399 Sentences With "castrato" | Random Sentence Generator

I'd always wanted to choreograph to Alessandro Moreschi, the only castrato to make solo recordings.

Q. Your voice often sounds closer to that of a boy than that of a castrato.

As the "voice" of Farinelli, the legendary castrato, Mr. Davies appears onstage alongside the actor portraying the character.

Donal Henahan, writing in The Times, didn't like it much — you can't match a castrato was his argument, in essence.

In his senior year at Princeton University, he wrote a show about a fictional castrato, unlocking $35,000 from college funds.

The celebrated castrato with whom Ms. Hallenberg has been especially associated is Carlo Maria Michelangelo Nicola Broschi — known as Farinelli.

The real Farinelli was a castrato, his high voice resulting from childhood castration, a once common procedure starting in the 1500s.

Farinelli, the castrato at the center of Claire van Kampen's baroque drama about the healing powers of music, sings his final solo.

The first singer to perform the title role in Handel's "Ariodante" at its London premiere in 1735 was a young Italian castrato.

In 2009, she released an entire album of castrato music titled "Sacrificium" (which won her a Grammy for best classical vocal performance).

Marianne Crebassa, in the castrato role of Sesto, and Christina Gansch, as Servilia, seem to constitute a white underclass in a black power structure.

At one end is the treasury of parts written for castrato singers during the Baroque era; at the other, an explosion of contemporary music.

During Move's new "XXYY," he remained mute, dancing to recordings of the castrato singer Alessandro Moreschi — a voice whose gender is hard to place.

Such a horse would be highly sought after for breeding, but there was an impediment: Gem Twist was a gelding — a castrato, in operatic parlance.

Are there two types of countertenors, one searching for the purity of the boy soprano, the other for the power and virtuosity of the castrato?

She had instead taken on some startlingly convincing facial hair to sing the title role in Handel's "Ariodante," a male character originally sung by a castrato.

This year, Cecilia Bartoli, the Italian mezzo-soprano, took on a male lead role in a Handel opera that was first performed in 1735 by a castrato.

In Claire van Kampen's new play, Philippe, mentally unstable and getting worse, obtains relief only upon the arrival in court of Farinelli, a great castrato of the day.

In his book, Michael Jackson: The Secret of a Voice, French vascular surgeon (and opera fan) Alain Branchereau alleges that the singer's voice was that of an operatic castrato.

He also debunked a much-quoted anecdote about a supposed power struggle between Rossini and Giovanni Velluti, the castrato singer for whom he wrote the role of Arsace, the Persian prince.

Once Mr. Davies had accepted the singing role, she tailored her musical choices to the specific qualities of his voice, rather than trying to imitate the elusive sound of the castrato.

Playing a castrato requires a leap of imagination, or empathy—the practice of castration was, thankfully, discontinued in the nineteenth century, and the true sound of Farinelli's voice can only be guessed at.

But it's based on history: It tells the story of the mad Philip V of Spain, whose wife sought to soothe his troubled spirits through performances by the celebrated castrato opera singer Farinelli.

The experience is especially nasty if one's wait coincides with the prime-time shows hosted by those two almost indistinguishable fellows with the suety faces, bouffant coiffures and nerve-racking mezzo-castrato voices.

The multigenre series, titled Mx'd Messages, gets started with Richard Move's new "XXYY," an exploration of gender fluidity inspired by Ralph Werther's little-known 21988.212 memoir, "Autobiography of an Androgyne," and recordings of the castrato singer Alessandro Moreschi.

A show for music lovers and fire marshal enthusiasts, Claire van Kampen's candlelit play, directed by John Dove, centers on the relationship between an addled Spanish monarch (Mark Rylance) and a famed castrato (Sam Crane, with singing by Iestyn Davies).

This gentle love story set in a forest glen was written for a low female voice and a castrato, a male singer castrated as a child to preserve his ability to produce the high, pure notes of a boy soprano.

This month, he makes his Broadway début in " Farinelli and the King ," a play by Claire van Kampen, about the relationship, in the eighteenth century, between King Philip V of Spain and Carlo Broschi, the most famous castrato of his day, known as Farinelli.

FARINELLI AND THE KING Mark Rylance is always a welcome addition to a Broadway season, so grab tickets early for Claire van Kampen's play, in which he portrays King Philippe V of Spain, whose depression is ameliorated by listening to the operatic castrato Farinelli.

It tells the true story of Philip V (rendered as Philippe V in the play) of Spain, the 18th-century king who suffered from depression that was apparently held at bay by performances by the famous castrato Farinelli, who gave up Europe's opera houses to be a court musician for the king.

It's the strange but true tale of the famous 18th-century Italian castrato singer and his close relationship with the mentally disturbed King Philip V of Spain (the play uses the French version of the Bourbon monarch's name, Philippe), who found solace and a temporary cure by listening to the singer's unearthly sound.

The other achievements of his adolescence included a doctorate of law awarded at the age of 16, expulsion from a monastery, a spell as a trainee priest, a love affair with a putative castrato (whom Casanova correctly believed to be a girl in disguise), a stint in the army, various other affairs and the start of his mostly unsuccessful gambling career.

Landrey tries to escape with a concealed dagger; but in his weakened state he is unable to evade Castrato, who trips him, sits on him, and stabs him. Castrato has convinced Clotair that Aphelia has been unfaithful to him; Clotair binds his wife and Castrato tortures her (he "sears her breast"). Castrato displays the corpses of Fredigond and Landrey, and Clotair understands that Aphelia is innocent and that he has been abused. Clotair stabs Castrato, who, dying, reveals her true identity as Chrotilda.

Alessandro Moreschi (11 November 1858 – 21 April 1922) was an Italian castrato singer of the late 19th century and the only castrato to make solo recordings.

As an author, he published The Last Castrato in 2005, with I.M. Wolf Publishing.The Last Castrato As in his song, Keno "left yesterday behind", leaving admirers and fans with much music and a children's movie.

Additionally, the character serves as a source of humour that targets 18th-century literary genres; after the character Nonsense chooses the castrato Signior Opera as her husband, Mrs Novel objects, declaring that she gave birth to his child. This act would be physically impossible because Opera is a castrato, and it pokes fun at how the genres and the public treated such individuals. Fielding was not alone in using the castrato image for humour and satire; William Hogarth connects the castrato singer with politics and social problems,Campbell 1995 pp. 33–34 and many other contemporary works mock women who favour eunuchs.

Castrato helps Clotair plan Aphelia's rape. Clovis intercepts his brother; as they fight, Castrato raises an alarm and their mother Fredigond arrives. Rather than trying to stop the fight, she eggs them on. Clotair stabs Clovis, who is carried off, presumably dead.

The novella ends with Mme de Rochefide and the narrator's condemning the castrato tradition as barbaric.

Domenico Mustafà (16 April 1829 – 17 March 1912) was an Italian castrato singer, composer and choir director.

Luigi Marchesi starred in Lodoiska (1796), Lauso e Lidia (1798), and ... The cast featured the castrato Girolamo Crescentini.

When Sarrasine arrives, Zambinella is dressed as a man. Sarrasine speaks to a cardinal, who is Zambinella's patron, and is told that Zambinella is a castrato. Sarrasine refuses to believe it and leaves the party, seizing Zambinella. Once they are at his studio, Zambinella confirms that she is a castrato.

Carlo Mannelli (4 November 1640 in Rome - 6 January 1697 in Rome) was an Italian violinist, castrato and composer.

Mysliveček's friend and close professional associate, the noted castrato Tommaso Guarducci, repeated his role of Farnaspe in the Perugia production.

The practice, known as castratism, remained popular until the 18th century and was known into the 19th century. The last famous Italian castrato, Giovanni Velluti, died in 1861. The sole existing sound recording of a castrato singer documents the voice of Alessandro Moreschi, the last eunuch in the Sistine Chapel choir, who died in 1922.

Mozart's Exultate Jubilate, Allegri's Miserere and other pieces from this period now sung by sopranos and countertenors were written for castrati. Some of the alto parts of Handel's Messiah were first sung by a castrato. Castrati include Farinelli, Senesino, Carestini, and Caffarelli. The last true castrato was Alessandro Moreschi (1858–1922) who served in the Sistine Chapel Choir.

The librettist Pietro Metastasio described Scalzi as a "very unique (sic) singer" and likened his voice to that of the famous castrato Farinelli.

Gioacchino Conti (28 February 1714 – 25 October 1761), best known as Gizziello or Egizziello, was an Italian soprano castrato opera singer. Gioacchino Conti.

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 last Sistine castrato to survive was Alessandro Moreschi, the only castrato to have made solo recordings. While an interesting historical record, these discs of his give us only a glimpse of the castrato voice – although he had been renowned as "The Angel of Rome" at the beginning of his career, some would say he was past his prime when the recordings were made in 1902 and 1904 and he never attempted to sing opera. Domenico Salvatori, a castrato who was contemporary with Moreschi, made some ensemble recordings with him but has no surviving solo recordings.Clapton, N.: Alessandro Moreschi and the World of the Castrato (London, 2008), pp.

19th century Giovan Battista Velluti by Luigi Rados Aureliano in Palmira was Rossini's second commission from La Scala. It opened the theatre's Carnival season with the famed castrato, Giovanni Battista Velluti as Arsace. It was the only role that Rossini wrote for the castrato voice. Rossini had originally written the role of Aureliano for Giovanni David, one of the most renowned tenors of the day.

