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| ISBN-13: | 9780520962033 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2015 |
| Series: | Ernest Bloch Lectures , #16 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 496 |
| File size: | 42 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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The Castrato
Reflections on Natures and Kinds
By Martha Feldman
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96203-3
CHAPTER 1
Of Strange Births and Comic Kin
Sometimes a project begins with a clue or a hunch from an unexpected quarter. I date the beginning of this one from a time when I began stumbling over a number of unrelated facts, among them a peculiar repertory of explanations for castration, resemblances between various castrato caricatures and feathered comedians, jokes that cast castrati as capons, fears of castrati as strange, grotesque, and overly moneyed, images of castrati as angels, and a myth of origins that assigns the castrato's birth to a rooster's egg. Imagine, then, my fascination when I read this passage from Gabriel Garcia Márquez's story "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children."
Everyone knew that a flesh-and-blood angel was held captive in Pelayo's house. Against the judgment of the wise neighbor woman, for whom angels in those times were fugitive survivors of a celestial conspiracy, they did not have the heart to club him to death. Pelayo watched over him all afternoon from the kitchen, armed with his bailiff's club, and before going to bed he dragged him out of the mud and locked him up with the hens in the wire chicken coop.... A short time afterward ... [their] child woke up without a fever and with a desire to eat.... when they went out into the courtyard with the first sight of dawn, they found the whole neighborhood in front of the chicken coop having fun with the angel, without the slightest reverence, tossing him things to eat through the openings in the wire as if he weren't a supernatural creature but a circus animal.
... The news of the captive angel spread with such rapidity that after a few hours the courtyard had the bustle of a marketplace and they had to call in troops with fixed bayonets to disperse the mob that was about to knock the house down. Elisenda ... then got the idea of fencing in the yard and charging five cents admission to see the angel.
If every idea yearns for an epiphany, this was mine, a promissory note for my odd miscellany. Here a bizarre, ambivalent creature floats down on an earthly dwelling like flotsam from heaven. He terrifies its owners, who cage him with their chickens only to find that he miraculously cures their sick child. The miraculousness of a therapeutic cure is not irrelevant to the history of the castrato. Nor is the fact that far from earning him freedom, the angel becomes more captive than ever, prized as a healer but no less so as an object of rough curiosity by an unruly crowd, and a profitable one at that.
Parts of this story resonate with different animal myths I had encountered while studying early modern festivity in connection with eighteenth-century opera. Such myths are invariably shot through with anthropomorphism, especially between men and fowl, and often they fetishize fowl. In ceremonies, rituals, and displays, fowl repeatedly feature as mediating figures alongside men—from the post-Romans in South Britain, where chickens were part of votive assemblages, to Salento, Italy, where hens are still celebrated for their chthonic powers, to present-day Zaire, where a boy's father would traditionally offer him a meal of turkey after his circumcision, and not least to the Balinese cockfights made famous by Clifford Geertz, which display men's passions in "a medium of feathers, blood, crowds, and money." Though neither fully animal nor human, fowl in these various usages typically live close to humans, to their cults, their social habits, and their fantasies of origin. They are metaphors of human society that move ambiguously between the poles of a stable social self and an alien other. Related myths invoke other domestic animals—notably pigs, which we will encounter anon, likewise endowed with attributes that give them redemptive powers for a larger group and often make them sacrificial spectacles, objects of marketplace commerce, or both.
In these are shades of Garcia's winged old man whose containment and exhibition not only heal but also enable the exchange of money with a gawking crowd. Transformed into the pliable forms of folktales, myths, and popular literature, such are the tales of angels, monsters, and clowns, or what Peter Stallybrass and Allon White call "creatures of the threshold." Such too, I will argue, are the myths of the castrato, which have much to reveal about the long-lived and peculiar European phenomena of producing, exchanging, and patronizing castrated singers. But these mythic forms are also profoundly bound up with the exceptional vocal art of castrati, which engaged the subjective ambivalences of listeners at their nervous, sensory, and psychic core. Small wonder that over time castrati as a group came to be enmeshed in many myths of their own: myths of origin that recounted how they were born and bred, myths of lifestyle that elaborated how they passed their days in primping, courting, and hobnobbing, myths of superhuman vocal powers generated by real vocal feats and often extraordinary physiological traits, which typically included fatty chests, a beardless face, fleshy hands, chest, and neck, and a sometimes outsized height or deformed proportions; and myths of a prodigious sexual allure, associated androgynously with both male and female attractions. One might say that although—or, indeed, because—castrati were often recruited to represent young male lovers and heroes, they were living avatars of mythological modalities of thought and belief.
