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Roseen Giles, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, University of Toronto; roseen.giles@gmail.com.
1 Most recent studies of the castrato have offered case studies of individual singers, or else have been limited to narrower time periods. See, for example, Berry, Helen, The Castrato and his Wife (Oxford, 2011)Google Scholar; Freitas, Roger, Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage, and Music in the Life of Atto Melani (Cambridge, 2009)Google Scholar; Frandsen, Mary E., ‘“Eunuchi conjugium”: The Marriage of a Castrato in Early Modern Germany’, Early Modern History 24 (2005), 53–124 Google Scholar; Heller, Wendy, ‘Varieties of Masculinity: Trajectories of the Castrato from the Seventeenth Century’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (2005), 307–321 Google Scholar; and Heartz, Daniel, ‘Caffarelli’s Caprices’, in Music Observed: Studies in Memory of William C. Holmes, ed. Colleen Reardon and Susan Parisi (Warren, MI, 2004)Google Scholar.
2 There was a rumour, originating in Paris in the 1770s, that it was actually Guadagni, and not Gluck, who composed the music for the role of Orfeo; Howard discredits this on the grounds that ‘only two of Guadagni’s surviving arias are contributions to Orfeo, and they were composed well after 1762, designed to be inserted in pasticcio versions of the opera’ (137).
3 While Feldman gives many illuminating examples of castrati portraying monarchs on stage, her suggestion that the singers acted as ‘deluxe’ doubles – mirrors that risked usurping the power of sovereigns – might be more convincing if the evidence for interactions between monarchs and castrati was the primary focus (in the form of the economy of gift-giving and other pecuniary tensions between singers and their employers). That these tensions are the result of Feldman’s ‘virtual diarchy’, as opposed to being simply the result of ambitious musicians occasionally demanding unreasonable compensation is not always made clear.
4 An image of the baptismal record is reproduced in Figure 1.1 (17), as is Guadagni’s record of death, given as Figure 11.1 (190). The singer’s will is transcribed in Appendix C. See also Howard, Patricia, ‘Happy Birthday, Cosimo Gaetano Guadagni!’, Musical Times 148 (2007), 93–96 Google Scholar.
5 Guadagni suffered a stroke around 1785, and subsequently lost the ability to speak. Remarkably, he continued to sing in the Basilica del Santo in Padua, vocalising wordlessly and still attracting curious tourists (Howard, 185).
6 Gluck to the Duke of Braganza, October 30, 1770 (Preface to Paride ed Elena, Vienna, 1770); quoted and translated in Howard, 177.
7 Gaetano’s brother was the tenor Giuseppe Guadagni, and his three sisters, Anna, Angiola, and Lavinia Guadagni, were all sopranos.
8 The first quotation is from Feldman, 24–5, and the second from 45. ‘Carried out in a kind of indirect symbolic imitation of Christ’s passion, such sacrifices were a more 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 common place. 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’ (Feldman, 7).
9 Feldman makes her connection between sacrifice and religious penitence rather forcefully, even sarcastically, by at one point quoting in passing the Nicene Creed: ‘In thinking about the broader context for these practices, it is important to bear in mind that castrations for singing, beginning well before 1600, took place only in Italy, geographic heartland of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church’ (xii).
10 Buried in endnote 25 of Feldman’s book (278) is a reference to the somewhat gruesome but revelatory study by Belcastro, Maria Giovanna et al., ‘Hyperostosis Frontalis Interna (HFI) and Castration: The Case of the Famous Singer Farinelli (1705–1782)’, Journal of Anatomy 219 (2011), 632–637 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, consisting of an anatomical study of Farinelli’s remains, exhumed in 2006.
11 The histories of the castrato and of satirical representations are here intertwined, whether through caricature drawings, or, as Feldman suggests, in the comic but terrifying character of Pulcinella (discussed in Chapter One, ‘Of Strange Births and Comic Kin’). See also the reproductions of Zanetti’s drawings given as Figures 24–6 and 39–41 in Feldman’s study.
