Four Voices, One Range

OK—you should probably hear it once in your life, if you want to consider yourself musically well traveled.

Welcome to the rarified world of composers seriously obscure like Porpora, Hasse, Broschi. How obscure? Well, my computer has just red squiggled the names, and I’ve spent a moment or two wondering if it was worth the time to add them to the dictionary. Would I ever write them, much less even remember them, again? Or would I be sufficiently annoyed by the squiggle appearing throughout the document that it would be worth it?

This ambivalent attitude towards these composers carries over into their music, which is absolutely wonderful—wow, the sheer number of notes they can pack in a score! These guys must have died of writer cramp; it’s music that tires me just to listen too, imagine writing the stuff…..

And do I care enough even to find out anything about even one of these guys? Luckily, I did—though more out of duty than interest. But I’m happy to tell you that his story is just as good as Farinelli’s, and it’s even true!

Now we back up. People have been cutting balls off boys for millennia, for varying reasons—humiliation, slavery, or just well, for a song. Quite literally—there were, according to Wikipedia, castrated males in the early Byzantine Empire. But the castrati first get into opera in the middle of the 16^th century—just as opera was being created. So it’s no surprise to find castrati in the operas of Monteverdi.

Knew that, but what I didn’t know is that castration does more than preserve the voice of a boy before puberty. The lack of testosterone also weakens and lengthens the bones—among which are the bones of the rib cage. So these guys developed huge chests, and phenomenal breathing capacity. As well, they had more agility than the female singer, and produced a distinct sound. All of this meant that composers could write music of phenomenal vocal difficulty, inversely related to any musical worth.

If you’ve seen the movie Farinelli, you’ll know—they were the Michael Jacksons and Beatles of their day. People went wild for them, they became hugely rich, they died young (generally). At the height of the craze for castrati, 4,000 boys a year were castrated.

Times changed, fashion changed. The last role for a castrato was written by Meyerbeer in 1828, but the tradition lingered on until quite late in—guess where—the Catholic Church. Yes, popes as far back as Benedict XIV in 1748 had tried to ban castrati, but their popularity was such that people might leave the church had Benedict done so. So as late as 1913, there was a castrato in the Sistine Chapel Choir. There has been talk, by the way, of urging the church to make an official apology.

There is, in fact, a recording of the last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, which you can hear below. Be warned, though, that styles in singing have changed in the last hundred years, and Moreschi may not have been that great a singer (sorry—it seems really mean to pan a guy who lost his balls….). But it’s a thing to hear.

It’s a rather forlorn sound, and it must have been a difficult life, living as the last relic of a dying tradition. Moreschi stands in contrast to his colleague three hundred years earlier, Siface, who was acclaimed as the best singer in the world by a critic in London (never an easy accolade to attain), and had a crazy love life.

You’re asking—at least I think you’re asking—how can a castrato have a love life? My answer: I don’t know, nor am I willing to find out. This isn’t that kind of blog, dammit.

All right, getting over my fit of pique and moving right along, I give you in Spanish what happened since it’s more complete and somehow sounds better:

Estuvo al servicio del el Duque de Módena y se enamoró perdidamente de Elena Marsili, viuda del conde Gaspari-Forni y hermana del Marqués Giorgio Marsili de Bolonia, quien se opuso tenazmente a la relación amorosa entre Siface y su hermana, por considerar a los castrati como un engendro (sic, or should it be asi?) de la naturaleza y una afrenta a la memoria y la sangre de la casa de los Marsili. El asunto fue llevado ante el Duque de Módena, quien tenía alta estima por el castrato y decidió alejar a Elena de Siface, enviándola al monasterio de San Lorenzo.

OK—loose translation. Siface falls head over heels with Elena Marsili, a dame who’s the widow of the Count of Gaspari-Forni (definitely sounds like comic opera) and the sister of the Marquis Georgio Marsili, who absolutely weirds out that his sister could be getting it on with a freak of nature. So everybody runs over to the Duke of Modena, who was wild about the castrato, and who decides to stick Elena into a monastery—always a good solution, right?—in San Lorenzo.

And is Siface beaten? Nope—not he!

Aun así Siface no renunció a Elena y cuando le fue dado el rol de Perseo en la ópera de Martelli, el cantante pudo frecuentar más Bolonia e inmediatamente pidió salvoconductos para visitar a Elena en el monasterio. El escándalo público y la ira del Marques Marsili llegaron a su punto más álgido. En hechos no esclarecidos del todo, el cantante fue asaltado en su carruaje que lo conducía a Bolonia por 4 hombres enmascarados que le dieron muerte, primero con bayonetas en su espalda y le remataron destrozándole el cráneo. El juicio iniciado no pudo inculpar al Marqués pero el Papa en persona se decidió a intervenir y desterró al Marqués de Bolonia y los Estados Papales. Elena Marsili desapareció del monasterio meses más tarde y se dice que coleccionó un gran número de aventuras amorosas, según muchos por venganza contra su hermano.

Siface doesn’t give up but rather, when he gets a role in Bologna, he begins begging permission to visit the monastery. Now the Marquis gets really pissed, and guess what happens? Four masked guys hop into the carriage that Siface is riding in; they kill him and then rekill (well, what else is rematar, computer?) by destroying his cranium. Well, they can’t pin it on the Marquis, so the pope steps in—I’ll send a sworn official translation to any of you scoffers out there—and exiles the Marquis from the Papal States and Bologna. The pope could do stuff like that in those days. Now then, what does the fiery Elena do? Wonderfully, she sticks out her tongue at her brother, escapes the monastery, and goes off screwing half the men in Italy!

Well, with a story like that, somebody was bound to make an opera about it, and Nicola Porpora stepped up to the plate. Below, Philippe Jarousky sings an aria, Tu che d’adrir m’accendi, from the opera Siface.

The castrato not only had to sing difficult, florid arias, but also arias of great expression. In fact, among the cognoscenti, one thing was prized above all else—the ability to start  singing virtually inaudibly, increase in fullness smoothly, and then to fade slowly and smoothly into nothing. Oddly, if you were to draw it, it would be a bell curve.

One of the best known of these expressive areas is Laschia ch’io pianga, from Handel’s opera Almira. It’s sung below by Radu Marian, a man born in Moldavia who never, for medical reasons, went through puberty. He’s what’s called an endocrinological castrato, or a natural castrato. It’s as close as we’ll come to hearing castratos as they were heard three centuries ago.

The BBC, in an interesting documentary on castrati, makes the point that the countertenor is a falsetto: the singer has learned to use only half of his vocal chords. He has made, if you will, a cello string into violin string, but he retains the bigger mouth and much larger chest of a man. In the video below, you can hear four singers: a female soprano, a boy, a countertenor, and what I think is the most beautiful of all, a male soprano, or natural soprano (technically called a sopranist).

The countertenor starts quite beautifully; it’s a warm and lovely sound. When he goes into his very top notes, however, he sounds strident. In contrast, Michael Maniaci, when he soars to his top notes, he shimmers. There’s no physical way that a countertenor can produce that glorious sound. How did he feel when he heard a man produce that loveliness, that loveliness he will never attain?

Look at his face in profile, and I think you’ll see.