Opere, direttori e cantanti, 2ª edition, Rome, Baldini & Castoldi, 2000, p. 42, (i.e. countertenor) Lorenzo Sances. Falsirena was sung by the composer and castrato Loreto Vittori.

The Modern Castrato: Gaetano Guadagni and the Coming of a New Operatic Age. p. 108. Oxford University Press. Lavezzi, Gianfranca (ed.) (2010). Pietro Metastasio: Melodrammi e arie, p.

The dated aesthetic of Moreschi's singing, involving extreme passion and a perpetual type of sob, often sounds bizarre to the modern listener, and can be misinterpreted as technical weakness or symptomatic of an aging voice.A range of critical opinion can be read in, for example: Donington, R: A Performer's Guide to Baroque Music London, 1973, (pp. 73–74); Shawe-Taylor, D: A Castrato Voice on the Gramophone, appendix to Heriot, A: The Castrati in Opera (repr. London, 1975), pp. 225–27; Scott, M: The Record of Singing (London, 1977), pp. 10–11; Law, J: Alessandro Moreschi Reconsidered: A Castrato on Records (in "The Opera Quarterly", 1984 2(2), pp. 1–12); sleeve-notes to Alessandro Moreschi the Last Castrato Complete Vatican Recordings (Opal CD 9823); Clapton, N: Alessandro Moreschi and the Voice of the Castrato (London, 2008), pp. 197–216 passim The standard of his recordings is certainly variable; Moreschi recorded two versions of Rossini's "Crucifixus".

Francesco Provenzale (15 September 1624 - 6 September 1704) was an Italian Baroque composer and teacher. Notably Provenzale was the teacher of famed castrato 'il cavaliere Nicolo Grimaldi (detto Nicolini)'.

Moreschi's Director at the Sistine was Domenico Mustafà, himself once a fine castrato soprano, who realised that Moreschi was, amongst other things, the only hope for the continuation of the Sistine tradition of performing the famous setting of the Miserere by Gregorio Allegri during Holy Week. When Moreschi joined the Sistine choir, there were still six other castrato members, but none of them was capable of sustaining this work's taxing soprano tessitura.

Balducci studied music under the castrato singer Giovanni Ripa in Iesi and the composer in nearby Senigallia.Radiciotti, Giuseppe (1893). Teatro, musica e musicisti in Sinigaglia, p. 132. RicordiConti, Carla (2003).

Baldassare Ferri (December 9, 1610 – September 10, 1680) was an Italian castrato singer. He is said to have possessed "extraordinary endurance of breath, flexibility of voice and depth of emotion".

Gaspare Pacchierotti Gaspare Pacchierotti (21 May 1740 in Fabriano (Marche) – 28 October 1821 in Padua) was a great mezzo-soprano castrato, and one of the most famous singers of his time.

Giuseppe Santarelli Giuseppe Santarelli (1710–1790) was an Italian castrato, composer, choir conductor, voice teacher, and Roman Catholic priest. He was named a knight of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

As early as 1748, Pope Benedict XIV tried to ban castrati from churches, but such was their popularity at the time that he realised that doing so might result in a drastic decline in church attendance. The rumours of another castrato sequestered in the Vatican for the personal delectation of the Pontiff until as recently as 1959 have been proven false. The singer in question was a pupil of Moreschi's, Domenico Mancini, such a successful imitator of his teacher's voice that even Lorenzo Perosi, Direttore Perpetuo of the Sistine Choir from 1898 to 1956 and a strenuous opponent of the practice of castrato singers, thought he was a castrato. Mancini was in fact a moderately skilful falsettist and professional double bass player.

I giuochi d'Agrigento is an opera by Giovanni Paisiello to a libretto by Count Alessandro Pepoli with which the rebuilt La Fenice in Venice was inaugurated on 16 May 1792. The castrato Gasparo Pacchierotti lead the cast.A Chronology Of Western Classical Music 1600-2000 1783231211 Jon Paxman - 2014 - 16 May The rebuilt Teatro La Fenice in Venice is inaugurated by Paisiello's I giuochi d'Agrigento (The Games of Agrigento). The famous castrato Gasparo Pacchierotti leads the cast.

Loreto Vittori (5 September 1600 (baptized) - 23 April 1670) was an Italian castrato and composer. From 1622 until his death, he was a mezzo-soprano singer in the papal chapel in Rome.

Gaetano Majorano Gaetano Majorano (12 April 1710 – 31 January 1783) was an Italian castrato and opera singer, who performed under the stage name Caffarelli. Like Farinelli, Caffarelli was a student of Nicola Porpora.

390, Sadie (2006). "The castrato sang excellently ... (this was Francesco Ceccarelli, then new to the Salzburg Kapelle)." Around 1780, Mozart revised "Exsultate, jubilate," possibly for Ceccarelli to sing at the Dreifaltigkeitskirche.C. Eisen, p.

Lancet The Voice of the Castrato, 1998; 351: pp. 1877–80. Operating through small, child-sized vocal cords, their voices were also extraordinarily flexible, and quite different from the equivalent adult female voice. Their vocal range was higher than that of the uncastrated adult male. 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.

Ferdigond and her lover Landrey are in her chamber; Castrato sets the room on fire, but the queen disguises her lover as the ghost of Clovis. Fredigond plans to rule the kingdom with Landrey once Clotair, Clovis, and Aphelia are dead. She wants Clotair to execute Aphelia, to placate Clovis's "ghost." Clotair initially falls for the trick, but Castrato, who is busily manipulating the other characters ("on all sides the eunuch will play foul"), informs him of the queen's intentions.

Il crociato in Egitto (The Crusader in Egypt) is an opera in two acts by Giacomo Meyerbeer, with a libretto by Gaetano Rossi. It was first performed at La Fenice theatre, Venice on 7 March 1824. The part of Armando was sung by the famous castrato, Giovanni Battista Velluti; the opera was probably the last ever written to feature a castrato. It is the last of Meyerbeer's series of operas in Italian, and became the foundation of the composer's international success.

The Musical Times, 105 (1457): pp. 498–500. Riccardo Primo was the third opera Handel composed for the trio of famous star Italian singers, the castrato Senesino and the sopranos Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni.

Giovanni Maria Bacchini (also known as Fra Teodoro del Carmine and "Bacchino") was an Italian castrato, composer, writer on music, and Roman Catholic priest who flourished during the late 16th century and early 17th century.

Mozart had a very poor opinion of dal Prato, and he was to be primo uomo in name only. He did not consider him worthy of such an important role. After Idomeneo, dal Prato remained in Munich for 25 years and established himself as a famous primo uomo, despite Mozart's criticism. Mozart repeatedly referred to dal Prato very sarcastically in his letters to his father as il nostro molto amato castrato Dal Prato (our much-loved castrato dal Prato) and in late 1780 describes him as "shoddy".

The scarlet gown or The history of all the present cardinals of Rome - an anonymous text authored in 1653 (translated into English by H. C. Gent) Barberini was also, apparently, involved in several affairs with men. He became particularly intimate with the castrato singer Marc'Antonio Pasqualini in the early 1640s. Contemporary testimony leaves little doubt that the "veritable passion" the cardinal felt extended to more than Pasqualini's beautiful voice.The Eroticism of Emasculation: Confronting the Baroque Body of the Castrato by Roger Freitas (The Journal of Musicology, Vol.

Luigi Marchesi in retirement Luigi Marchesi (; 8 August 1754 – 14 December 1829) was an Italian castrato singer, one of the most prominent and charismatic to appear in Europe during the second half of the eighteenth century.

Maunsell had two more children in Ireland with Kingsman but her place and date of death is not known. In 2012 Helen Berry wrote a fictionalised biography of her life in "The Castrato and his Wife".

The last great castrato roles were composed specifically for him: Arsace in Rossini's Aureliano in Palmira (1813) and Armando in Meyerbeer's Il crociato in Egitto (1824). He made his London debut in 1825 in Il crociato in Egitto. The crowds reacted poorly to his initial performances as he was the first castrato to appear in London in 25 years, but he drew crowds until the end of his career. In 1826 he took over management of The King's Theatre in London and appeared there in Aureliano in Palmira and Morlacchi's Tebaldo ed Isolina.

Robert William Crowe is an American operatic sopranist (male soprano) and musicologist.Robert Crowe Giovanni Battista Velluti in London, 1825–1829: Literary Constructions of the Last Operatic Castrato, PhD Musicology, (Boston University). Dissertation committee: Joshua Rifkin and Victor Coelho.

Gaetano Guadagni, by Antonio Fedi. Gaetano Guadagni (16 February 1728 – 11 November 1792) was an Italian mezzo-soprano castrato singer, most famous for singing the role of Orpheus at the premiere of Gluck's opera Orfeo ed Euridice in 1762.

The corresponding term for the male lead (usually a castrato in the 17th and 18th centuries, later a tenor) is primo uomo.H. Rosenthal, H. and J. Warrack, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera, 2nd Edition, Oxford University Press, 1979. p. 398.

Because of the general dislike for the castrato voice in France, young lover roles were assigned to the high male voices of hautes-contre.Potter, p. 19; Heriot (1975) p. 13; for the usage of French terminology, see also: L. Sawkins, art.

