Academic literature on the topic 'Castrati'

Statement of the problem. Today, the vocal music of the Baroque era is in great demand among performers all over the world аnd in Ukraine too. This is a new trend in performance practice, since ancient works of the classical period are the basis of the vocal training repertoire Leading experts in various professional fields (medicine, archeology, history) have many positive research results. The author of the article uses new facts related to the effect of castration on the performer’s body. Today, the art of castrati remains understudied. This is an original phenomenon in the history of singing culture of the XVII–XVIII centuries. Castrato singers have mastered a wide range, limitless breathing and phenomenal vocal technique. They became standard singer-artists and supplanted female singers. The history of voice change after castration is recorded in fragments. It reached us only on the basis of documentary (medical) materials. This fact determines the relevance of the proposed topic. There are many published works in various fields. They are dedicated to this problem. But the secret of castrates has not been fully revealed yet. This is the novelty of the topic. Recent research and publications. Researchers J. Abitbol (2006), N. Clapton (2008)], P. Barbiere (1996), A. Heriot (1975), J. Lauri-Volpi (1972), Govorukhina, N. (2017), V. O. Gigolaeva-Yurchenko (2020, 2021) covered the issue of singing features in the performance of bel canto masters with the help of evolution, history, cultural studies, vocal methodology, phoniatrics and vocal phonopedia. Musical Analysis is complex. There is only one recording of the castrato singer A. Moresky. He is known as the “Angel of Rome” Therefore, the facts about the manner of singing in the Italian classical school of bel canto during the heyday of the Baroque era. They are in historical documents. These documents were written by historians and musicians of that time. Research materials. YouTube materials with performances by the castrato singer A. Moreski and modern countertenors F. Fajoli, F. Zharusski, M. Tsenchich, Yu. Minenko. Objectives, methods, and novelty of the research. The purpose of the article is to analyze the vocal and physiological specifics of the performance of castrato singers and modern countertenors. The object is the vocal technique of the authentic bel canto vocal style of baroque music affetti; subject – the influence of physiology on the formation of the performance style of castrato singers and modern countertenors stylistic Among the tasks is to identify the dynamics of growing interest in the art of castrato singers in medicine – genetics – vocals; systematize data on the physical and physiological differences in the vocal states of castrato singers and modern countertenors; on the example of the work of countertenors, to state the uniqueness of the vocal physiology of the human body in XX–XXI. The research methodology is represented by historical, analytical, functional, interpretive and gender methods. They contribute to the disclosure of the declared topic from different angles. Results and conclusion. The author presents a panorama of modern studies on castrates. She reveals the destructive function of surgical intervention in the human body, conducts a comparative comparison of castrates and counter tenors. They are two phenomena belonging to different historical centuries. The author emphasizes the advantages of developing the natural sound of a coloratura male voice without medical intervention. She gives examples of the analysis of the adaptive voice capabilities of the human organism of the 20th–21st centuries

The employment of castrati in the Byzantine Church can be traced back to the choirmaster Brison in the fourth century. Brison was called upon by John Chrysostom to organize the antiphonal hymn-singing in the patriarchal church. Since eunuchs were generally considered to be remnants of a pagan past, castrati are seldom mentioned in early Byzantine sources, but beginning in the tenth century references to eunuchs or castrati became more and more frequent. By the twelfth century all the professional singers in the Hagia Sophia were castrati. The repertory of the castrati is discussed and the question is raised whether the introduction of castrati to the Sistine Chapel was influenced by the employment of castrati in Italo-Greek cloisters.

This study suggests that, against the background of early modern views of sexuality, the castrato appears not as the asexual creature sometimes implied today, but as a super-natural manifestation of a widely-held erotic ideal. Recent work in the history of sexuality has shown the prevalence in the early modern period of the "one-sex" model, in which the distinction between male and female is quantitative (with respect to "vital heat") rather than qualitative. This model provides for a large middle ground, encompassing prepubescent children, castrati, and other unusual figures. And that middle ground, in fact, seems to have been a prime locus of sexual desire: the art, literature, and historical accounts of the period argue that boys especially were often viewed -perhaps by both sexes-as erotic objects. Further evidence suggests that this sexual charge also applied to castrati. The plausibility of such an erotic image is strengthened by investigation into the actual sexual function of these singers, which seems to have fallen somewhere between historical legend and modern skepticism. Finally, a survey of castrato roles in opera, from Monteverdi to Handel, shows how these singers were deployed and suggests that their popularity could not have depended entirely on vocal skills. Instead, I argue that castrati were prized at least in part for their unique physicality, their spectacularly exaggerated embodiment of the ideal lover.

