The Castrata Book 2

Books shelved as castrati: Cry to Heaven by Anne Rice, Painted Veil by The Gendering of Men, Volume 2, Queer Articulations (Hardcover) by.
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Yet at the same time, Dorothea fell in love with another man. Tenducci was heartbroken, but Dorothea was practical. She even sought her father's help in dissolving the marriage so she could marry her new lover.

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A highly publicized battle ensued in the London courts where the marriage was finally annulled. The argument centered on Tenducci's state of being a castrato, since he could not possibly consummate the marriage and father children. I was saddened to learn that the eighteenth-century equivalent of today's rock superstars can be so completely forgotten that only a handful of people alive today even recognise his name. I also was sad to realise that amongst the women of her day, Dorothea was one of the very few lucky ones because she was not completely invisible whilst she was alive.

The Castrato and his wife is a readable book that relies on scholarly detective work and strong narrative to tell this tragic tale. It presents fascinating insight into the world of opera, the Catholic church, and into the nature of sex and marriage in Georgian Britain.

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Further, the author explores questions about the meaning of marriage that resonate to this very day. If you enjoy European history or if you are an opera fan, or if you enjoy reading strange-but-true stories, there is much in this compelling book that will appeal to you. She is the author of numerous articles on the history of eighteenth-century Britain, and is the co-editor with Elizabeth Foyster of The Family in Early Modern England This is her second book.

GrrlScientist maintains her presence on a number of social media sites, including facebook and twitter: Order by newest oldest recommendations. Show 25 25 50 All. Threads collapsed expanded unthreaded. She was more than a woman; she was a masterpiece. He makes a connection between modern psychoanalysis and a study of the sound the castrato made when he sang, lost to us now, sadly. It began, it seems, because women were not allowed to sing in church, and, in the Papal States, were banned from singing at all.

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. She writes rather well about this notion of sacrifice, quoting Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, two late 19th-century writers on the general subject of sacrifice. Thereafter the victim, now improved, mediates between sacred and profane worlds.

This liminal position came not only after an operation but after the many years of gruelling training that followed it. The castrato Cafarelli, for example, reports that his teacher made the students work from a single sheet of exercises for five years before letting them do anything else. They were not encouraged, or so it appears, to put emotion into their voices. He devoted a short chapter to a rapturous description of the quality of emotion in the singing of the castrato Velluti.

In a rather wonderful sentence, she questions the very idea of maleness. 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.

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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. Everybody, it seemed, wanted them, but for different things. Girls wanted to dress them up; men wanted to fuck 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. In the middle of all of this flexibility lay the gap between the act of mutilation, which became increasingly apparent in the way the body formed as the boy grew up, and the beauty of the voice.

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Casanova, who knew something about bodies and beauty, said of the castrato Salimbeni: Besides the complexes that blokes in the 21st century may have about castration and the shivering joy many take in explaining all this to a psychoanalyst, there is another reason the castrato may continue to fascinate us. It is the old idea that while heard melodies are sweet, those unheard are haunting. But all of these offer merely clues. Some of the clues are fascinating, however, perhaps because the language used to describe a castrato singing has its own luscious, plaintive sound.

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In other words, since this sound was once made, it belongs to us, or almost does, or — perhaps more correctly — we know that it existed, but it is gone now, it is lost sound, and all we can do is imagine it. We can imagine it powerfully since we still have much of the music castrati sang. We just do not have their voices.

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Other singers — contraltos and countertenors — sing the music now, but it is not the same. The earliest castrati began to flourish in the s 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 testicles were eliminated by crushing them, squeezing them to cause them to atrophy, or, more commonly, excising them.


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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. Castrati could, in their younger years, pass for 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 the music historian Charles Burney tried to discover where these operations were conducted, but failed:. 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.

The Castrato and his Wife – book review | @GrrlScientist | Science | The Guardian

Thus the creation of these singers was filled with mystery and ambiguity. It was both forbidden by the Catholic Church and fundamental to church music. They created an aura of awe and wonder when they sang, and many superlative descriptions survive, but they also caused laughter and mockery, especially in London. They sang in the great operas of the age, but many in England considered them secret Jesuits. The best account we have of this arises from the marriage of the castrato Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci to Dorothea Maunsell, the teenage daughter of a prominent Anglo-Irish family.