The vocal pedagogical methods taught in these schools, however, were based on the concepts developed within the monastic system. Many of the teachers within these schools had their initial musical training from singing in church choirs as children. The church also remained at the forefront of musical composition at this time and remained highly influential in shaping musical tastes and practices both in and outside the church. It was the Catholic Church that first popularized the use of castrato singers in the 16th century, which ultimately led to the popularity of castrato voices in Baroque and Classical operas.

The castrato Senesino, c. 1720 Early performances of opera were too infrequent for singers to make a living exclusively from the style, but with the birth of commercial opera in the mid-17th century, professional performers began to emerge. The role of the male hero was usually entrusted to a castrato, and by the 18th century, when Italian opera was performed throughout Europe, leading castrati who possessed extraordinary vocal virtuosity, such as Senesino and Farinelli, became international stars. The career of the first major female star (or prima donna), Anna Renzi, dates to the mid-17th century.

Stefano Dionisi (born 1 October 1966, in Rome) is an Italian actor. He has performed in more than sixty films since 1986. He is best known for portraying the 18th-century Italian castrato opera singer Farinelli in the movie of the same name.

Dorothea Maunsell became Dorothea Kingsman after being Dorothea Tenducci (born 1750) was a British singer at the centre of a scandal after she married (and later divorced) an Italian castrato opera singer named Giusto Fernando Tenducci. She had children with her second husband.

Giuseppe Belli as Segimiro in Hasse's opera Arminio (costume design by Francesco Ponte; Dresden 1753) Giuseppe Belli, also Giovanni Belli, also known as 'Il Cortoncino' (born 1732 in Cortona; died 19 January 1760) was an Italian castrato-soprano singer at the Saxon court.

Giusto Fernando Tenducci Giusto Fernando Tenducci, sometimes called "il Senesino"Not to be confused with Francesco Bernardi, "Senesino" par excellence. (ca. 1736 – 25 January 1790), was a soprano (castrato) opera singer and composer, who passed his career partly in Italy but chiefly in Britain.

Bianconi, pp. 186-188 Often, these plots were modifies to reinforce inequitable gender rolesHeller, p. ?? or question authorities, most notably the Catholic Church and especially the Incogniti’s ultimate rivals, the Jesuits.Muir, Chapters 1 and 2 The character Giasone was originally cast for a castrato.

Rauzzini Biography of Venanzio Rauzzini at operissimo.com (in German) It has been suggested that Rauzzini may not in fact have been a castrato, but rather had an endocrine condition that prevented his voice from breaking, hence his many affairs as he was thought to be "safe".

All dunces, the suitors include Dr. Orator, Sir Farcical Comic, Mrs. Novel, Bookseller, Poet, Monsieur Pantomime, Don Tragedio and Signior Opera.Pagliaro 1999 pp. 71–72 The goddess eventually chooses a foreign castrato opera singer as her favourite — Signior Opera — after he sings an aria about money. Mrs.

Carestini Giovanni Carestini (13 december 1700 in Filottrano, near Ancona – 1760 in Filottrano) was an Italian castrato of the 18th century, who sang in the operas and oratorios of George Frideric Handel. He is also remembered as having sung for Johann Adolph Hasse and Christoph Willibald Gluck.

A page from the manuscript for Placide venti ameni by Giuseppe Aprile, written in his own hand. Giuseppe Aprile (28 October 1731 – 11 January 1813) was an Italian castrato singer and music teacher. He was also known as 'Sciroletto' or 'Scirolino'. Aprile was born in Martina Franca.

Susan McClary notes that, in this particular opera, this choice raises some gender issues. She argues that the singer type (e.g. bass, tenor, castrato, alto and soprano) each had certain associations. For example, a bass voice was generally used for an authoritarian or powerfully masculine figure.

Anderson, Emily. The Letters of Mozart and his Family. London, [1938], 3rd edition 1985. In another letter he insists that dal Prato ha cantato in modo vergognoso (sang in a shameful way), and even considered calling the castrato Ceccarelli, whom Mozart despised, from Salzburg to take over as Idamante.

Giovanni Battista Velluti as a young man Giovanni Battista Velluti, colloquially "Giambattista" (28 January 1780 – 22 January 1861), was an Italian castrato. He is also considered "last of the great castrati" and had a reputation of being something of a diva, with some singers refusing to appear with him.

Giovanni Battista Andreoni (1720–1797)Andreoni biography at Haendel.it was an Italian castrato singer with a mezzo-soprano range. Andreoni went in 1736 to sing for the court of Lucca. Then in 1738/39 he was engaged by the opera houses in Venice, after which he went to London.

Francesco Paolo Masullo (Acquaviva delle Fonti, 1679 – Acquaviva delle Fonti, 1733) was an Italian singer. Son of Antonio Domenico he studied singing as castrato in 1690 at the Conservatorio della Pietà dei Turchini of Naples. He became maestro di cappella of the Cathedral of Acquaviva delle Fonti in Apulia.

Keno retired, following a successful major concert at the ULTRA stadium in 1991.Major concert After he left the music and movie industry, he took up writing and released articles under the byline JFSanchez. He also released a book titled The Last Castrato under the name J. Wolf Sanchez.

But in German-speaking countries the alto parts as well are sung by boys. Historically, a strategy for avoiding the shift altogether was castration. Castrati are first documented in Italian church records from the 1550s.John Rosselli, "Castrato" article in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2001.

The great singers who were to be the brightest stars of the Royal Academy during the next few years, such as the castrato Senesino and the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni, had not yet arrived in London. Senesino had obligations to fulfill and arrived in September 1720, accompanied by a group of outstanding singers: the castrato Matteo Berselli, the soprano Maddalena Salvai and the bass Giuseppe Boschi. Handel used the libretto of Teofane for his Ottone, with Cuzzoni as prima donna. It became his most successful opera in the years of the Academy. In 1724 and 1725 Handel wrote several masterpieces: Giulio Cesare, (1724) with many da capo arias that became famous, and Anastasia Robinson as Cornelia.

She was a child prodigy: she first performed in public in Southampton in 1773; in April 1774 she made her first London appearance at the Haymarket Theatre. She studied voice with the celebrated castrato Venanzio Rauzzini and premiered the role of Cupido in Rauzzini's opera L'ali d'amore on 29 February 1776.

This religious solo motet was composed when Mozart was staying in MilanK. Kuster, M. Whittall, Mozart: A Musical Biography, Oxford University Press, p. 25 during the production of his opera Lucio Silla which was being performed there in the Teatro Regio Ducale. It was written for the castrato Venanzio Rauzzini,L.

Domenico Mustafà was born in the comune of Sellano,Italian Who's Who page. province of Perugia and had been castrated due to a bite from a pig. He became a famous soprano castrato with the Cappella Sistina in the Vatican. He was particularly admired for his performances of Handelian music.

Giovanni Manzuoli Giovanni Manzuoli (Giovanni Manzoli) (1720–1782) was an Italian castrato who sang as a soprano at the beginning of his career, and later as a contralto.Hansell, Kathleen Kuzmick. "Manzuoli, Giovanni" IN The New Grove Dictionary of Opera New York : Grove's Dictionaries of Music 1992, vol. 3, p. 197.

4 (Prague, 1782), p. 190; transcription and translation into English in Freeman, pp. 383-86. The role of Timante in this production was sung by the great castrato Gaetano Guadagni during the last portion of his long career. Mysliveček's second version of Demofoonte premiered at the Teatro San Carlo, Naples in 1775.

It was first performed in Venice at the Teatro SS. Giovanni e Paolo on 9 February 1664. It was also given in Rome in 1671 with the castrato Giovanni Francesco Grossi as a celebrated Siface. Giovanni Buonaventura Viviani produced a greatly revised version of the opera for the Carnival of Venice in 1678.

Alessandro Moreschi, one of the last castrato singers, performed Ave Maria and several other pieces of music on recordings for the Gramophone & Typewriter Company in the early 1900s. A rendition by Yo-Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin was used as the main theme in the 2017 Palme d'Or winning Swedish film The Square.

Manfredini was born in Pistoia, near Florence. He studied music with his father, Francesco Onofrio Manfredini. Then he studied with Perti in Bologna and Fioroni in Milan. In 1758 his older brother Giuseppe, a castrato, went to Moscow with Locatelli's opera troupe, and Vincenzo went with him, possibly as one of the troupe.

Alessandro Moreschi, the last of the Sistine castrati By the late 18th century, changes in operatic taste and social attitudes spelled the end for castrati. 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 the iconoclastic Napoleon. The last great operatic castrato was Giovanni Battista Velluti (1781–1861), who performed the last operatic castrato role ever written: Armando in Il crociato in Egitto by Meyerbeer (Venice, 1824). 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".

Americus built both harpsichords and pianofortes. He is described by composer, musician and chronicler Charles Burney in Rees's Cyclopaedia for 1772 as "a harpsichord maker of second rank, who constructed several pianofortes, and improved the mechanism in some particulars, but the tone, with all the delicacy of Schroeter's (see below) touch, lost the spirit of the harpsichord and gained nothing in sweetness". Nevertheless, one of his harpsichords was owned and played by the naturalized English castrato, Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci, an intimate friend of Johann Christian Bach and an associate of world-renowned castrato Gaspare Pacchierotti, a regular visitor to London between 1778 and 1791. Tenducci published a set of sonatas for the harpsichord or pianoforte not heard since the 18th century.

