Welcome to those who just now catching Trrill from
Catchdubs!
How to explain the most recent abscence: our editor has been busy redesigning
somebody's web site.
Of course nothing can excuse not posting today, for on this day we celebrate the 300th birthday of Carlo Broschi, known as
Farinelli (1705-1782). Farinelli was the undisputed operatic god of his time and arguably the greatest singer in the history of music. He was, to some degree, like a rock star; he got paid assloads of money, was sexualized by many of his audience, was accorded critical and public praise, and befriended the most popular personalities of his day, including monarchs.
Did I mention that dude was
totally missing his nads and was a soprano? It seems that he had been kicked by a horse as a boy and had to have his testes removed for medical reasons. This was a fairly common story told to mask the truth about many boys during his time. Poor families, often from rural areas had the surgery performed on their son in hopes of bringing him good fortune later in life, through singing.
Farinelli was only one of the famed
castrati from the Baroque era, but what extant information we have on his life and career says that he was unrivaled for not only his virtuosic vocal capabilities but for his attention to musicality. Perhaps the most inspired words on Farinelli's singing come from the great teacher of singing, Giambattista Mancini:
"His voice was thought a marvel, because it was so perfect, so powerful, so sonorous, and so rich in its extent, both in the high and the low parts of the register, that its equal has never been heard in our times. He was, moreover, endowed with a creative genius which inspired him with embellishments so new and so astonishing that no one was able to imitate them. The art of taking and keeping the breath, so softly and easily that no one could perceive it, began and died with him. The qualities in which he excelled were the evenness of his voice, the art of swelling its sound, the portamento, the union of the registers, a surprising agility, a graceful and pathetic style, and a shake as admirable as it was rare. There was no branch of the art which he did not carry to the highest pitch of perfection… The successes which he obtained in his youth did not prevent him from continuing to study; and this great artist applied himself with so much perseverance that he contrived to change in some measure his style and to acquire another and superior method, when his name was already famous and his fortune brilliant."
The castrati, and Farinelli especially, made fascinating singers because while the lack of testosterone introduction (pubescence) kept the child-size larynx intact, the rest of the body continued to grow. By the time he was a teenager, Farinelli would have still had a small vocal mechanism that would have allowed rapid passages and ornaments at great velocity and trills of perfect accuracy and evenness. This would have been coupled with the lung capacity at least the size of a grown man. This allowed the singer, according to writers from the period, to sing for more than one minute without taking a breath. Today, this is simply unheard of [we won't count Kenny G's Guinness Book record, since he used instrumental circular breathing].
In the modern era, there is little evidence as to exactly how a castrato would have sounded, least of all Farinelli, who sang music so difficult that much of it cannot be performed today without some severe editing. Much has been made of the 1994 Corbiau film
Farinelli: il castrato, especially with regard to the timely use of new digital technology to
recreate the singer's voice by melding that of a modern soprano and countertenor. The film itself is somewhat exploitative in its storytelling and on a large scale inaccurate about Farinelli's appearance and voice. The soundtrack features the digi-voice in several blockbusters of his repertoire, including works by Handel and by Farinelli's own brother. The composite voice lacks, however, the technical and tonal characteristics that are consistently described in the writings of the day.
Still, there have been several performers who have taken up Farinelli's repertoire in order to revive the furious splendour of the music and re-master the technique necessary to perform it. The result is singing that outdoes the film soundtrack at almost every turn [Pun intended? You decide.]. One early proponent of this literature was Cecilia Bartoli. Already known for her stunning vocal fireworks, she took some of the Farinelli to the concert stage. Here's a live recording of her performing an aria that was added by Riccardo Broschi to Hasse's
Artaserse. Listen for the pitch she holds for sixteen seconds (starting at 4:49), allowing it to pulsate in intensity. From all the audience shifting and unrest at the end of it, it's easy to get a sense of 18th century craze over Farinelli's singing:
Of course, even that can't beat what is, for my money, the best Farinelli disc out there. The singing is impeccable; the production is exquisite; the scholastic work is committed. Vivica Genaux's
Arias for Farinelli was released in 2002 to great acclaim, including a Grammy nomination for Best Classical Vocal Performance. What a shame it didn't win [damn Renée Fleming]. Every track is a marvel, epecially Broschi's brilliant
"Qual guerriero in campo armato" with its machine-gun-fire tremolos, and Giacomelli's
"Quell'usignolo", a tune that was an integral part of Farinelli's daily life.
