This week’s theme is…Falsetto Bros! It’s good to be a man 🙂 Male singers possess a major difference in comparison to females: a falsetto range. It’s like a magical third zone of vocal timbre that allows men to soar like chirpy birds above their more commonly used tenor and baritone registers. I love to sing in my falsetto register. I often experience an enchanting and lyrical freedom up there that I don’t experience in the lower tessituras. Across the years, and in different musical cultures, many male singers have discovered the same thing, and have worked to cultivate performing voices through their falsetto ranges, often grappling in some way to reconcile their masculinity with the feminine associations of their chosen (or determined) voice. This week we look at some such gentlemen.
Falsetto Bros, Day 1 – “Pallido il sole” from Artaxerxes by Johann Adolph Hasse
Men and boys have been castrated as long as mankind has kept historical records. Castration seems to have practiced in countless cultures and for diverse reasons. An important distinction is made in the terminology: a eunuch is a man who has been castrated after puberty; a castrato is one who has been castrated before. The difference is far deeper than the name. Once a man has gone through puberty, all he is really losing is the sperm (well, probably a little more complicated than that, but nothing compared to pre-pubescent castration). But a pre-pubescent male who is deprived of his primary hormonal engines will lose all of the secondary sex characteristics they are responsible for driving. Many of these I’m sure you are aware of. But it’s the ones of which you may not be that are significant to the development of European music in the 18th and 19th centuries. One of testosterone’s lesser-known effects is that it prompts the hardening of the epiphyses, the rounded ends of the longer bones in the arms and legs. Because of this the limbs of castrati were often noted to be unusually long, gangly and awkward. The ribs, too, were subject to this effect, and so the castrati’s abdominal cavities often expanded to freakish proportions, cultivating lung capacity and power in excess of the typical adult male. Combine this with the additional effect, or lack thereof, that the vocal apparatus did not mature and deepen to the usual range, and you have the recipe for a very special kind of singer, what some might even call a singing machine.
This ideal combination of super lung capacity and super vocal range yielded a combination of vocal power, stamina, agility, and timbre that is simply impossible to create otherwise. The castrati of the eighteenth century became superstars. Their feats of vocal pyrotechnique were unparalleled, as was their stature and demand as star performers. In Catholic church choirs around the year 1600, female singers began to be replaced by men due to biblical verses that prohibit women from being heard in church. Sometimes boys were used for the higher parts, sometimes countertenors (sexually mature men who train their falsetto ranges), and sometimes castrati. The castrati were always found to be the superior solution and their presence in church choirs throughout Italy, Bavaria, and other places, became more and more common, eventually finding their way into the choir of the Sistine Chapel, the positions of which would eventually crystallize into a deeply entrenched hierarchy of power and authority that would reach across time to the very last castrato singer on record, Alessandro Moreschi, who died in 1922.
He actually made some recordings, which you can find here:
It doesn’t sound quite like anything else I’ve ever heard. And I love listening to polyphonic choral works by Palestrina, but I bet hearing these works with castrati singing the higher parts would take a bit of getting used to. I can’t even imagine what it would sound like in the flesh.
The castrati came to be simultaneously admired and reviled. Admired for the breathtaking feats of vocal virtuosity within their power and for the stunning levels of expression they were able to create, but reviled for their odd and awkward appearances and social ineptitude. The revulsion that so many harbored in response to the castrati indicated a deep discomfort with the industry as a whole, and particularly with the practitioners of the operation necessary to create them in the first place. If you would like to get a sense of the strange lives led by castrato singers, you might try the movie Farinelli, which tells the story of the title character, one of the greatest castrato singers in history. It is unflinching at times, dealing with the pain of the operation, and the scars that remained with him for years because of it.
It is estimated that upwards of 4,000 boys were castrated each year during the heyday of the European castrato singers, although hard statistics were elusive, as were practitioners who admitted to carrying out the operation. The music historian Charles Burney reports in his writings that he went on a wild goose chase that took him through all the major urban cultural centers of Italy in search of an organization that produced castrati, but found nothing, perpetually directed elsewhere. So the industry was shady and secretive. Their training was anything but. The great castrato singers owe much of their performing success to the rigorous instruction they received at the hands of their masters. Scarcely an hour of the day was wasted as they practiced daily passagework, vocal agility exercises, counterpoint, dictation, and keyboard skills. The end product was a well-oiled musical machine. And the church choirs were not the only ones that employed their services. Eventually they made it big on Europe’s opera stages as well.
Scarcely an Italian opera (which was most operas) written during the eighteenth century that did not contain at least one role intended for a castrato singer. The castrati became the stars of the show, singing the heroic male roles in spite of their female ranges. This may seem strange to you, but you can get used to it. I have listened to hours of Baroque operas and can at this point quite easily associate the mezzo-soprano range with the heroic male. These operas by composers like Handel, Vivaldi, Porpora, Hasse, and others, contain beautiful and expressive music. It is music worth hearing. But what do we do with those castrato roles today? The true sound of the castrato singers is impossible to recreate within the legal and ethical boundaries of the modern world, much to the frustration of music history enthusiasts who would love to hear this music realized by its intended performers. But there are several imperfect solutions, all of which have been used, and all of which are unsatisfactory in some way. You could have women sing them, although then the gender is wrong, and the vocal timbre is not quite authentic. You could transpose the arias in question to the range of male singers, although this truly robs the music of its animating spirit. And then there is my favorite solution: have countertenors sing them.
Countertenors have been with us for centuries, even during the age of the castrati. They are males who train their falsetto ranges and are thus able to operate them with clarity, power, and agility, usually applying this ability to Western art music. While they are not exactly what the castrati would have sounded like (and again, we’ll never know), I bet they are probably the closest we will come. Here is the German singer Andreas Scholl, one of the best countertenors performing today, singing the aria “Pallido il Sole” from the opera Artaxerxes by Johann Adolph Hasse. The opera was composed in the early 1700s to be performed during the Venetian Carnival, which saw many opera performances, especially since they were often prohibited during the ensuing lenten season. The libretto, about a Persian emperor, is by the great librettist Metastasio, and is pretty typical of the dry, heroic stuff that the castrati tended to sing about in 18th century serious Italian operas that told stories of legendary heroes of history dynasties or mythological lore.
One of the things I love about this recording is that Scholl, just for a moment, goes into his chest voice at 3:30. I’m not sure why he does it there, but it really pops out of the texture in a surprising and delightful way. Briefly, we hear Scholl’s reedy tenor voice in the midst of the chirpy countertenor for which he is known and on which he has worked for so many hours to train. It’s like he’s breaking character, a quick wink at his audience to reassure them of his natural state.
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