117 and passim The practice of women performing en travesti in operas became increasingly common in the early 19th century as castrato singers went out of fashion and were replaced by mezzo-sopranos or contraltos in the young masculine roles. For example, the title role of Rossini's 1813 Tancredi was specifically written for a female singer. However, travesti mezzo-sopranos had been used earlier by both Handel and Mozart, sometimes because a castrato was not available, or to portray a boy or very young man, such as Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro. In 20th-century opera, composers continued to use women to sing the roles of young men, when they felt the mature tenor voice sounded wrong for the part.

Giovanni Battista Mancini (1 January 1714 - 4 January 1800) was an Italian soprano castrato, voice teacher, and author of books on singing. Mancini was born at Ascoli Piceno, Italy. He studied singing in Naples with Leonardo Leo and in Bologna with Antonio Bernacchi. He also studied composition and counterpoint there with Giovanni Battista Martini.

From 1758 he was in London, where he was first heard at the King's Theatre. He sang an aria by the castrato Caffarelli in Baldassare Galuppi's Attalo. and the following year he was singing in Gioacchino Cocchi's Ciro riconosciuto. He was still singing as "second man" but Charles Burney thought he was the best.

The German translation used by Handel was made by Friedrich Christian Feustking. The recitatives of the opera are in German, and while most of the arias are also in German, many are in Italian, as was the custom at the opera house in Hamburg. Almira is the sole example among Handel's many operas with no role for a castrato.

Vincenzo dal Prato (5 May 1756 – 1828)Entry for "Vincenzo Dal Prato" at Biblioteca communale di Imola, citing p. 113 of Bologna all'opera : le voci più prestigiose nate sotto le due torri dal 1600 al 1980 by Adriano Bacchi Lazzari and Giuliano Musi, Minerva 2016 was an Italian soprano castrato singer, famous for his work with Mozart.

To express their gratitude, Luísa and her husband wrote the opera Pollinia and dedicated it to the Empress. The opera's première was in October, when Luísa performed with the famous castrato Luigi Marchesi (1754–1829). Marchesi, famous for his turbulent temperament, envied her success. He and the composer Sarti engaged in a campaign of rivalry against Luísa Todi.

197–216 The recording technology of the day was not of modern high quality. Salvatori died in 1909; Moreschi retired officially in March 1913, and died in 1922. 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.

Roland Barthes identifies castration as one of the novella's main concerns. Zambinella is a castrato. Because women were not allowed on stage, castrati regularly played the parts of women. The tradition of the castrati ended in France before it did in Italy, and when Sarrasine arrives in Italy and meets Zambinella, he does not know about it.

In his time in London, Fabri also performed in revivals of Giulio Cesare, Tolomeo, Rinaldo, Rodelinda,Winton Dean: "Fabri, Annibale Pio", Grove Music Online, ed L. Macy and Scipione, in which Handel transposed for tenor the originally castrato title role.cf. Le magazine de l'opéra baroque and ; the part of Goffredo in Rinaldo was also transposed for him by Handel.

It was a success, was printed and sold in prints. It was also her favorite portrait, which she had reproduced to give to friends. She was a great lover of music and painting and the promoter of many artists. She met the castrato Farinelli in 1737, and the young Mozart in 1764, whom she found very charming.

Farinelli, a soprano castrato famous for singing baroque coloratura roles (Bartolomeo Nazari, 1734) Coloratura is an elaborate melody with runs, trills, wide leaps, or similar virtuoso-like material,Oxford American Dictionaries.Apel (1969), p. 184. or a passage of such music. Operatic roles in which such music plays a prominent part, and singers of these roles, are also called coloratura.

The vocal part is written for alto castrato voice, and was sung at the premiere by the celebrated performer Senesino. It is now often sung in modern productions by a countertenor voice, but has been sung in productions and recordings by both males and females, in registers from bass to soprano.See, e.g., examples in sections "Recordings" and "External links".

Portrait of Felice Salimbeni by Georg Friedrich Schmidt(1751) Felice Salimbeni (c. 1712 - 16 October 1755) was an Italian castrato opera singer. Born in Milan, his singing teachers included Nicola Antonio Porpora and Christoph Schaffrath. He sang in venues in Rome, Vienna, Berlin and Dresden, singing the title parts in operas by Porpora and Antonio Caldara.

Some of the opera's bravura arias have been recorded by the singers Simone Kermes ("Empi, se mai disciolgo"), Max Emanuel Cenčić ("Qual turbine che scende"), ("Qual turbine che scende") and Cecilia Bartoli ("Parto, ti lascio, o cara").Wigmore, Richard (2012). "Dramma per Musica: Castrato arias excavated by Sony's star soprano Kermes". Gramophone. Retrieved 30 April 2016.

On this latter occasion he sang Acronte in Hasse's Romolo ed Ersilia on the occasion of the marriage of Peter Leopold of Habsburg-Lorraine, future Grand Duke of Tuscany and Holy Roman Emperor, and the Infanta Maria Luisa of Spain. Here, for the first time, he encountered the famous castrato Gaetano Guadagni, then at the height of his career.

Fétis, p. 351; Villarosa, p. 54. A colourful anecdote relates how another overweening castrato star, Caffarelli, rode post-haste to Rome from Naples just to attend incognito his debut; and full of enthusiasm eventually yelled at him: "Bravo, bravissimo Gizziello, it’s Caffariello who's telling you!"Francesco Florimo, Cenno storico sulla Scuola musicale di Napoli, Naples, Rocco, 1869, II, p.

In 1736, he served as a page for Pietro Andrea Cappello, the Venetian ambassador to Spain. While at the Spanish court, the famous castrato singer Farinelli heard him sing. Farinelli was said to have been impressed, although Alberti was an amateur. Alberti's best known pieces are his keyboard sonatas, although even they are very rarely performed.

For the 1709/10 season Thomyris was revived once again. This time the main attraction was the famous and very expensive castrato Nicolini appearing as Tigranes, on 17, 21 and 24 November, 6 and 20 December 1709, and 3 January and 23 February 1710. Thomyris was so popular that it was revived several times between 1716 and 1728.

My voice has a kind of calm sound. We're big oooh-ers; we love to oooh. It's a big, full sound, that's very pleasing to us; it opens up the heart." Rock critic Erik Davis wrote, "The 'purity' of tone and genetic proximity that smoothed their voices was almost creepy, pseudo-castrato, [and] a 'barbershop' sound.

It was only a modest success, however, and its run was interrupted by an eruption of the volcano Mt. Vesuvius. The cast was not particularly distinguished for a production at the San Carlo, but it did include the castrato Domenico Bedini, who would later appear in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera La clemenza di Tito in Prague in 1791.

Flavio Crispo is a 1720 opera by Dresden kapellmeister Johann David Heinichen concerning Flavius Crispus, son of the Emperor Constantine I The opera was never performed due to an incident where the star castrato singer Senesino tore up the music for one of his arias and cast it at the composer's feet. The incident was witnessed by Baron von Mordaxt, Protector of the King's Music who reported it to Friedrich August I, leading to the three Italian singers involved being dismissed and the opera cancelled. Senesino may have wanted to escape from the contract due to a more attractive offer from Handel, who the previous year had attempted to recruit the castrato to his company in London. Senesino was quickly hired by the Royal Academy of Music and spent the next 16 years in London.

Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, Bärenreiter-Verlag, 1972 Mozart's correspondence with his father records the evolution of his composition in detail. He effected several major revisions of his early ideas, some occasioned by the disappointing abilities of Anton Raaff and the castrato Vincenzo dal Prato ("Il nostro molto amato castrato Dal Prato", Mozart joked), the first Idomeneo and the first Idamante respectively. Such difficulties did not prevent Mozart from enjoying his work on his opera greatly, partly because the orchestra at Karl Theodor's court, which had accompanied the Prince to Munich after previously serving him in Mannheim, was the most expert in all Germany. Mozart's widow told a biographer that her husband's time in Munich had been the happiest of his life, and had left him with an abiding affection for the fruit of his labours there.

This was a part of a long-term project to re-establish the Italian opera in Dresden. In 1724, the Dresden court began training five young Italian opera singers with some of the finest vocal teachers in Italy like Nicola Porpora, a great composer in his own right and future teacher of the young Joseph Haydn. In the first week of February 1730, the young singers, the castrato alto Domenico Annibali, the castrato sopranos Giovanni Bindi (also called Porporino), Ventura Rocchetti 'Venturini' and the sister sopranos Maria Rosa Negri and Anna Negri were called to Dresden. There is hardly any coincidence that in the same week, Johann Adolf Hasse was offered the "primo" Kapellmeister position.Ágústsson, Jóhannes (2013), The Secular Vocal Collection of Jan Dismas Zelenka – A Reconstruction, Studi vivaldiani 13: 3-52 (p. 31).

It was not until the late 19th century that the Roman Catholic Church officially condemned the production of castrati. In Modern times, the Mexican Javier Medina is the only professional opera singer that can perform as a castrato, since he suffered from an involuntary chemical castration, as a result from a cancer treatment that he had before he reached puberty.

Antonio Maria Bernacchi Antonio Maria Bernacchi (23 June 1685 – 1 March 1756) was an Italian castrato, composer, and teacher of singing. He studied with Francesco Antonio Pistocchi. His pupils included Farinelli, for a brief period during 1727, and the tenor Anton Raaff. Nowadays Bernacchi is best remembered for his association with the composer George Frideric Handel, in six of whose operas he sang.

