice its special value called for the exotic powers of castrati. This value may have lain in an association with youth: in opera, castrati were to sing the parts of young heroes. It may also have had to do with superiority. 'Soprano' means 'higher', a notion not taken lightly by a society that was at once hierarchical minded and used to displaying hierarchical order in forms perceived by the senses. A composer in charge of a church choir, writing when the system had been going for a long time, assumed that higher voices took precedence of lower--and that a 'natural' alto (a castrato) must as a rule take precedence of a falsettist.
Artistic and economic influences
This superiority found practical expression in the new public opera houses: the fees paid to high voices in leading parts (castrati and women) were almost invariably higher than those paid to tenors and especially to basses. In church choirs the matter was complicated by seniority, but there too the high voices (castrati and tenors) were generally paid better than basses, the commonest male voices.
We still need to explain why a preference, even a craze, for high voices should have led ordinary people to undertake (and people in authority to condone) so drastic a step as castration. One possible answer is that the cultivation of the solo voice in the new genres of the early seventeenth century--opera, cantata, and oratorio--required a new professionalism uncalled for in the age of polyphonic music that had gone before, and that the castrati--thanks to unbroken study from childhood, less hampered by social custom than the education of girls--were best able to meet this new demand. This is of some help. Yet we still need to ask was the step taken as drastic as we think?
Severe economic crisis struck Italy about 1620. The city of Venice apparently managed to keep much of its industry going in spite of increasing rigidity and lack of competitiveness. In many other places, however, deindustrialization--followed by war and by the two great plagues of 1630 and 1656--confirmed the upper classes in their retreat into landholding as their main source of income; sometimes the retreat was accompanied by a new imposition of feudal tenures or by a strengthening of entails to safeguard the line of descent. With it went an increase in the numbers of monks and nuns, probably most marked in the period 1580--1650: by the 1670s they seem to have accounted for some 5 per cent of the population in Florence and Catania, for about 9, 10 or 11 per cent in decayed Central Italian towns such as Siena, Pistoia, and Prato; in more populous Cities--Venice, Rome, Naples--the proportion was lower but absolute numbers higher, with monks alone numbering well over 3,000 in Rome, 4,000 in Naples.
For rich families, getting a son or a daughter into a monastic order cost less than setting up the son in an official career or than marrying off the daughter; in a lean time it could bring privileges such as tax concessions. For many middling or poor people a child who became a monk or a nun held out the hope of security in troubled times, not just for the individual but for the family. Such decisions about a child's future were a matter of family strategy. Material explanations of this kind need imply no denial of the intense religious feeling common in baroque Italy--itself stirred by the sense of longer and decline. These conditions broadly held through the whole of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century.
Monks, according to a late eighteenth century German writer, were 'so to speak, castrati who had not been operated upon' (quoted in F. Haböck, Die Kastraten in ihre Gesangskunst, 1927, p. 148). They were celibates, not always of their own choice. A castrate could be thought of as an enforced celibate with an unusual chance of securing for his family an income, perhaps a fortune. There were castrate monks who sang in or directed church choirs: one took part--though only after Mazarin had spent six years using diplomatic pressure on the Pope--in the Paris performance of Cavalli's opera Ercole amante (1660), singing the part of a woman disguised as a man. Some other castrati became monks late in life; many more became priests. But no vows were needed for the castrate's 'vocation' to have something in common with that of the monk.
Desire and deviation
We need to stand as far as we can away from modern assumptions. Central to these is the right of human beings to sexual fulfillment. The tradition of Christian asceticism began to decline even in Southern Europe from the mid eighteenth century; it is nearly lost. But around 1600 it was still strong. Renunciation of sexual life could seem not just possible but ideal. Sexuality could anyhow be a burden when (as happened in at least parts of Italy) celibacy was on the increase between 1600 and 1750 owing to economic hardship and the efforts of families to safeguard property, while the vigilance of those same families probably did much to prevent sexual relations outside marriage. Celibacy was a means to birth control.
According to a foreign observer in eighteenth-century Naples, the practice of castration 'attracts no notice in a country where the population is huge in relation to the amount of work available' (see J.-J. Le Frangois de Lalande, Voyage d'un François en Italie, VI, 1769, p. 348). To become a castrato--still more, to make your son become one--need not in these conditions seem a total misfortune.
