Word: castrato
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...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...
Besides these three stories the rest of the issue doesn't seem to matter so much. I think the best thing to say about Jonathan Kozol's little piece of satanism is that he has given his people wonderful names: Brubeck, Euclid, Castrato. The poetry in the issue is almost uniformly hard to remember. In the best of the lot, Epitaph for a Young Athlete, F. L. Seidel clothes his single small joke in pretentious language. While the only image of David Ferry's The Late Hour Poem is more ludicrous than striking, Nina Castelli's The Coquette concludes, with...
...Singing a role originally written for a castrato...
...women in both places. Force of public opinion drove the castrati from the Italian stage about 1800. But, in the indignant words of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th Edition), "they remained the musical glory and moral shame of the papal choir till the accession of Pope Leo XIII." Last great castrato was Professor Alessandro Moreschi, who entered the papal choir in 1883 at the age of 25, remained 30 years...