Francesco Bartolozzi (Italian, Florence 1728–1815 Lisbon) Charles Burney, April 1, 1784 British, Etching and stipple engraving; second state of three; plate: 7 1/2 x 6 in. (19.1 x 15.2 cm) sheet: 10 5/8 x 7 1/8 in. (27 x 18.1 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1917 (17.3.756-1677) http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/377271
In 1770 Charles Burney travels through Italy with a notebook and a question nobody wants to answer. He wants to know where boys are made to be castrated. In Milan they tell him it is done in Venice. In Venice they tell him it is done in Bologna. In Bologna, where a law forbids it, they tell him it is done in Florence. In Naples, which produces more singers than anywhere else, they tell him it is done in Puglia. Burney writes it all down and notes that every city points to another, and that he could find no one willing to admit it was done in his own.
It is the perfect portrait of a system that Europe practised for two centuries while pretending not to. The operation was forbidden by civil law and condemned by the Church, and at the same time the Church was the main employer of those who had undergone it. The Sistine Chapel employed castrated singers well into the twentieth century.
How many there were we will never know. Figures of four thousand boys a year circulate, and they should be taken for what they are: nineteenth-century estimates with no registers behind them, repeated for two centuries because they make an impression. No hospital kept a record of those operations, for the obvious reason that they were illegal. What is known for certain is the economic mechanism, and the mechanism is worse than the number.
It worked like this. A poor family in the South had a son with a beautiful voice. A maestro di cappella or an agent came by, listened, and made an offer: the boy goes into a boarding school, eats, learns, and if things go well in ten years he earns as much as a notary. The condition was an operation performed at eight or ten, before the voice broke, by a barber or a village surgeon, without anaesthesia, with a death rate that nobody ever counted. Families declared, when required, that it had been necessary because of an illness, or a fall from a horse, or the bite of a pig. The pig bite is a justification that recurs in the documents with a frequency that says everything by itself.
The calculation, from the family’s point of view, was not irrational, and that is what makes the whole business unbearable. One boy in a hundred actually reached success, and the one who did became very rich. Carlo Broschi, known as Farinelli, went to Spain in 1737 and stayed there for more than twenty years as a man of the court, with a salary, a house and real political power. The other ninety-nine ended up in provincial choirs, or ended up nowhere at all, with a body altered for good and a career that did not exist.
The voice that came out of it was neither a woman’s voice nor a boy’s. The body grew while the larynx did not, so you had an adult rib cage pushing against short vocal cords: high register, enormous power, very long breath. That sound is the reason eighteenth-century opera is written the way it is written. Handel’s arias with their interminable coloratura are not a stylistic whim, they are music built around a human instrument that no longer exists.
The end comes late and through bureaucracy. On 22 November 1903 Pius X signs the motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini on sacred music, which establishes that the high parts in churches be entrusted to the voices of boys. It is not a moral condemnation, it is a liturgical rule, and it closes the matter.
One sonic trace remains, and it is the only one in the world. Alessandro Moreschi, born in 1858, the last castrato of the Sistine Chapel, recorded for the Gramophone Company in Rome in 1902 and 1904. Those recordings exist, are in the public domain, and anyone can listen to them tonight. You have to know what you are listening to: Moreschi was over forty, a church singer and not an opera virtuoso, the recording technique of the era squeezed everything into a funnel, and the singing style, with those sobs and those portamenti, was the taste of his time and not of the eighteenth century. We are not hearing Farinelli. We are hearing the last man left of a category that Europe had built and then stopped naming.
Moreschi died in Rome in 1922. On his tomb are written his name and his title: singer of the Pontifical Chapel.