Nor was it a step condemned by the Church. Theologians held that we are caretakers, not owners, of our bodies. Most thought castration licit only to save life, on medical advice and with the boy's consent. A minority, however, held that on a balance of advantage castration for artistic purposes could be licit if the benefit to the community (to the effectiveness of church services or the supposed needs of rulers) outweighed the damage to the individual. Among Italian theologians it was discussed until about 1750 a matter finely balanced between 'probable' and 'more probable' opinions, and even when opposition began to build up Pope Benedict XIV advised (1748) against a proposal that castration should be forbidden by all bishops--essentially on prudential grounds: it was better to avoid disturbance and work for a compromise that would bring about gradual change.
Surgical procedures
The operation itself may have been relatively mild and safe. We know little about it. According to the dubious source already mentioned, the testicles might be removed, or they might be caused to wither through pressure, maceration, or the cutting of the spermatic cord; none of these method amounted to the horrific 'total castration' (removal of the penis as well as of the testicles) said to have been inflicted mainly in Africa on slaves intended for Turkish and Persian harems, and to have killed most of them. An account of the cost of castrating a Modenese boy, drawn up--probably in the 1670s or 1680s--by an experienced person, assumed 'about thirteen days' as the time needed for the operation and the period of convalescence. This does not suggest a very grave wound. People gossiped about operations that had supposedly failed to castrate a boy fully. One such is documented: the boy had been 'castrated on one side only', so that as he turned fourteen his voice broke. We do not hear of deaths caused by castration. They may have occurred, and may have gone unreported in times when early death, and death through medical error, were common. But the impression one gets is that the operation was a routine one.
That people should have castrated substantial numbers of boys, not in antiquity or in another continent but in early modern times and at the heart of Western Christendom, arouses fear, distaste, sometimes a prurient interest. That at least is how most onlookers have reacted since the mid eighteenth century, both in Italy and outside. Comments have been jocular or hostile, concerned with the eccentric and the grotesque. Jokes have kept the castrati safely on the margin of everyday life. Awareness of our own feelings should help us to see that, on the contrary, they were for many years accepted at the heart of social life in the courts and towns of Italy, and played some part in that of areas under Italian cultural influence, particularly southern Germany and the Iberian peninsula.
Historical evidence
About the castrati there is much we do not and cannot know. We cannot hear their voices; the few recordings made in the infancy of the gramophone only hint at a sound now lost. We cannot interrogate them; this is true of many people studied by historians, but even when there were still castrati living, scholars were too embarrassed to ask them searching questions. We do not really know how they were operated on or what the operation did to human characteristics other than the voice. Nor do we always know who were or were not castrati; so we can make only a rough estimate of how many there were at any time.
Such knowledge as we have is largely back to front: it comes from the late eighteenth century, when castrati were on the way out. Much of it comes from a few sources like the musicologist Charles Burney, who visited Italy in 1770. He and other travellers reported Italians as deeply ashamed of the practice; they built up a myth according to which Naples was the centre of opera, with its orphanages (conservatorii) the chief source of musical education, and its surrounding Kingdom of Naples the main provider of castrati, whom they saw as in the first place opera singers: castrati singing in church choirs Burney dismissed as 'the refuse of the opera houses' (C. Burney, Music, Men and Manners, 1969, pp. 128, 63--64). Yet if one thing is clear about castrati it is that most of them were church singers, who might or might not sing from time to time in opera.
Nor do we know much about the physiology and psychology of castrati. Some things are clear. Males castrated before puberty had high voices, lacked secondary sexual characteristics such as facial and body hair and early baldness, and were more likely than ordinary males to grow to an unusual height. Some--not all or even most--attained an unusual vocal power, range, and length of breath, because an enlarged thoracic cavity combined with an undeveloped larynx allowed a mighty rush of air to play upon small vocal chords. The resulting tone, in the best singers, was felt as extraordinary, at once powerful and brilliant; it did not sound like what we hear from most counter-tenors. At the extreme, Farinelli united this power and brilliance with highly-trained flexibility and a range said to be above three octaves (from C to D in altissimo): no wonder a woman in a London audience exclaimed--the story is apt though perhaps untrue--'One God, one Farinelli!