MATTERS AND FACTS
Who exactly made up this caste of men? Over most of history and in most settings castrated singers were Italians whose testes had been removed before puberty to retain their vocal range into adulthood, after which their voices remained high but went on to mature with the power of adult men. Many, but not all, had been singled out for castration because they showed promise as boy chapel singers. In the shank of the seventeenth century, when the practice of castrating boys was at its peak, the Italian peninsula was suffering from severe economic woes, pestilence, and war, and many families could find no means of subsistence. Parents often hoped that by having their sons castrated, they might improve the prospects of the family, the child, or both, which otherwise could be meager or nil. To castrate one or more sons so that they might eventually land a secure position singing in a Catholic church, at which women were forbidden from singing by Pauline proscriptions, was a reasonable course of action for such families. Families of middle-class station whose material circumstances were less dire often sought to indemnify themselves against declining resources or to improve their social lot, usually singling out younger sons who lay outside inheritance schemes for alternative forms of employment, much like sending a younger son off to the military or the priesthood. Castrations were also mobilized by systems of patronage and cultural production, being urged on by teachers, local chapelmasters, parents or relatives, or agents working for prospecting patrons, princely or non, or for princes themselves.
At first glance, the castration phenomenon may seem like a historical aberration or mere curiosity. But for a long swath of European history, castrated singers stood categorically at the top among musical creator-performers. There were, of course, plenty of journeymen castrati, workaday men who populated minor chapels, some traveling around gigging in small operatic parts or oratorios, or singing cantatas and songs in private homes in their time off. Still, we should understand them, on the whole, as more than "performers" in our modern sense of proficient conveyors of a score. Collectively they formed a prominent musical elite, perhaps the elite caste of musician-performers, because their art required special powers of invention, execution, finesse, and nuance, fortified by musical skills that went beyond the standard musicianly competencies of sight-reading and keyboard proficiency to include highly developed skills in figured bass and improvisation on vocal parts as well as advanced skills in counterpoint and composition, which involved writing partimenti and composing works in different genres. It was because of these skill sets that many were consulted on all manner of musical subjects by cognoscenti and doubled as professional composers, impresarios, chapelmasters, and teachers, and why for many composers over about two centuries, including Monteverdi, Cavalli, Vivaldi, J. C. Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Cimarosa, and the young Rossini, writing for the best castrati was a top goal, and having them on payrolls and playbills was equally important to rulers from Frederick the Great and Maria Teresia to the three French Louis and Catherine the Great.
Enabling this vocal capital were both the conditions of the castrato body and its acculturation in singing. Typically in the period up until the eighteenth century the apprenticeship of a castrato was longer and more concentrated than that for other singers, especially in the stage of development after a boy was castrated but before his first major employment. This was true regardless of where he was trained, whether in a conservatory, cathedral school, or private teacher's home. A rough survey of the seventy or so most famous castrati during the prime years of castrato singing, from the early seventeenth century to the late eighteenth, reveals that about half were known both as singers and as composers with some meaningful output, though the two activities tended to be intertwined, with their compositional emphasis on vocal music, sometimes with orchestral accompaniments and sometimes not. Among castrati who produced a significant corpus of compositions, we can count, in the seventeenth century, Loreto Vittori, Atto Melani, and Francesco Antonio Massimiliano Pistocchi; and in the eighteenth Carlo Broschi (known as Farinelli), Vito Giuseppe Millico, Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci, Giuseppe Aprile, Venanzio Rauzzini, and Girolamo Crescentini.
* * *
The earliest castrati cropped up in Italy during the 1550s in northern parts of the peninsula and the chapels of Rome. By no later than the 1550s there were two at the duke's chapel in Ferrara. The first to appear in the Sistine Chapel (the pope's private chapel, also called the Cappella Pontificia or papal chapel) was a Spaniard named Hernando Bustamante who joined in 1558, though officially the pope did not authorize their recruitment until decades later, in 1589, and the papal bureaucracy did not identify them as such in its registers for another ten years. Other castrato singers at the papel chapel were also Spanish, but, as Corinna Herr shows, high parts in the period were sung by both castrati and falsettists, who overlapped for many decades, both groups including singers of both Spanish and Italian origin. It is very hard to say when choirs in Italy moved toward all-castrato treble sections, and it is not clear that all did so entirely. But there is no doubt that by the early to mid-seventeenth century castrati proliferated in Italy, having moved quickly into church jobs and often thence onto the stage. Although Italy evidently had a monopoly on producing castrati, Germany took an interest in them early on. Orlando di Lasso corresponded from Bologna about one in 1574. His patron Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria kept castrati in Munich at least briefly in the same period, and by the 1580s they were established there. Not long thereafter, by the early seventeenth century, they had moved further abroad to Württemberg and Vienna. The diaspora coincided with economic distress, caused and compounded by the agonies of natural disaster, plague, and war, which led thousands of desperate families, especially rural ones, to seek any means of livelihood and prompted them to flood Italian cities.