Abstract The advent of a new political regime in Italy in the 1790s led to decrees banning castrati from the stage and the closure of the singing academies where they taught. But seventy years later the composer Gioacchino Rossini looked back to the castrati as the last adepts of the art of bel canto: “As to the castrati, they vanished, and the usage disappeared in the creation of new customs. That was the cause of the irretrievable decay of the art of singing.” This essay focuses on the eighteenth-century castrato Gasparo Pacchierotti—friend of Charles, Frances, and Susan Burney, idol of William Beckford—and on the efforts of the novelist and critic Stendhal to “remember” Pacchierotti’s lost voice. Stendhal never heard Pacchierotti in his prime, but in his 1824 Vie de Rossini he declared that the art of bel canto had reached its apogee with Pacchierotti in 1778: five years before the writer’s own birth. Stendhal sought to demonstrate that the lost voice could be remembered by way of both historical evidence and the textual and viva voce “recordings” of earlier listeners: Beckford, the Burneys, and the singer Gabriel Piozzi. In Stendhal’s erotics or mnemonics of musical sensation, such textual and performative recordings allow us to remember the sensations elicited by an absent voice as vividly as the phonographic or digital recordings on which later listeners would rely.

The male falsetto enjoyed a brief period of acceptance, even adulation, as it was wielded by tenors such as John Braham and Giovanni Rubini in the first four decades of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the last castrati to tread the stage were winding down their careers, while in Germany and Austria female impersonators such as Karl Blumenfeld, who possessed highly cultivated falsetto voices, were achieving a kind of fame of their own. These three kinds of falsetto—the castrato voice was heard at this time as having the same two registers standard for all voices, falsetto and chest voice—were, to a degree probably startling to modern readers, considered analogous to one another. The decline of the ”legitimate” falsetto as an extension of the tenorial chest voice was concurrent with the phenomena of the disappearing castrati and the wildly over-the-top female impersonators—all of whom were both implicitly and explicitly compared to one another. Both the tenors and the falsettists bore an uncomfortable, even ridiculous, perceptual proximity to the epicene, effeminate, always/already maimed state of the castrato, under the regulation of an anxious version of the male gaze. This proximity played a large role in the rapid disappearance of the tenorial falsetto after 1840.

This article considers the spectral afterlives of castrati in nineteenth-century music historiography, reading them as transhistorical mediators between the “stuff” of archives and embodied musical experience. The article first sketches out the germane late eighteenth-century notions of feeling, art history, and aesthetics—from the empirical potential of sensibility to J. J. Winckelmann's systematization of classical art—that invited people to imagine certain bodies as capable of sensing history and, in turn, of rendering history “sense-able” through artistic style. Bringing these historical threads into dialogue with recent theories of queer temporality and queer aesthetics, the article argues that castrato singers were cast as once-living art objects and thereby invested musically, dramaturgically, and bodily with the same hybrid temporalities associated with artifacts of material culture—enabling later writers to invoke castrati as having materialized both the ephemerality and the historical situatedness of past musical styles. Moving from the generalized castrato figure to one particularly salient example, the article then focuses on three writers' representations of Gasparo Pacchierotti (1740–1821). The authors discussed here—Alessandro Pepoli (1790s), Stendhal (1820s), and Vernon Lee (1880s)—each portrayed Pacchierotti as embodying the frictions between the singer's late eighteenth-century moment and the writer's own hybrid present. Imaginatively encountering Pacchierotti as, respectively, a living body, a remembered voice, and material remains, each grappled with the limitations—and the stakes—of music histories. Ultimately, the castrato emerges from these scattered remains as a ghost of the feelings, fictions, and fantasies that haunt historiography.

It seems fair to say that we are enmeshed in an Age of Reconstruction. Whatever groans the shibboleth of ‘authenticity’ may elicit from musicians and musicologists, the film industry's leap for the bandwagon is proof of the principle that Period Pieces Pay. Of the recent spate of feature films set in the eighteenth century, one in particular has marketed itself through its reconstructive credentials. The technologies that allow us to remodel our bodies, and revive old recordings on compact disc, also allowed the makers of Farinelli, Il Castrato to reach back and breathe new life into the voice of the long-dead castrati.