Oct 5, 2015 06:55 PM
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n19/colm-toibin/ravishing
EXCERPT: [...] the sculptor Sarrasine, who had gone to live in Italy in 1758, fell in love with a singer, La Zambinella, who is described in as much luscious detail [...] She was ‘intensely alive and delicate beyond words’. Her eyes, her mouth, her flesh were all perfect:
Imagine Sarrasine’s surprise when he found out that La Zambinella was a bloke who had been castrated.
[...] Martha Feldman’s "The Castrato," rich in scholarship and filled with subtle analysis, is one of several books that have appeared on the subject of castrati in recent years.
[...] It began, it seems, because women were not allowed to sing in church, and, in the Papal States, were banned from singing at all. ‘It is important to bear in mind,’ Feldman writes, ‘that castrations for singing, beginning well before 1600, took place only in Italy, geographic heartland of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.’ While London warmed to castrati, and paid them fortunes, the English did not castrate their own.
[...] Castrati, for Feldman, can be understood as the second sons of Italian families who, instead of going into the military or the church, took up singing, and in order to excel had to make a sacrifice. She notes that castration arose at a time in Italy when the eldest son got most or all of the inheritance. For one of the others, getting castrated was a way to deal with the problem of making a living.
[...] In Feldman’s version of things, the castrato had no interest in being figuratively or really female, but rather was ‘decidedly male’. [...] she sees maleness in Italy in the period when the castrati flourished as a political category that involved having personal access to power and wealth, and to easy autonomy. Castrati, as she points out, managed their estates, decided on heirs and bequests; they also had an international network of friends, patrons and associates. They went where they liked, they did what they liked, some of them even married women. That might be a useful definition, indeed, for a man, and not only in the 18th century.
[...] Boys were castrated to make them better and stronger singers, not to make them girls. On the other hand, while living in the house of a Russian prince the castrato Balatri ‘gained unheard of access to the sexually segregated, staunchly Orthodox female quarters of the household, where he spent many an hour by the embroidery frames, and he was even dressed up in drag by the princess and her girls for fun’.
In Portrait of a Castrato, Roger Freitas writes that ‘contemporaries frequently regarded castrati as analogues to boys … The castrato does seem frequently to have taken the boy’s role in sodomitical sex.’ Thus castrati could shift and transform themselves.
Everybody, it seemed, wanted them, but for different things. Girls wanted to dress them up; men wanted to f#ck them. When composers needed them to sound like angels rather than play the parts of big strong men, they merely wrote different music, making castrati sound sweet, maybe even divine. They sang over the bodies of dead children as much as they sang the big warrior roles. ‘As angel guardians of the dead,’ Feldman writes, ‘young castrati were assimilated to other androgynous beings of long ancestry, giving them special mimetic flexibility as intercessories with the divine.’
[...] The earliest castrati began to flourish in the 1550s in the north of Italy and in the chapels of Rome. The glory years of castrato singing, however, lasted from the early 17th to the late 18th century. Feldman writes with an admirable precision about the actual procedure, which was carried out on boys before puberty:
The operation affected the voice. ‘Their resonating chambers,’ Feldman continues, ‘were thus larger than normal in proportion to the vocal emission equipment (the larynx), so much so that we can suppose that with the right training some castrato voices could deliver a sound of greater punch and more powerful resonance than those typical of trained women and uncastrated men.’ While castration did wonders for the voice, it caused problems in the rest of the body – larger ribcages, extended jaws – and medical problems in middle and old age such as osteoporosis. Castrati could, in their younger years, pass for women. They didn’t grow beards and they often were shaped like women, developing the ‘secondary sexual characteristics of women’.
While the practice of castration for the purpose of creating great singers was common, the details of who performed the operation and where remains difficult to ascertain. No one was proud of performing a castration and no place wished to be associated with it. In 1770 the music historian Charles Burney tried to discover where these operations were conducted, but failed:
Thus the creation of these singers was filled with mystery and ambiguity....
EXCERPT: [...] the sculptor Sarrasine, who had gone to live in Italy in 1758, fell in love with a singer, La Zambinella, who is described in as much luscious detail [...] She was ‘intensely alive and delicate beyond words’. Her eyes, her mouth, her flesh were all perfect:
Quote:The artist did not tire of admiring the inimitable grace with which the arms were attached to the body, the wonderful roundness of the throat, the graceful curves described by the eyebrows and the nose, and the perfect oval of the face, the purity of its clean-cut lines, and the effect of the thick drooping lashes which bordered the large and voluptuous eyelids. She was more than a woman; she was a masterpiece.