Born in Forlì, Siboni studied singing in his native city with castrato Sebastiano Folicaldi. He made his professional opera debut in 1797 at the age of 17 in Florence. Over the next several years he sang with various Italian opera troupes, making appearances in Genoa, Milan, and Prague among other cities. In Prague he married Louise Veith, the daughter of a local banker.

Portrait of Carlo Scalzi by Joseph Flipart, c. 1737. Carlo Scalzi (c. 1700–after 1738) was an Italian castrato who had an active performance career in major opera houses in Italy from 1718-1738. He was also heard in London in 1733–1734 where he notably created the role of Alceste in the world premiere of George Frideric Handel's Arianna in Creta.

The film proper opens in Madrid, Spain, at the palace of King Philip V. Riccardo Broschi (Enrico Lo Verso) demands to see his brother Carlo (Stefano Dionisi), now known by his nickname, Farinelli. Carlo refuses him. The rest of the film is told in flashback. Eighteen years earlier, Carlo and Riccardo watched an itinerant trumpet player humiliate a young castrato.

One of two portraits of Domenico Annibali that was painted by artist Anton Raphael Mengs. Domenico Annibali (c. 1705 - 1779) was an Italian castrato who had an active international career from 1725-1764\. He began his career in his native country and was then committed to the Grosses Königliches Opernhaus in Dresden from 1729 until his retirement from the stage 35 years later.

Coletti started his musical education in Rome, then moved to the Naples Real Collegio di Musica, where he studied with the tenor Alessandro Busti, a pupil of the castrato Girolamo Crescenti.Giampiero Raspa, Note biografiche sul baritono anagnino Filippo Coletti (1811–1894), in Scritti in memoria di Giuseppe Marchetti Longhi, vol. II, pp. 483ff., Istituto di Storia e di Arte del Lazio Meridionale, 1990.

Here Burney encountered him again, and reports fascinatingly on his ability to sing perfectly in tune: so exact was his intonation in duets with his fellow castrato Venanzio Rauzzini that their singing generated "difference tones". He sang further settings of the Orpheus story by Antonio Tozzi (1775) and Ferdinando Bertoni (1776), which by no means continued the reformist tendencies of Gluck.

The Estates Theatre in Prague, the venue of the world premiere of the opera in 1791 The premiere took place a few hours after Leopold's coronation. The role of Sesto was taken by castrato soprano, Domenico Bedini. The opera was first performed publicly on 6 September 1791 at the Estates Theatre in Prague. The opera remained popular for many years after Mozart's death.

Clotair responds by marrying Aphelia instead of killing her. Lamot, disguised as a surgeon, has discovered that the wounded Clovis is still alive. Clovis masquerades as the ghost of his father Childerick, and terrifies the queen into admitting that she poisoned her husband. Clovis turns Fredigond and Landrey over to Castrato, who starves the imprisoned queen and her paramour, then poisons them.

35 a dramatic form that he regarded with contempt. Fielding considered it "a foreign intruder that has weaned the public from their native entertainments".van der Voorde 1966 p. 96 The character Signior Opera, the image of the favoured castrato singer within the puppet show, is a parody of the foreigners who performed as singers, along with the audiences that accepted them.

A record from the Cöthen court shows a payment to Bach (March 1723) for requilling the plectra of "das Reise Clavesin" ("the traveling harpsichord").Stauffer (1995, 294). Stauffer mentions the alternative possibility that the Prince's traveling harpsichord was merely a small one and not folding. The famous castrato Farinelli (Carlo Broschi) owned two folding harpsichords, mentioned in his will from 1782.

'Va tacito e nascosto' in the first published edition (1724, London) "Va tacito e nascosto" (Italian; translation, "Silently and stealthily") is an aria written for alto castrato voice in act 1 of George Frideric Handel's opera Giulio Cesare in Egitto, composed in 1724 to a libretto by Nicola Francesco Haym. Sung by the character Julius Caesar, it features extensive solos for natural horn.

A seated statue was discovered in the temple to Ishtar in Mari, representative of a musician. The name given in the inscription is Ur-Nanshe, a masculine name. The statue's sex is unclear as the torso shows a female breast, though it could have even represented a castrato. The statue depicts Ur-Nanshe sitting on a decorated pillow wearing a fringed dress.

Giovanni Andrea Bontempi (ca. 1624 – 1 July 1705) was an Italian castrato singer, later composer, historian, music theorist, and assistant kapellmeister to Heinrich Schütz at Dresden from 1657. He was born Giovanni Andrea Angelini, in Perugia but later took the surname of his patron Cesare Bontempi. His Il Paride was the first Italian-language opera to be given in Dresden.

Billboard's Chris Payne thought that the song fades into the background of the other stronger tracks on Overexposed. Adam Markovitz of Entertainment Weekly was more critical towards Levine's vocals on "Love Somebody" and wrote that the singer's voice is processed in a high disaffected whine — "like a male Rihanna or an android castrato", which according to him, it's ideal for tracing the contours of a pop hook.

Farinelli is a 1994 internationally co-produced biographical drama film directed by Gérard Corbiau and starring Stefano Dionisi, Enrico Lo Verso, Elsa Zylberstein and Jeroen Krabbé. It centers on the life and career of the 18th- century Italian opera singer Carlo Broschi, known as Farinelli, considered the greatest castrato singer of all time; as well as his relationship with his brother, composer Riccardo Broschi.

Title plate from the English Translation of Tosi's singing treatise, Observations on the Florid Song, first published in England in 1743. Pier Francesco Tosi (c. 16531732) was a castrato singer, composer, and writer on music. His Opinoni de' cantori antichi e moderni... was the first full-length treatise on singing and provides a unique glimpse into the technical and social aspects of Baroque vocal music.

"Happiness" first appeared on the 2009 AIDS benefit Album Dark Was the Night, produced by the Red Hot Organization. Videos exist for "All the Big Trees" and "Daníell in the Sea" which can be found on the duo's official website, along with an electronic press kit that includes making-of information and recipes. "Boy 1904" uses a recording of the last known castrato singer.

The aria has previously been used in other films such as Farinelli, a 1994 biographical film about the castrato singer Farinelli, and was used again by von Trier in Nymphomaniac during a scene referencing the sequence showing Nic approaching the open window. The eight-track soundtrack features both versions of "Lascia ch'io pianga" and selected extracts of the "score" created by sound designer Kristian Eidnes Andersen.

He had only a modest career as an opera singer, despite having a voice of an extraordinarily wide vocal range from bass to the lower tenor notes. However, he became highly regarded as a voice teacher. Amongst his pupils were the castrato singers Girolamo Crescentini and Francesco Roncaglia and the tenor Matteo Babbini. His compositions include five operas, five oratorios, and over 400 pieces of sacred music.

The historical Farinelli, by Bartolomeo Nazari 1734Farinelli is an opera in two acts, described as 'serio-comic', by John Barnett, to a libretto by his brother Charles Zachary Barnett. Produced in 1839, it is the third of the composer's large-scale operas, and was the last to reach the stage. The hero is the castrato singer Farinelli, although the storyline of the opera is fictional.

The librettist, Giulio Rospigliosi, became Pope Clement IX in 1667. The part of Sant'Alessio lies extremely high and was meant to be sung by a castrato. The accompanying orchestra is up-to-date, dispensing with the archaic viols and using violins, cellos, harps, lutes, theorbos, and harpsichords. The opera includes introductory canzonas which function as overtures; indeed they are the first overtures in the history of opera.

High-voice male singers are often cast in preference to female contraltos in HIP opera productions, partly as a substitute for castrato singers. Alfred Deller is considered to have been a pioneer of the modern revival of countertenor singing. Leading contemporary performers include James Bowman, David Daniels, Derek Lee Ragin, Andreas Scholl, Michael Chance, Drew Minter, Daniel Taylor, Brian Asawa, Yoshikazu Mera, and Philippe Jaroussky.

Albert was born Louise-Marguerite-Augustine Himm in Paris. She entered the Conservatoire de Paris in 1803 where she was a pupil of Charles-Henri Plantade. The following year she received the conservatory's first prize in singing and later studied with the castrato singer Girolamo Crescentini. She first appeared at the Paris Opéra in 1803 at the age of 12 as L'Amour (Cupid) in Cherubini's Anacréon.

Caricature of Fontana by Pier Leone Ghezzi Domenico Giacinto Fontana (1692–1739), also known as "Farfallino", was an Italian castrato singer active primarily in Rome from 1712 to 1736. He specialised in singing soprano female roles and earned the name "Farfallino" ("Little Butterfly") for his graceful stage appearance. He was born in Perugia and died there at the age of 47.Brumana, Biancamaria (1996).

Mozart's Exultate Jubilate, Allegri's Miserere and parts of Handel's Messiah were written for this voice, whose distinctive timbre was widely exploited in Baroque opera. In 1861 the practice of castration became illegal in Italy, and in 1878 Pope Leo XIII prohibited the hiring of new castrati by the church. The last castrato was Alessandro Moreschi (1858–1922) who served in the Sistine Chapel Choir.

Apolloni and Cesti adapted the title role (originally sung by a castrato) for Masotti. The opera itself was also adapted to suit Venetian taste. While some new arias were added for Masotti, several others were shortened or eliminated. Most of the lengthy recitatives were also eliminated, and the final apotheosis with Venus and Innocence was omitted, as it was in all the post-1655 Italian revivals.

