Word: castrato
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...utterly amoral libretto and gentle music. Yet the results probably fall short of Monteverdi's intentions. In his day, singers, not composers or conductors, were kings; and no modern revival can ever recapture their singular contributions to a performance. For instance, two major roles in Poppea, scored for castrato voices, are sung in this recording by a countertenor and tenor, who provide earnest but ghostly approximations of the old score. The album, however, gives fine hints of how early Italian baroque opera sounded: intimate, civilized, and a trifle boring to modern ears...
...wrote the famed castrato soprano Pier Francesco Tosi in his book Observations on the Florid Song, which was the basic handbook for opera singers during the 18th century. In those days singers freely ornamented composers' scores with their own improvised embellishments in a style known as bel canto (literally, "beautiful singing") To today's purists, who worshipfully preach note-for-note fidelity to the composer the style is strictly bellow canto. Nevertheless, performances in opera houses and on recordings are now being laced with so many variations on old arias that Tosi would sing...
...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 by spiraling off on melodic tangents that had no resemblance to the score; Soprano Angelica Catalan!, while singing in England, tried to hold her own by tossing in elaborate variations of God Save the King in every opera she sang...
...late 19th and early 20th centuries, when German composers such as Wagner and Strauss insisted on Werktreue- allegiance to the printed score. At the end f his career, even Verdi was threatening to sue any opera house that permitted singers to change a single note of his music. The castrato vogue gradually faded, and as the size and interpretive importance of the orchestra multiplied, the composer became the dominant figure in opera. "The singer's margin of creative and imaginative freedom was inevitably inhibited," says Pleasants, "and he became a single element in a vast ensemble subject...