Word: castrati
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Slurs & Shakes. The history of bel canto and the reasons for its revival are chronicled in a lively new book by Musicologist Henry Pleasants, The Great Singers (Simon & Schuster; $7.50). The first prima donnas of bel canto were not donnas at all but male sopranos and contraltos. These castrati, who commanded the center stage of opera for more than 100 years, until the end of the 18th century, constituted about 70% of all male singers. They postured and strutted on the stage like peacocks improvising elaborate vocal filigrees, inserting grace notes or unaccompanied passages, some of which lasted as long...
...18th century Italy, reports Pleasants, women singers were considered hardly better than prostitutes and were banned throughout the Papal States. Thus most female roles were sung by castrati, who were paid four times as much as the other singers, up to 20 times as much as the composers. Some tenacious women singers masqueraded as castrati (which caused occasional -and embarrassing- sexual complications). When women were finally accepted on all opera stages in the early 1800s, the vain castrati resented the competition. The result was some classic vocal jousts. Castrato Domenico Caffarelli, for instance, liked to fluster the sopranos during duets...
Maureen Forrester didn't mind. She long ago resigned herself to the fact that, woe unto her, the contralto in opera is the unsung singer. Of the precious few roles available to the contralto, most are skimpy caricatures of degenerate kings-roles written in olden times for castrati-or "the other woman." "In opera," she says, "the high-frequency voice has it. A contralto has to sing the whole night before anyone is impressed." It is just as well. Forrester is 5 ft. 9 in. and weighs 180 Ibs.; there are not many male singers who could make...
...most popular singer in Europe. Monteverdi, Bach, Handel, and especially Henry Purcell, himself a countertenor, composed a wealth of lute songs, folk ballads, cantatas, hymns, operas, madrigals and carols for the male alto. The rage for the high-pitched male voice also helped give rise to the castrati singers-boy sopranos castrated before puberty. In 18th century Italy, parents received a handsome fee for each son to go under the knife. But with the dawning of the romantic era in the 19th century, the delicate voices of the castrati and the countertenors were drowned out by the growing volume...
White Voices, touted in publicity as an Italian-style Tom Jones, is a ribald comedy based on one long, indelicate joke about the once-celebrated castrati, the eunuch sopranos of Italy. Gelded at an early age to preserve the pitch and "whiteness" of their voices, the castrati enlivened Europe's leading salons and opera stages for most of the 17th and 18th centuries...