As Farinelli's fees rose, so did the public pressures to appear, perform, and sustain perfection. So, like the equally androgynous White Gloved One, at the height of this glory, the thirty-two year old star decided to retire from public performance to sing for King Philip V of Spain, whose Queen apparently employed Farinelli to sing the same four arias to the King each evening for ten years to relieve his melancholy madness. One of these arias was purported to be the Giacomelli
"Quell'usignolo che innamorato" (The nightingale in love). In the aria, Farinelli (and here, Vivica Genaux) duets with and mimics the nightingale-song of a piccolo. It's in this aria that Genaux steps completely over Bartoli. Beginning at 11:41, she too sings for twenty seconds without breathing, but unlike in Bartoli's selection, it is not a single pitch that she sings, but a long, florid passage full of leaps and trills. It doesn't get better than this, folks:
Quell' usignolo che innamorato
Se canta solo tra fronda e fronda
Spiega del fato la crudeltà.
S'ode pietoso nel bosco ombroso
Che gli risponde con lieto core
Di ramo in ramo cantando va.
As the King's psyche fell further away from his duties, Farinelli became his Private Counsellor, received foreign guests, reorganised the Madrid Opera, and directed music at the royal chapel. What Farinelli had intended to be a short stay in Spain turned out to be over twenty years, at the end of which time he had attained the power, if not the name, of a prime minister. In 1750, he was knighted in the order of Calatrava. Afterward, he retired to Bologna, having amassed a tremendous fortune from his singing career and in the service of Spain.
The rest of this week, we'll be taking short looks at the legacy of the castrati, with recordings that range from the silly to the sublime, Porpora to pop.
Related links:
As with all good things, the age of the castrati came to an end. As classical virtues lost their foothold with the coming of the French Revolution, so the opera seria began to fail to hold the interest of European audiences. As the opere serie were virtually the castrato's raison d'être, the need for them became virtually non-existent, and they were discarded as quickly as a paddleball after the County Fair. The last major opera that featured a role written expressly for a castrato was Meyerbeer's Il Crociato in Egitto. It had been well nigh twenty years since the public had heard the voice of a castrato, and it is said that when Giovanni Battista Velutti (1781-1861), the last great castrato, sang his first notes, some of the theatre-goers burst into laughter. The castrato was a novelty—an antique of a now passé musical style. The result was that Velutti's role was taken over by Giuditta Pasta. Velutti [pictured left, click to enlarge] made his final appearance on the London stage in 1829, and with his retirement, so ended the age of the castrato.
Well, in opera, at least. Meanwhile, in the Sistine Chapel the castrati continued to be members of the choir. There was a temporary halt when the Papal States came under the rule of Napoleon in 1808, but after his removal in 1815, the castrati were reinstated. In 1870, the church officially banned castration but continued to employ whatever castrati that remained in the Sistine Chapel choir.
As chance would have it, a pair of field recorders for Gramophone & Typewriter Company who had come to cut a gramophone cylinder of the Pope's voice in the spring of 1902 happened upon the Sistine Chapel choir and in 1902 managed to make several recordings of it, along with the last known surgical castrato, the only castrato to have been recorded in solo —Alessandro Moreschi (1858-1922). Moreschi was probably castrated around 1865, just five years shy of the ban. While studying music at the Scuola di San Salvatore in Lauro, he was discovered by Gaetano Capocci, who became his teacher. In 1883 he was admitted to the Capella Sistina, after being heard performing the role of Seraph in the oratorio Christus am Ölberge by Beethoven. At that time Moreschi's voice was a high soprano of extraordinary purity and agility, to such an extent that he was nicknamed "Angelo di Roma" and made soloist of the Capella Sistina by the pope. After being made a secretary of the Chapel, Moreschi was promoted to the director of the choir, and two years later appeared singing in the funeral of Italian king Umberto I at the Pantheon.