Imagine Sarrasine’s surprise when he found out that La Zambinella was a bloke who had been castrated.
[...] Martha Feldman’s "The Castrato," rich in scholarship and filled with subtle analysis, is one of several books that have appeared on the subject of castrati in recent years.
[...] It began, it seems, because women were not allowed to sing in church, and, in the Papal States, were banned from singing at all. ‘It is important to bear in mind,’ Feldman writes, ‘that castrations for singing, beginning well before 1600, took place only in Italy, geographic heartland of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.’ While London warmed to castrati, and paid them fortunes, the English did not castrate their own.
[...] Castrati, for Feldman, can be understood as the second sons of Italian families who, instead of going into the military or the church, took up singing, and in order to excel had to make a sacrifice. She notes that castration arose at a time in Italy when the eldest son got most or all of the inheritance. For one of the others, getting castrated was a way to deal with the problem of making a living.
[...] In Feldman’s version of things, the castrato had no interest in being figuratively or really female, but rather was ‘decidedly male’. [...] she sees maleness in Italy in the period when the castrati flourished as a political category that involved having personal access to power and wealth, and to easy autonomy. Castrati, as she points out, managed their estates, decided on heirs and bequests; they also had an international network of friends, patrons and associates. They went where they liked, they did what they liked, some of them even married women. That might be a useful definition, indeed, for a man, and not only in the 18th century.
[...] Boys were castrated to make them better and stronger singers, not to make them girls. On the other hand, while living in the house of a Russian prince the castrato Balatri ‘gained unheard of access to the sexually segregated, staunchly Orthodox female quarters of the household, where he spent many an hour by the embroidery frames, and he was even dressed up in drag by the princess and her girls for fun’.
In Portrait of a Castrato, Roger Freitas writes that ‘contemporaries frequently regarded castrati as analogues to boys … The castrato does seem frequently to have taken the boy’s role in sodomitical sex.’ Thus castrati could shift and transform themselves.
Everybody, it seemed, wanted them, but for different things. Girls wanted to dress them up; men wanted to f#ck them. When composers needed them to sound like angels rather than play the parts of big strong men, they merely wrote different music, making castrati sound sweet, maybe even divine. They sang over the bodies of dead children as much as they sang the big warrior roles. ‘As angel guardians of the dead,’ Feldman writes, ‘young castrati were assimilated to other androgynous beings of long ancestry, giving them special mimetic flexibility as intercessories with the divine.’
[...] The earliest castrati began to flourish in the 1550s in the north of Italy and in the chapels of Rome. The glory years of castrato singing, however, lasted from the early 17th to the late 18th century. Feldman writes with an admirable precision about the actual procedure, which was carried out on boys before puberty:
Quote:The testicles were eliminated by crushing them, squeezing them to cause them to atrophy, or, more commonly, excising them. Much less often the testicles were removed by resection of the entire scrotum … The procedure seems not to have been far removed from that of castrating livestock and other domestic animals … Before surgery began, boys seem typically to have been given opium or had their carotid artery compressed to induce a coma (or a coma-like state), after which they were immersed in milk baths or cold baths as a form of anaesthesia before the cut.
The operation affected the voice. ‘Their resonating chambers,’ Feldman continues, ‘were thus larger than normal in proportion to the vocal emission equipment (the larynx), so much so that we can suppose that with the right training some castrato voices could deliver a sound of greater punch and more powerful resonance than those typical of trained women and uncastrated men.’ While castration did wonders for the voice, it caused problems in the rest of the body – larger ribcages, extended jaws – and medical problems in middle and old age such as osteoporosis. Castrati could, in their younger years, pass for women. They didn’t grow beards and they often were shaped like women, developing the ‘secondary sexual characteristics of women’.
While the practice of castration for the purpose of creating great singers was common, the details of who performed the operation and where remains difficult to ascertain. No one was proud of performing a castration and no place wished to be associated with it. In 1770 the music historian Charles Burney tried to discover where these operations were conducted, but failed:
Quote:I was told at Milan that it was at Venice; at Venice, that it was at Bologna; but at Bologna the fact was denied, and I was referred to Florence; from Florence to Rome, and from Rome I was sent to Naples. The operation most certainly is against the law in all these places, as well as against nature; and all the Italians are so much ashamed of it, that in every province they transferred it to some other.
Thus the creation of these singers was filled with mystery and ambiguity....