Other characteristics are as unclear now as they were in Burney's day. Writers of the time were content to repeat a farrago of notions drawn from ancient authors such as Hippocrates: castration cured or prevented gout, elephantiasis, leprosy, and hernia; castrati tended to have weak eyes and a weak pulse, lacked fortitude and strength of mind, and had difficulty in pronouncing the letter R. Burney, from personal knowledge, denied that castrati were cowards or lazy, but could not supply a full alternative account. Males castrated before puberty clearly cannot father children; but the question was often raised: can they none the less experience the sexual drive and engage in sexual intercourse? The only 'authority' available then or now on the practice of castration is outstandingly muddled: its implied answer is at one point 'yes', at another 'no'. The answer 'yes' was current in the ancient world and in early modern Europe; twentieth-century medical opinion, for what it is worth, tends to say 'no'.
It seems best, then, to forget the clichés that litter books on opera, and look at the whole phenomenon of castrati afresh.
The rise of the castrati
The rise of opera coincided with but in no obvious way caused that of the castrati. If anything, the taste for the castrato voice antedated opera. Nor did it at once dominate the new form. 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. Of Monteverdi's two other surviving operas, II ritorno d'Ullisse in patria (1640) uses normal male voices, but L'incoronazione di Poppea (1642) allots the two male leads to castrati. Vocal casting then and for another 200 years was determined by which singers were available castrati: it seems, were not yet always at hand or perhaps always wanted.
There seems to be no evidence of castrato singers in Western Europe before the 1550s. Some of the earliest came from Spain, perhaps because of previous Moorish rule there. One entered the Papal (Sistine) Chapel choir in 1562, though he and others were not formally described as castrati until 1599. At St Peter's the Pope officially authorized the recruitment of castrati in 1589.
By the early seventeenth century there were castrati employed all over Italy as the court singers of ruling princes, in chamber or chapel or both. They also flourished in Germany--first in southern capitals (Munich, Stuttgart, Vienna), then, by mid-century, in Dresden. So far as we can tell they were all Italians or at any rate had been castrated and trained in Italy, except for some in Germany who were locally produced and who seem to have been employed only in their ruler's chapel; Spaniards faded out. From then on castration for artistic purposes remained a practice known to be carried on almost exclusively in Italy and associated with Italian music. It had spread quickly. Why?
The explanation has to be looked for in church. Women were forbidden (in line with St Paul's teaching) to utter there. This was a necessary but not a sufficient cause, since boys and falsettists (male altos) could sing the higher parts. Contemporary comments show that people became dissatisfied with choirboys because they were no sooner trained than lost, with falsettists because their sound came to seem weak and reedy; the castrato voice in contrast was described as 'natural' and 'genuine' (sincera)--terms obviously applied to the quality of sound rather than to the means that produced it.
People were besotted with the high, in particular the soprano, voice its special value called for the exotic powers of castrati. This value may have lain in an association with youth: in opera, castrati were to sing the parts of young heroes. It may also have had to do with superiority. 'Soprano' means 'higher', a notion not taken lightly by a society that was at once hierarchical minded and used to displaying hierarchical order in forms perceived by the senses. A composer in charge of a church choir, writing when the system had been going for a long time, assumed that higher voices took precedence of lower--and that a 'natural' alto (a castrato) must as a rule take precedence of a falsettist.
Artistic and economic influences
This superiority found practical expression in the new public opera houses: the fees paid to high voices in leading parts (castrati and women) were almost invariably higher than those paid to tenors and especially to basses. In church choirs the matter was complicated by seniority, but there too the high voices (castrati and tenors) were generally paid better than basses, the commonest male voices.
We still need to explain why a preference, even a craze, for high voices should have led ordinary people to undertake (and people in authority to condone) so drastic a step as castration. One possible answer is that the cultivation of the solo voice in the new genres of the early seventeenth century--opera, cantata, and oratorio--required a new professionalism uncalled for in the age of polyphonic music that had gone before, and that the castrati--thanks to unbroken study from childhood, less hampered by social custom than the education of girls--were best able to meet this new demand. This is of some help. Yet we still need to ask was the step taken as drastic as we think?
