BAROQUE OPERA AND THE CASTRATI

BY OLIVIA LERWICK

The year is 1099. The place: the plains outside the great city of Jerusalem. Our protagonist, Rinaldo, fights not only for the glory of his King and his God but for his one true love, the beautiful Almirena. From here, he embarks on his hero’s journey, meeting each new challenge with a purity of heart that leads him like a golden thread through the traps his enemies have laid. And yet, in our 2023 production, we are made to understand that these adventures are real only in the imagination of a young boy trapped by the random cruelty of illness. Unable to leave the hospital, he manifests his longing in his dreams and sallies forth as the hero he knows himself to be.

Baroque opera is uniquely able to relay the emotional complexity of this dream within a dream. Unlike the verismo style, whose straightforward relatability is grounded so heavily in reality, Baroque opera relies on the grandiosity and mythical qualities of its plots to entrance its audience. In order to make the unbelievable believable, however, one must heighten every aspect of the performance. Historically, the sets, costumes, lighting, and, most significantly, the music were meant to inspire awe and evoke the power of heroes and gods. With the stakes so high, one can only wonder, what singer could have assumed such prestige? Who could sing in such a way as to make them godly? The solution at the time—an operation performed on boy sopranos before puberty—created a singer who combined the thrilling high notes and vocal flexibility of a boy soprano with the heroic (and resonant) physique of an adult male.

Somewhat ironically, the same castrati who played gods on stage were almost always cut “in the name of God.” They were the product of a culture whose misogyny was so entrenched that it would rather emasculate itself than let women sing in church, which would have presumably been even more humiliating. Of course, the practice of castrating talented boy sopranos was never given papal approval, but the increasing complexity of music in the late 16th century, the male falsetto’s general lack of power, and the cost of training sopranos who would soon be lost to puberty led the church into one of its most bizarre paradoxes. Officially, castration in any of the Papal States was illegal. Unofficially, it became increasingly popular as their astonishing vocal abilities came to light, and an economic downturn forced more and more families to consider giving their children to the church.

The illegality of the practice, alongside the indisputably grotesque nature of the procedure, made for fantastical tales of “accidents,” which often involved being bitten by a malicious pig or falling from a horse in such a way as to lose one’s manhood. In reality, most boys were castrated at home with some alcohol or milk of poppy to numb the effects and possibly took a milk bath beforehand as it was said to soften the skin. If they survived and had either the money or the patronage to do so, they would be sent to special schools where their one and only task was to learn how to sing.

These schools, primarily located in the Kingdom of Naples, created many vocal techniques that are still used today, including breathing techniques, scale work designed to increase agility and improve intonation, and, perhaps most importantly, the seamless transition between the very lowest range of the voice to the highest. It should be noted that the castrati’s unusual physiology likely enhanced the desirability of many of these techniques. Without testosterone, the castrati’s vocal folds remained the same as those of a child, and they also usually lacked the hormone which made their growth plates close, meaning that they were often tall and gangly with big barrel chests. The smallness of their voice paired with a huge lung capacity meant that they could sing extremely long phrases without taking a breath (legend has it the great castrato Farinelli could sing continuously for a whole minute) and that they could perform complicated passages with exceptional speed and precision.

The castrato voice was, for many, the literal embodiment of the unbelievable. The few good enough to make it into opera were idolized by the aristocracy that funded them. They were the original heroes of the stage and brought both vocal ability and vocal music to heights that were previously unthinkable. In a legend that presages our modern obsession with celebrity, one woman was said to have cried out, “One God, one Farinelli!” after one of his performances.

For some of them, perhaps their lives also felt like a dream within a dream. Their power onstage could never truly be reflected in their lives offstage, as they were never given any social status outside of their vocal talents. Even marriage and partnership for a castrato were frowned upon, and they were mocked and criticized for their feminine bodies despite also being desired for them. In the liminal space they were given, they could be gods, but only for a short time.

Audiences today have the chance to hear the gods sing again in the talents of countertenors, biologically unaltered men who sing full voice in their falsetto. Our 2023 Artist-in-Residence, Anthony Roth Costanzo, is one of the world’s leading countertenors, and plays the lead in our production of Rinaldo. Costanzo has performed at many of the leading opera houses in the world and was Musical America’s Vocalist of the Year in 2019. Perhaps most fittingly, he won a GRAMMY award for his portrayal of the godking Akhnaten in Philip Glass’s opera of the same name and has extensive knowledge of what it means to portray the hero.

It should come as no surprise that the composer of Rinaldo, G.F. Handel (1685-1759), would capitalize on the popularity of the castrati. In fact, the title role of Rinaldo, which premiered in London in 1711, was sung by the great castrato, Nicolò Grimaldi. Between 1711 and 1731, Rinaldo was performed 53 times, the most of any of Handel’s operas, but as his style and the prevalence of castrati waned, his operas fell into obscurity, and Rinaldo was not performed again until 1933. Baroque opera has gained popularity since the mid-20th century. This relatively recent popularity accounts for much of the resurgence of the countertenor, with more and more new works being written for their unique and awe-inspiring voices.