The opera opened at the Queen's Theatre on December 14, 1708, with the castrato Nicolò Grimaldi (Nicolini) starring as Pyrrhus, who had sung in the original 1694 production in Naples; another castrato Valentino Urbani, (Valentini) in the role of Demetrius, Littleton Ramondon (Cleartes), Purbeck Turner (Arbantes), Margherita de L’Epine (Marius), Cook (Brennus), Catherine Tofts (Climene), Joanna Maria Lindelheim (Deidamia). The two castrati sang in Italian, the other singers in English. The sets for the first production were created by Marco Ricci and Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini. The opera had a significant impact on the business of running an opera house in England. Nicolini brought with him a detailed account of the economics of Venetian opera houses, and the management of the Queen’s Theatre adapted its business model accordingly. In accordance with Nicolini’s advice a subscription of 1000 guineas was raised from Queen Anne and both subscriptions and ticket prices were increased.

The opera was the first to be sung in a mixture of English and Italian, and it was one of the first London operas in which the castrato Nicolò Grimaldi (known as Nicolini) performed. There were three separate productions of Camilla in London which together had 111 or 112 performances 1706 and 1728, making it the most popular and successful work of its period, after The Beggar's Opera.

As part of the extensive wedding celebrations, Mozart's pastoral opera Ascanio in Alba was also being performed. The main roles in both works were taken by the soprano Antonia Maria Girelli Aguilar, the castrato Giovanni Manzuoli and the tenor Giuseppe Tibaldi. They were all among the greatest vocal virtuosi of their time, but were past their best. The stage sets were created by the brothers Bernardino, Fabrizio and Giovanni Antonio Galliari.

Il finto astrologo is an intermezzo by composer Niccolò Piccinni. The opera uses an Italian language libretto by Carlo Goldoni. The work premiered at the Teatro Valle in Rome on 7 February 1765 with a cast that included the famous castrato Venanzio Rauzzini as Clarice. Il finto astrologo is derived from Il mondo della luna, a libretto originally set to music by Baldassare Galuppi in 1750, with several modifications.

Nicola Porpora, Montagnana's teacher. Antonio Montagnana (fl. 1730–50, born in Venice) was an Italian bass of the 18th-century who is best remembered for his association with the composer George Frideric Handel, in whose operas Montagnana sang. Montagnana's first known appearance is in 1730 at Rome, and 1731 he sang at Turin in operatic works by Nicola Porpora, thought to be his teacher: Porpora also instructed the famous castrato Farinelli.

Tosti wrote well for the voice, allowing, indeed encouraging, interpretation and embellishment from operatic singers. Most artists, therefore, specialising in the classical Italian repertoire have performed and recorded Tosti songs; yet Tosti never composed opera. Notable examples on record include Alessandro Moreschi (the only castrato who ever recorded) singing "Ideale", Mattia Battistini singing "Ancora", Nellie Melba singing "Mattinata" and Enrico Caruso singing "A vuchella" and "L'alba separa dalla luce l'ombra".

By the power of Tonio's almost inhuman soprano voice, Guido is roused from his depression, and takes him as a star student. Tonio progresses in his lessons extremely quickly. Guido also has Tonio perform some of his original compositions, which begin to impress audiences at the conservatorio. Tonio, for his part, struggles to come to terms with his castrato status; in his own mind, he is "less than a man".

Sarrasine gives us a closer look at the role of castrati in both common opera and in religious tradition. Catholicism in Italy dictated that there could be no female singers, and the high voice parts were usually played by either prepubescent boys or castrati. In order to become a castrato, a boy had to give up his "manhood", i.e., have his testes removed at a very early age.

Giovanni Ansani (11 February 1744 – 15 July 1826) was an Italian tenor and composer. In 1770, he was singing at Copenhagen. About 1780 he came to London, where he at once took the first place; but, being of a most quarrelsome temper, he threw up his engagement on account of squabbles with soprano castrato Francesco Roncaglia. He returned the next year with his wife, Maccherini, who was not successful.

Although the music written for the concerto focused on high voices, there is no evidence that the ensemble used either castrati or falsettists.Newcomb 1980, p. 170. This fact is surprising, considering that castrati were shortly to become the biggest stars of a new art form, opera.Nicholas Clapton In 1607, Monteverdi's Orfeo featured four castrato roles out of a cast of nine, showing the new dominance of this vocal type.

''''' is an opera in three acts composed by Nicola Porpora to an Italian- language libretto by Nicola Coluzzi. It premiered in February 1732 at the Teatro Capranica in Rome with an all-male cast. The leading male roles were taken by two of the most prominent castrato singers of the 18th century—Domenico Annibali as Germanico and Caffarelli as his nemesis Arminio. The female roles were portrayed by castrati en travesti.

Julie Ann Sadie, Companion to Baroque Music p. 75 Pergolesi was only 24 years old when he began to work on Metastasio's libretto in 1734. The score is dedicated to the new monarch, but was written expressly to mark the 42nd birthday of the Queen of Spain, Elisabetta Farnese. He made many changes to Metastasio's original text, largely for the famous mezzo-soprano castrato, Gaetano Majorano, known as Caffarelli.

Domenico Barbaja in Naples in the 1820s The great success in Venice of the premieres of both Tancredi and the comic opera L'italiana in Algeri within a few weeks of each other (6 February 1813 and 22 May 1813 respectively) set the seal on Rossini's reputation as the rising opera composer of his generation. From the end of 1813 to mid-1814 he was in Milan creating two new operas for La Scala, Aureliano in Palmira and Il Turco in Italia. Arsace in Aureliano was sung by the castrato Giambattista Velluti; this was the last opera role Rossini wrote for a castrato singer as the norm became to use contralto voices – another sign of change in operatic taste. Rumour had it that Rossini was displeased by Velluti's ornamentation of his music; but in fact throughout his Italian period, up to Semiramide (1823), Rossini's written vocal lines become increasingly florid, and this is more appropriately credited to the composer's own changing style.

Although a castrato, Tenducci married 15-year-old Dorothea Maunsell secretly in 1766. The marriage was repeated in July 1767 with a license granted by the Bishop of Waterford and Lismore. In 1772, those marriages was later annulled on the grounds of non-consummation or impotence, which was one of the few grounds that women could use to sue for divorce. However, Giacomo Casanova claimed in his autobiography that Dorothea gave birth to two children.

7 The castrati came in for a great amount of scurrilous and unkind abuse, and as their fame increased, so did the hatred of them. They were often castigated as malign creatures who lured men into homosexuality. There were homosexual castrati, as Casanova's accounts of 18th-century Italy bear witness. He mentions meeting an abbé whom he took for a girl in disguise, only later discovering that "she" was a famous castrato.

In the book, Passarello writes about famous voices from cultural history, including the eighteenth-century castrato Farinelli, punk rock crows, impressionists, the rebel yell, the Wilhelm Scream, the Howard "Dean Scream," Pittsburgh sportscaster Myron Cope's "Yoy!", and Marlon Brando's "Stella!" from A Streetcar Named Desire. Passarello was the first woman to win the Stella Screaming Contest in New Orleans in 2011. The book's title comes from DJ Kool's 1996 hip-hop song.

For this, Mozart wrote some new music, made some cuts, and changed Idamante from a castrato to a tenor. The British premiere was given by the amateur Glasgow Grand Opera Society in 1934. The first performance in the United States was produced by Boris Goldovsky at the Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood during the summer of 1947.Goldovsky, Boris, My Road to Opera, Houghton Mifflin, 1979 Today Idomeneo is part of the standard operatic repertoire.

The canvas backdrop represented pictorially the characters of Handel's oratorio, and in the centre was depicted the resurrection itself. The role of Mary Magdalene was sung at the first performance by the soprano Margherita Durastanti. The participation of female singers was prohibited by Papal edict, and the Pope went to the length of admonishing Ruspoli for permitting Durastanti to take part. For the remaining performances, her role was sung by a castrato.

198 for Giustiniani's descriptions. Tenor Jean de Reszke who originally trained as a baritone With the rise of the castrato singer in Italian opera, the baritenor voice came to be perceived as "ordinary" or even "vulgar" and was relegated to portraying character roles – villains, grotesques, old men, and even women.Celletti (1996) p. 7 Although there were exceptions, such Dario in Vivaldi's L'incoronazione di Dario (created by the tenor Annibale Pio Fabri),Casaglia (2005).

Although a castrato, Tenducci married 15-year-old Dorothea Maunsell secretly in 1766. The marriage was repeated in July 1767 with a license granted by the Bishop of Waterford and Lismore. In 1772, those marriages was later annulled on the grounds of non-consummation or impotence, which was one of the few grounds that women could use to sue for divorce. However, Giacomo Casanova claimed in his autobiography that Dorothea gave birth to two children.

In 1622 he entered the Collegium Germanicum. He remained resident there for a year, but continued to sing in the choir of Sant'Apollinare, the Collegium's church, on multiple occasions up to 1645. During his time with the choir he trained with Giacomo Carissimi who trained several other prominent Roman singers, including Giuseppe Bianchi and the castrato Giovannino. Ceccarelli was also considered an outstanding interpreter of Carissimi's motets which they often performed together.

He is a “sopranista”, a male who has a female soprano vocal range voice. He often dresses in a unique manner when he performs. His repertory is various; he sings castrato (Farinelli) compositions in baroque time, opera, Japanese, classic, crossover, musical and pops. He collaborates with Japanese orchestras and artists and also overseas orchestras, such as the Moscow Philharmonic Symphony, the England Chamber Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (London), and Prague Chamber Orchestra.