Severe economic crisis struck Italy about 1620. The city of Venice apparently managed to keep much of its industry going in spite of increasing rigidity and lack of competitiveness. In many other places, however, deindustrialization--followed by war and by the two great plagues of 1630 and 1656--confirmed the upper classes in their retreat into landholding as their main source of income; sometimes the retreat was accompanied by a new imposition of feudal tenures or by a strengthening of entails to safeguard the line of descent. With it went an increase in the numbers of monks and nuns, probably most marked in the period 1580--1650: by the 1670s they seem to have accounted for some 5 per cent of the population in Florence and Catania, for about 9, 10 or 11 per cent in decayed Central Italian towns such as Siena, Pistoia, and Prato; in more populous Cities--Venice, Rome, Naples--the proportion was lower but absolute numbers higher, with monks alone numbering well over 3,000 in Rome, 4,000 in Naples.
For rich families, getting a son or a daughter into a monastic order cost less than setting up the son in an official career or than marrying off the daughter; in a lean time it could bring privileges such as tax concessions. For many middling or poor people a child who became a monk or a nun held out the hope of security in troubled times, not just for the individual but for the family. Such decisions about a child's future were a matter of family strategy. Material explanations of this kind need imply no denial of the intense religious feeling common in baroque Italy--itself stirred by the sense of longer and decline. These conditions broadly held through the whole of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century.
Monks, according to a late eighteenth century German writer, were 'so to speak, castrati who had not been operated upon' (quoted in F. Haböck, Die Kastraten in ihre Gesangskunst, 1927, p. 148). They were celibates, not always of their own choice. A castrate could be thought of as an enforced celibate with an unusual chance of securing for his family an income, perhaps a fortune. There were castrate monks who sang in or directed church choirs: one took part--though only after Mazarin had spent six years using diplomatic pressure on the Pope--in the Paris performance of Cavalli's opera Ercole amante (1660), singing the part of a woman disguised as a man. Some other castrati became monks late in life; many more became priests. But no vows were needed for the castrate's 'vocation' to have something in common with that of the monk.
Desire and deviation
We need to stand as far as we can away from modern assumptions. Central to these is the right of human beings to sexual fulfillment. The tradition of Christian asceticism began to decline even in Southern Europe from the mid eighteenth century; it is nearly lost. But around 1600 it was still strong. Renunciation of sexual life could seem not just possible but ideal. Sexuality could anyhow be a burden when (as happened in at least parts of Italy) celibacy was on the increase between 1600 and 1750 owing to economic hardship and the efforts of families to safeguard property, while the vigilance of those same families probably did much to prevent sexual relations outside marriage. Celibacy was a means to birth control.
According to a foreign observer in eighteenth-century Naples, the practice of castration 'attracts no notice in a country where the population is huge in relation to the amount of work available' (see J.-J. Le Frangois de Lalande, Voyage d'un François en Italie, VI, 1769, p. 348). To become a castrato--still more, to make your son become one--need not in these conditions seem a total misfortune.
Nor was it a step condemned by the Church. Theologians held that we are caretakers, not owners, of our bodies. Most thought castration licit only to save life, on medical advice and with the boy's consent. A minority, however, held that on a balance of advantage castration for artistic purposes could be licit if the benefit to the community (to the effectiveness of church services or the supposed needs of rulers) outweighed the damage to the individual. Among Italian theologians it was discussed until about 1750 a matter finely balanced between 'probable' and 'more probable' opinions, and even when opposition began to build up Pope Benedict XIV advised (1748) against a proposal that castration should be forbidden by all bishops--essentially on prudential grounds: it was better to avoid disturbance and work for a compromise that would bring about gradual change.
Surgical procedures
The operation itself may have been relatively mild and safe. We know little about it. According to the dubious source already mentioned, the testicles might be removed, or they might be caused to wither through pressure, maceration, or the cutting of the spermatic cord; none of these method amounted to the horrific 'total castration' (removal of the penis as well as of the testicles) said to have been inflicted mainly in Africa on slaves intended for Turkish and Persian harems, and to have killed most of them. An account of the cost of castrating a Modenese boy, drawn up--probably in the 1670s or 1680s--by an experienced person, assumed 'about thirteen days' as the time needed for the operation and the period of convalescence. This does not suggest a very grave wound. People gossiped about operations that had supposedly failed to castrate a boy fully. One such is documented: the boy had been 'castrated on one side only', so that as he turned fourteen his voice broke. We do not hear of deaths caused by castration. They may have occurred, and may have gone unreported in times when early death, and death through medical error, were common. But the impression one gets is that the operation was a routine one.
