Castrato
: castrati) is a male singer who underwent castration before puberty in order to retain a singing voice equivalent to that of a soprano, mezzo-soprano, or contralto.
Listening to the only surviving recordings of a castrato (see below), one can hear that the lower part of the voice sounds like a "super-high" tenor, with a more falsetto-like upper register above that.
By the 9th century, eunuch singers were well-known (most in the choir of Hagia Sophia) and remained so until the sack of Constantinople by the Western forces of the Fourth Crusade in 1204.
Stereotypically, eunuchs served as harem guards, but they were also valued as high-level political appointees since they could not start a dynasty which would threaten the ruler.
In 1589, by the bull Cum pro nostro pastorali munere, Pope Sixtus V re-organised the choir of St Peter's, Rome specifically to include castrati.
Because of the popularity of Italian opera throughout 18th-century Europe (except France), singers such as Ferri, Farinelli, Senesino and Pacchierotti became the first operatic superstars, earning enormous fees and hysterical public adulation.
[12] The strictly hierarchical organisation of opera seria favoured their high voices as symbols of heroic virtue, though they were frequently mocked for their strange appearance and bad acting.
During the remainder of the day, the young castrati had to find time to practice their harpsichord playing, and to compose vocal music, either sacred or secular depending on their inclination.
[14] This demanding schedule meant that, if sufficiently talented, they were able to make a debut in their mid-teens with a perfect technique and a voice of a flexibility and power no woman or ordinary male singer could match.
There are, though, records of some young boys asking to be operated on to preserve their voices (e.g. Caffarelli, who was from a wealthy family: his grandmother gave him the income from two vineyards to pay for his studies[15]).
[18] Only a small percentage of boys castrated to preserve their voices had successful careers on the operatic stage; the better "also-rans" sang in cathedral or church choirs, but because of their marked appearance and the ban on their marrying, there was little room for them in society outside a musical context.
In Rome in 1762 he attended a performance at which the prima donna was a castrato, "the favourite pathic" of Cardinal Borghese, who dined every evening with his protector.
They lingered on past the end of the ancien régime, which their style of opera parallels, and two of their number, Pacchierotti and Crescentini, performed before Napoleon.
Soon after this they were replaced definitively as the first men of the operatic stage by a new breed of heroic tenor, as first incarnated by the Frenchman Gilbert-Louis Duprez, the earliest so-called "king of the high Cs".
After the unification of Italy in 1861, "eviration" was officially made illegal, as the new Italian state had adopted the previous penal code of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which expressly forbade the practice.
A group photo of the Sistine Choir taken in 1898 shows that by then only six remained, plus the Direttore Perpetuo, the fine soprano castrato Domenico Mustafà.
The official end to the castrati came on St. Cecilia's Day, 22 November 1903, when the new pope, Pius X, issued his motu proprio, Tra le Sollecitudini ("Amongst the Cares"), which contained this instruction: "Whenever ... it is desirable to employ the high voices of sopranos and contraltos, these parts must be taken by boys, according to the most ancient usage of the Church."
The Catholic Church's involvement in the castrato phenomenon has long been controversial, and there have recently been calls for it to issue an official apology for its role.
Jimmy Scott, Radu Marian and Javier Medina[27] are examples of this type of high male voice via endocrinological conditions.
[32] However, it is believed the castrati possessed more of a tenorial chest register (the aria "Navigante che non spera" in Leonardo Vinci's opera Il Medo, written for Farinelli, requires notes down to C3, 131 Hz).
[33] Similar low-voiced singing can be heard from the jazz vocalist Jimmy Scott, whose range matches approximately that used by female blues singers.
Tetley never did personally divulge the exact reason for his condition, which left him with the voice of a preteen boy for his entire adult life.
[37] Botanist George Washington Carver was noted for his high voice, believed to be the result of pertussis and croup infections in his childhood that stunted his growth.