Giovanni Cesari (25 June 1843 – 10 March 1904) was an Italian singer with a soprano acuto, or high soprano voice. Together with Alessandro Moreschi, Domenico Salvatori and Domenico Mustafà, Cesari was a famous castrato singer of the late 19th century. Born in the town of Frosinone, he was dropped off at an orphanage in 1852 by his parents. Here he started his musical education under the direction of Gaetano Capocci, financed by the Sistine Chapel.

Vincenzo's father Francesco was a composer, violinist, and church musician and his older brother Giuseppe was a noted castrato singer who had served the Russian court as a singing teacher during Vincenzo's time there.Libby (1992) p. 182 According to Italian musicologist Leonella Grasso Caprioli, Manfredini- Guarmani's baptismal certificate states her date of birth as 2 June 1780.Caprioli (2007) Earlier sources have variously listed her birth year as 1786 and 1790,Forbes (1992/2008) p.

Charles Burney, a contemporary music historian, described the Florentine castrato thus: "Manzoli's voice was the most powerful and voluminous soprano that had ever been heard on our stage since the time of Farinelli; and his manner of singing was grand and full of dignity. The applause he received was a universal thunder of acclimation."Smith, Horace and Woodworth, Samuel. Festivals, games, and amusements: ancient and modern New York : J. & J. Harper, 1831, p.

Dean, Winton, "A Handel Tragicomedy" (August 1969). The Musical Times, 110 (1518): pp. 819–822. Flavio is unusually concise for an opera by Handel of this period. It is also notable as a skillful blend of tragedy and comedy, both in the text and the music, and for being one of Handel's few operas to feature leading roles for all major voice categories of his day – soprano, contralto, castrato, tenor and bass.

146 Marianna Bulgarelli and her Aeneas, Nicolò Grimaldi, reprised their roles on 10 May 1725 in Reggio Emilia for the premiere of Nicola Porpora's setting of the Didone libretto. Markstrom suggests that she was probably also present in Rome to coach the castrato "Farfallino" who sang the title role in Leonardo Vinci's 1726 setting of the libretto. (The papal ban on female performers in Rome's theatres prevented Bulgarelli from singing the role of Dido herself).

In Europe, when women were not permitted to sing in church or cathedral choirs in the Roman Catholic Church, boys were castrated to develop a special high voice and to prevent their voices breaking at puberty. The first documents mentioning castrati are Italian church records from the 1550s.John Rosselli, "Castrato" article in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2001. In the baroque and classical music eras these singers were highly appreciated by opera composers as well.

The role of Turnus was taken by Valentino Urbani (Valentini), of Lavinia by Joanna Maria Lindelheim, and of Prenesto by Margherita de l'Épine. The other roles were sung in English by Purbeck Turner (Latinus), Littleton Ramondon (Metius), Richard Leveridge (Linco), Catherine Tofts (Camilla) and Mary Lindsey (Tullia). From February 7, a new castrato, Giuseppe Cassani, took over the role of Metius. He was extremely unpopular and audiences hissed him and did not appear after February 10.

He points out that Pandolfi is named on the title page of the 1669 sonatas (although without the additional surname Mealli) as a musician of Messina, and that the 1669 sonatas are named after court musicians of that city; one of them to the castrato Giovanni Marquett, whom Pandolfi was to murder a few years later.McCormick (2011), pp. 4, 18. Pandolfi killed Marquett in Messina on 21 December 1675 following a political argument in the Duomo.

Detail from Marco Ricci's 1709 painting Rehearsal for an Opera. Ricci was a stage painter at the Queen's Theatre, and this singer is assumed to depict Nicolini, the house's principal alto castrato. The amount of recycled music in Rinaldo is such that Dean and Knapp call it an "anthology" of the best works from Handel's Italian period. Sadie raises the question of whether the opera's dramaturgy is affected by the small amount of music written for its particular situations.

During the 19th century, the ever- increasing popularity of opera made it difficult for the choir to attract highly skilled singers who could make more money on the operatic stage. As early as 1830, Mendelssohn complained of the quality of the singing. The problem was exacerbated as the supply of castrato singers, the mainstays of the virtuoso soprano parts, began to dry up. With the unification of Italy in 1871, the castration of boy singers was made illegal.

He also brought together an exceptional troupe of musicians and singers from Italy, including the composer Ferdinando Paër, who became master of his household music, the castrato Girolamo Crescentini, and the contralto Giuseppina Grassini. Napoleon did not allow applause in the hall during performances. The orchestra played a special air by André Grétry when Napoleon entered the theater, and the Vivat Imperator when he departed. But, because of his military campaigns, he was rarely in Paris to enjoy them.

Valeriano Pellegrini caricatured Valeriano Pellegrini (c. 1663 – 18 January 1746) was an Italian soprano castrato singer of the 18th century. He is largely remembered today for his association with the composer George Frideric Handel, whom he sang for in Italy and then later followed to London. He sang the role of Nero in Handel's opera Agrippina at the work's initial run in Venice (26 December 1709), a part which demanded a high level of technical skill.

The opera is set in Persia (modern-day Iran) about 470 BC and is very loosely based upon Xerxes I of Persia. Serse, originally sung by a mezzo soprano castrato, is now usually performed by a mezzo-soprano or counter-tenor. The opening aria, "Ombra mai fu", sung by Xerxes to a plane tree (Platanus orientalis), is set to one of Handel's best-known melodies, and is often known as Handel's "Largo" (despite being marked "larghetto" in the score).

In 1769 for Le feste d'Apollo at Parma which was conducted by the composer, Gluck transposed part of the role of Orfeo up for the soprano castrato Giuseppe Millico, maintaining a libretto in Italian. After not having been performed for a very long time, this version was finally given its first modern revival on 13 November 2014 at the ' in Herne, with a countertenor in the title role.Thomas Molke, "Gelungener Festival-Abschluss"; Online Musik Magazin, 16 November 2014.

It is based on the Classical legend of the sculptor Pygmalion. Pimmalione was specially commissioned by the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte to show off the talents of two of his favourite singers, the famous castrato Girolamo Crescentini and the contralto Giuseppina Grassini (who had been Napoleon's lover). It was first given in a private performance at the emperor's palace, Les Tuileries. Napoleon was delighted with the work and offered Cherubini a large reward and a commission for another piece.

A caricature of a performance of Handel's Flavio, featuring Berenstadt on the far right, the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni in the centre and Senesino on the left. Gaetano Berenstadt (7 June 1687 - buried 9 December 1734) was an Italian alto castrato who is best remembered for his association with the composer George Frideric Handel. Berenstadt created roles in three of Handel's operas. Berenstadt's parents were German and his father was timpanist to the Grand Duke of Tuscany.

Dean, W. & J.M. Knapp (1995) Handel's operas 1704-1726, p. 298. For the fourth season in 1723, for which his first opera was Ottone, Handel assembled a cast of star singers including the internationally famous castrato, Senesino, beginning a long and sometimes stormy association with Handel that included creating seventeen leading roles in his operas for London, at a vast salary. The star soprano Margherita Durastanti, who had sung in many of Handel's early works in Italy as well as his previous operas in London, joined the cast, as did English soprano Anastasia Robinson, who was unhappy about much of the music Handel had written for her to sing in Ottone, feeling that she could not portray, as he desired, scorn and anger, and appealed in a letter to one of the patrons of the Royal Academy to intervene with Handel to write gentler music for her to suit her abilities. Also in the cast was another internationally renowned castrato, Gaetano Berenstadt, in the first of three roles he created in Handel operas.

She repeated her success in it in London. In 1892, she spent 6 months in Rome, studying under Mustafa, the last castrato Head of the Sistine Chapel Choir, adding half an octave to the top of her range. Emma Calvé (1895) Her next triumph was Bizet's Carmen. Before beginning the study of this part, she went to Spain, learned the Spanish dances, mingled with the people and patterned her characterization after the cigarette girls whom she watched at their work and at play.

In London or during a trip to Paris in 1736, he met the celebrated castrato Farinelli, whose portrait he painted twice in 1735 and again in 1752. Amigoni also encountered the painting of François Lemoyne and François Boucher. In 1739 he returned to Italy, perhaps to Naples and surely to Montecassino, in whose Abbey existed two canvases (destroyed during World War II). He travelled to Venice to paint for Sigismund Streit, for the Casa Savoia and other buildings of the city.

"Bel raggio", from Rossini's Semiramide, was the album's only disappointment. Von Stade infused it with passion, but the aria's fioriture and other vocal challenges were too difficult for her to negotiate without some moments of audible discomfort. "L'Ombra fedele, anch'io" from Broschi's Idaspe was an aria that many listeners would probably never have come across before. Written for the composer's brother, the famous castrato Farinelli, it was "an insinuating piece with a kind of trumpet obbligato, and many repeated notes, in Handelian vein".

Seven Sacraments series by Giuseppe Maria Crespi. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden Ottoboni was one of the great patrons of his generation. He resided in the Palazzo della Cancelleria, where he had begun to construct a theatre in 1689. The favourite of Cardinal Ottoboni, Andrea Adami, a castrato, was appointed master of the papal choir in the Sistine Chapel.Handel as Orpheus: voice and desire in the chamber cantatas by Ellen T. Harris Between 1709 and 1710 Filippo Juvarra entered the court and enlarged the theatre.