These are some broad outlines of what we know, but I want to claim that the business of having a son castrated is not reducible to a quest for survival or improvement. Always mediating the phenomenon were Catholic religious ideas, often intermixed with rural folk beliefs as well as familial strategies for distributing wealth and functions within a system of primogeniture, none of the strands of which can be disentangled. As John Rosselli insisted, to offer one's son for castration was to make an offering to God and thus a consecration to the church, which also mediated family relations. Legally the church condemned the practice as being against the order of nature and counter to the obligation to be fruitful and multiply. And yet proscriptions do not map onto the symbolic load castration bore. In some sense castration for singing, as a sacrificial offering to the church, was much like joining the priesthood. Accordingly it was freighted with beliefs and obligatory utterances—the two are hard to distinguish—about giving up procreation and typical sexuality in order to gain subsistence for one's family or to improve oneself and one's loved ones, to find salvation, a place in society, the good graces of the Lord, and the good graces of the Lord's shepherds, meaning ecclesiastical authorities and royal patrons who ruled by divine right. Carried out in a kind of indirect symbolic imitation of Christ's passion, such sacrifices were a more than viable alternative in a world where want and famine were rife and where mutilation, whether as physical therapy or punishment or the consequence of harsh labor, disease, and other misfortunes, was commonplace. That virtually all castrati did sing primarily or (more often) exclusively for the church speaks to this issue of castration as sacrifice in the properly Catholic sense. Only starting in the later seventeenth century were some mainly theater and court singers, and even those usually had a home base in a church or princely chapel.
Surgically speaking, all these men had undergone a bilateral herniotomy, or bilateral orchiectomy. 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, and never was there full oblation. The procedure seems not to have been far removed from that of castrating livestock and other domestic animals, a practice with which many rural people in earlier centuries were familiar, though animals tended to be younger at the age of castration relative to their lifespan. 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 anesthesia before the cut. The vas deferens was severed (as for a vasectomy), and the testicles scored with a two-centimeter incision.
Some understanding about the operation comes from an obscure mid-sixteenth-century German "incisor" (a doctor of the surgical class) named Caspar Stromayr from Lindau am Bodensee on Lake Constance in Bavaria. Stromayr was a meticulous and supremely conscientious expert who performed his craft not to produce castrated boys as singers, but rather as therapy for chronic and acute medical problems. In addition to practicing surgery, he spent many years toiling away on a manuscript, completed in 1559 but not published until 1925, on the radical treatment of hernias and cataracts, replete with 186 hand-colored illustrations, each captioned with a couplet of explanation, including ritualistic prayers. The excision techniques described appear to be versions of what was practiced in Italy, as well as certain corollaries, for example, having the patient sit in a milk bath before the operation and having him lie in a tilted position with the legs above the head (Fig. 1), a forward-looking technique of Stromayr's own invention.
* * *
The direct role of the church is critical to this history, for it was through the church that boys began entering the profession in the latter half of the sixteenth century and through it that the remaining ones exited more than three and a half centuries later. Many castrations were instigated by church schools, churchmen, priests who taught at conservatories, and teachers or parents who worked within the church. The question nonetheless remains: why did the practice develop on a massive scale and why were castrati prized in virtually every corner of Europe? Assuredly, eunuch singers have thrived in other times and places—the courts of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, the Ottoman empire, and precolonial India, for example—in some cases with similarly exceptional training and status. But in no case do singing eunuchs seem to have moved decisively beyond the paternalistic, hierarchical contexts of courtly patronage to operate as independent professionals in a modern, money-driven marketplace as Italians did throughout western and eastern Europe, especially by the later seventeenth century and increasingly thereafter.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Castrato by Martha Feldman. Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
PrefaceNote on Textual Transcription, Translations, Lexicon, and Musical Nomenclature
PART ONE. Reproduction
1. Of Strange Births and Comic Kin
Appendix to Chapter 1
2. The Man Who Pretended to Be Who He Was
PART TWO. Voice
3. Red Hot Voice
4. Castrato De Luxe
PART THREE. Half-light
5. Cold Man, Money Man, Big Man Too
6. Shadow Voices, Castrato and Non
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index