12 See Holmes, William C., Opera Observed: Views of a Florentine Impresario in the Early Eighteenth Century (Chicago, 1993), 136–139 Google Scholar. In the chapter ‘Castrato De Luxe: Blood, Gifts, and Goods’, Feldman also recounts the legend of Caffarelli snubbing King Louis XV over the apparently inadequate gift of only one gold snuffbox (166). An equally delicious anecdote can be found in Charles Baroe’s story regarding the castrato Tenducci (the subject of Helen Berry’s groundbreaking study), who was said to carry with him a red velvet purse containing the remains of his testicles.
13 Forkel, Johann Nikolaus, Musikalischer Almanach für Deutschland (Leipzig, 1783), 130 Google Scholar.
14 These recordings, as well as several others of soprano singers from the early twentieth century, and video footage of in-use vocal chords can be accessed through The Castrato’s companion website: www.ucpress.edu/go/castrato.
15 On the reference to Homeric fragments and medieval musicology, see Treitler, Leo, ‘Homer and Gregory: The Transmission of Epic Poetry and Plainchant’, The Musical Quarterly 60 (1974), 333–372 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 Thankfully, Feldman also clarifies that she is ‘not talking about anything so slippery as a psychoanalytic Lacanian voice, the voice as an “acoustic mirror” of the listening “subject”, the object of a drive, or the uncanny space between mechanism and cause’ (79).
17 This is found again in the edition by Garcia in the Traité complet de l’art du chant (Paris, 1847), reproduced in Feldman, 225. The notes of the embellished version of the recitative and aria are largely illegible in this image.
18 Quoted and translated in Howard, 157.
19 ‘And inseparably too the castrated man is at odds with an emerging sexual binarism and a new set of representational codes that insist that things seen and heard should be true to nature, and hence that representations on stage not be disjunct from the bodies doing the representing’ (Feldman, xxi).
20 Burney, , A General History of Music, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period (London, 1776)Google Scholar, 1: 863; quoted in Howard, 199.
21 Burney, General History, 2: 876; quoted in Howard, 195.
22 This was written by Gian Maria Ortes in his letter to Hasse dated 31 December 1768; quoted and translated in Howard, 120.
23 Lord Mount Edgcumbe also commented on this upon visiting the aged Guadagni in Padua in 1784: ‘When he sang as first man at our opera he was uncommonly handsome, and a remarkably good actor; Garrick himself having taken pains to instruct him’. Edgcumbe, Mount, Musical Reminiscences, 4th edn (London, 1834), 34–36 Google Scholar; quoted in Howard, 175.
24 Howard, 76; the source of this quotation regarding Laschi’s stage presence is not specified in the text.
25 Both Feldman and Howard address the issue of transcription/re-composition/embellishment of opera arias famously performed by particular castrati and subsequently notated for publication: ‘On this view, scores were not just intentional objects, nor were they just records of performances, presentation objects, or souvenirs, as the case may be, but rather they were templates for audience/performer interactions’ (Feldman, 134); see especially Feldman’s discussion of Crescentini’s ‘re-composition’ of Zingarelli’s aria ‘Ombra adorata, aspetta’ (224) and Howard’s consideration of Guadagni’s ‘extemporaneous effusions’ as compositions (139).
26 ‘“Fourth tones” in this gloss become something like the “third kinds”, notes that exceed the usual registral triptych conventionally described for human voices, much as humans can exceed or defy a “typical” sexual dyad. Fourth tones are strange and other. White and cool like Calvé’s flute tones, they lie for her beyond nature or sex, beyond earth, beyond knowing’ (Feldman, 128).
27 Gounod, Charles, Mémoires d’un artiste (Paris, 1896)Google Scholar, 99–100; quoted and translated in Howard, 193.
28 Honoré de Balzac, Sarrasine, in Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York, 1974), 223; quoted in Feldman, 258.
29 In his will, Guadagni specified his nephew Vincenzo Guadagni as his universal heir; see Howard’s transcription, 188–9.