The seventeen recordings were released on CD in the 1990's. Of them, eight are solo Moreschi. The quality of the recordings is exceptionally low, as the quality of all recordings was at the time. The singing is… interesting. The sound of a castrato is itself so distinct and indescribable that the first word that comes to mind is "freak." It is important to note, however, that Moreschi was, by this point in his life, not a great singer, by any means. He was well past his prime, if he ever had one. His style is not that of the castrati of the Baroque era, but one of the over-emotive early 19th century religious music. Listeners today are often disconcerted with the scoops and excessive portamenti and seemingly intentional register breaks. It's easy to be judgemental, but one must remember that having been castrated never assured a boy of a great voice, and there were always as many bad voices as good, if not more. Moreschi may have simply been a bad singer, but whatever the case, we have been blessed with these indispensable documents—the only recordings ever made of a solo castrato voice. Here is Alessandro Moreschi performing the Bach-Gounod "Ave Maria" and Paolo Tosti's "Preghiera":
But perhaps more interesting is not the solo Moreschi recordings, but those with the chorus. The members of the Cappella Sistina were not credited by name, and little was written about the group as a whole, but the evidence in surviving photos seems to support the idea that there were other older castrati in the choir [click on the photos to view larger versions]. In the chorus photo in the third paragraph, there is a man standing at the left of Moreschi who appears to be the same fellow at the back-right of the group photo in this paragraph. In the signatures photograph, at least one and possibly two of the men besides Moreschi is a castrato; one Giovanni Cesari is labelled "soprano (acuto)." Likewise in the upper chorus photo, at the bottom left, is a man who looks remarkably similar to Domenico Mustafà, another of the last castrati in the Sistine Chapel choir. Furthermore, when listening to the ensemble works on the disc, one can discern the other soprani or contralti that do not sound like falsettists (though there were a few in the choir). This is especially prominent in the Palestrina madrigal for four voices, "La cruda mia nemica."
By March 1913 Moreschi had retired from the Cappella Sistina to his home in Rome, where he spent the rest of his life. He performed on occasion, such as under a mass celebration at the Capella Giulia in 1914. He was also a friend of a German writer Franz Habock, author of the extremely important Die Kastraten und ihre Gesangskunst, who planned to revive the Farinelli repertoire with Moreschi in 1914. However, the grand plan failed to became a reality due to several obstacles on the way—probably the war and the decay of Moreschi's voice, yet Habock himself point out the main reason for the failure: Moreschi, as all the other Capella singers, was simply unqualified of singing the Baroque repertoire in a proper way, as it had become almost impossible to find teachers even remotely connected with the grand tradition of Tosi and Mancini, the teachers of the great castrati of the 18th century.
Regarding Moreschi's appearance Habock had this to say, after seeing him in 1914:
That said, it's great to be back, and boy have I got the scoop for you. The Seattle Opera's Manon Lescaut opens this weekend with Carol Vaness in the title role. While the Des Grieux stigma has long kept tenors away from it, it's Manon that presents a real problem. The character, like Butterfly, is a teenager singing long, adultlike phrases over a severe orchestration, and with emotional climaxes that are perhaps foreign to girls of that age. To keep Manon young, plum, but not necessarily full of dumb is a considerable task?one that takes a great deal of intelligence and, in 
The term "golden" is so overused with regard to great singers, and perhaps in this case it's even a misnomer. Hearing Victoria's Act II and IV work last night, I'm more inclined to call the voice prismatic. Rather than a single, shimmering metal, the sound miraculously takes on multiple colors on a single pitch, and light and dark qualities are simultaneously evident [ chiaroscuro isn't just for art history geeks]. A lirico-spinto voice with superb command over loud and soft singing; an unworldly security and ease in the low, middle, and high ranges; Ms. Litherland treats the word as sovereign. Too often, when a singer is said to have a colorful voice, what is really being referred to is either the singer's conscious effort to modify vowel quality or the singer's technical and vocal inability to sing the vowels as they are spoken in the original language. The result is rarely moving; instead, words and indeed entire phrases are lost in a mire of vocal constrictions and aural taxations. Victoria attempts no such thing; rather she allows the clarity of the vowels and the crispness of the consonants to take on a life of their own so that the tone itself serves to engender emotion in the listener, rather than impose it on him.
Here are two oldish soundclips that only hint at what the voice is like now [and I have a very strong suspicion that it will only get better]:
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