Homosexuality is a common theme found in many of Honoré de Balzac's works, for example Illusions perdues (1837–43). In Sarrasine, we meet Zambinella, a seemingly beautiful woman whom Sarrasine admires, but who turns out to be castrato. Sarrasine, who took Zambinella to be his ideal woman, is deeply distressed when he learns this and tries to kill Zambinella. One possible explanation for Sarrasine's extreme reaction is that he fears that his love of La Zambinella is a mark of homosexuality.

Engraving of Rosemond Mountain with guitar At some point she was trained by the Italian castrato Venanzio Rauzzini.The Silencing of Bel Canto, Brianna E Robertson- Kirkland, University of Glasgow, page 4, retrieved 4 February 2015 She was said to be the "best female singer on the English stage" from 1800 when she appeared as Polly in the Beggar's Opera. In 1807 she had a benefit in Glasgow which included James Kenney's False Alarm. The cast included the comic actress Mary Ann Orger.

Handel revived the opera (with various changes) three times during his lifetime: in 1725, 1730, and 1732. The roles of Cesare and Cleopatra were originally sung by the castrato Senesino and the famous soprano Francesca Cuzzoni respectively. Handel composed eight arias and two recitatives accompagnati for each singer, thus making full use of their vocal capabilities. Curio and Nireno were not allotted any arias in the original version, only singing in recitatives, although they take part in the first and final choruses.

Giovanni Gualberto Magli was an Italian castrato who had an active singing career during the first quarter of the 17th century. Born in Florence, he studied voice with Giulio Caccini before becoming a musician for the House of Medici on 23 August 1604. He participated in the world premiere of Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in 1607 at the court of Prince Francesco IV Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, portraying the roles of La Musica and Proserpina and possibly one other part.Fenlon, "The Mantuan Orfeo" pp.

Perhaps Ponnelle had been influenced by Daniel Heartz's suggestion that Mozart had conceived his opera as something closer to French tragédie lyrique than to Italian opera seria. Whatever one thought of Ponnelle's contribution to the evening, he allowed his singers to communicate the profound feelings latent in Mozart's music. Frederica von Stade was "marvellously convincing" as the youthful prince (a part initially written for a castrato and later revised for a tenor). Ileana Cotrubaș was impressive from Ilia's first note to her last.

Despite its shortcomings, the success of Arsinoe showed that the London public would go to see Italian-style operas in English. In April 1705 William Congreve and John Vanbrugh put in an opera sung in Italian, with Italian singers, Gli amori di Ergasto by Jakob Greber at the Queen’s Theatre, Haymarket, but it was not popular. Only with the arrival of the first Italian castrato, Valentino Urbani, in London, in 1707, did the popularity of Italian opera really take off.

The original cast were Pepusch’s future wife Margherita de L'Epine, soprano (Thomyris), Francis Hughs, countertenor (Orontes), (later replaced by Valentino Urbani) Catherine Tofts (Cleora), Mr Lawrence, tenor (Tigranes), Richard Leveridge, bass, (Baldo) and Mary Lindsey, soprano (Media). With its original cast, the opera was first performed in English. Before long however Francis Hughs was replaced by the famous castrato Valentino Urbani. Urbani had premiered in London in Camilla in 1706, and he took over the role of Orontes in Thomyris.

The last two of these commissions were made possible by the failure of Johann Christian Bach to make good on a commitment to the management of the theater. Ezio (and all three of the other operas from this series) were very well received by the Neapolitan musical public. The cast was distinguished, as would be expected at the San Carlo; it included the castrato Gaspare Pacchierotti. Mysliveček's Ezio of 1775 was first revived in modern times in Prague in 1937.

She spent 1751–1753 in Madrid, appearing in operas under the direction of the celebrated castrato Farinelli. Following that, she sang in Paris and made her debut in London, where she became a major star. She composed and published songs there, and quarreled with the manager of the opera house where she appeared, attacking him in pamphlets she published under her own name. Regina had him dismissed, and took over the management of the theatre herself, while continuing to star in the performances.

These included Petrillo, a musician famous for his beauty, and Cecchino, a Venetian castrato. Ferdinando's uncle Francesco Maria de' Medici, only three years older, was a strong influence on his life. Anton Domenico Gabbiani, Prince Ferdinand and his musicians, 1685-90, Florence, Palatine Gallery of Palazzo Pitti In 1689 Ferdinando married Violante of Bavaria, the daughter of the elector of Bavaria Ferdinand and Adelaide of Savoy. Although she also liked music and loved Ferdinando, her feelings were not requited and the marriage was unhappy and barren.

Handel travelled to Italy to engage new singers and also composed seven more operas, among them the comic masterpiece Partenope and the "magic" opera Orlando. After two commercially successful English oratorios Esther and Deborah, he was able to invest again in the South Sea Company. Handel reworked his Acis and Galatea which then became his most successful work ever. Handel failed to compete with the Opera of the Nobility, who engaged musicians such as Johann Adolph Hasse, Nicolo Porpora and the famous castrato Farinelli.

31 ff an Italian opera not featuring at least one renowned castrato in a lead part would be doomed to fail. 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.Heriot chs. 1–3 passim 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.

The castrato Carlo Scalzi, by Joseph Flipart, c. 1737. In the 1720s and 1730s, at the height of the craze for these voices, it has been estimated that upwards of 4,000 boys were castrated annually in the service of art.a claim first made in Pleasants, H., "The Castrati", Stereo Review, July 1966, p. 38) Many came from poor homes and were castrated by their parents in the hope that their child might be successful and lift them from poverty (this was the case with Senesino).

The prologue begins with Carlo Broschi, the famous castrato Farinelli, reminiscing about his childhood as a singer in the church choir. A newly castrated boy runs in and warns Carlo that his voice will result in death, then ends himself. Carlo is traumatized and refuses to sing a composition by his older brother Riccardo for his voice teacher, Nicola Porpora. He cries and runs to his father, who comforts him, but extracts a promise that he will never refuse his voice to his brother again.

Although Dionisi provided the speaking voice (originally in French), Farinelli's singing voice was given by the Polish soprano Ewa Malas-Godlewska and the American countertenor Derek Lee Ragin, who were recorded separately and then digitally merged to recreate the sound of a castrato. Its musical director was the French harpsichordist and conductor Christophe Rousset. The musical recording was made at a concert hall, the Arsenal in Metz, with the orchestra Les Talens Lyriques. Parts of the movie were filmed at the Margravial Opera House in Bayreuth.

A sculpture from the Park of the Monsters in Bomarzo, Italy. The park served as the model for the garden which appears in Lucille's memories of his childhood. Yuki noted that the title of the series was potentially misleading, as the orchestra is not composed of guignols; she chose the word "guignol"—which describes hand puppets, not marionettes—for its sound. Page limitations affected the roles of Kohaku and Carnelian, Lucille's castrato rival, although she felt that the story still ended as she had planned it.

As he was raised to be a gentleman, and because he was castrated relatively late in life, he continues to act like a man, unlike the more effeminate poses of castrati boys. Despite the fact he is a castrato, even local noblemen come to respect him both as a sparring partner and as a friend. However, Guido and others need to scheme to get Tonio, finally, out of the conservatorio and onto the stage. After his debut, Guido and Tonio travel to Rome for his operatic premiere.

Myers combined her love of history, opera, Italy, and mystery to write the Tito Amato mystery series. She often states that she fell in love with the mystery genre while reading Agatha Christie as a young girl. She credits Anne Rice's Cry to Heaven and Steven Saylor's Gordianus the Finder series with providing inspiration for her historical series that follows the career of Venetian castrato soprano and amateur sleuth Tito Amato. Her first novel, Interrupted Aria, was published by Poisoned Pen Press in 2004.

Il pastor fido, a pastoral opera first performed in 1712, had not been a success with audiences. This was probably due to the fact that it was lacking in the sort of spectacular scenic effects and larger than life emotions of Handel's then sensational previous opera Rinaldo . As a result, in 1734, Handel radically revised Il Pastor Fido and presented the new version with a star role for celebrated castrato Carestini. This production ended Handel's 1733-34 season at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket.

In the original version of the film, it is revealed that after the freaks caught Hercules, they turn him into a castrato. While some versions end on Cleopatra as the human duck, another ending shows Hans, now living in a mansion off his inheritance and still humiliated, visited by Phroso, Venus and Frieda. Frieda tells Hans not to blame himself for what happened and that she still loves him. The two then share a heartwarming hug and it is presumed that they continue their relationship.

Around 1777, the 21-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart spent some time in Mannheim, where he had hoped (in vain, it turned out) to find employment. Mozart undertook to teach Aloysia in singing. This is less implausible than it might seem, since according to Mahling, Mozart was himself a trained (former) soprano, instructed in childhood (1764–1765) by a celebrated castrato, Giovanni Manzuoli. Mozart had performed in public as a singer repeatedly up until he was 13, after which perhaps puberty proved a barrier to further performances.

The opera was first performed at the Teatro San Benedetto in Venice on 12 May 1779 to open the theater's unique Ascension operatic season. It was the last of the composer's three operas produced in Venice. No complete score survives from the production, only a few individual arias that found their way into aria collections. The cast was distinguished, including as it did the great castrato Luigi Marchesi, one of the composer's close friends and professional associates, and the noted English soprano Cecilia Davies.

"Se tu della mia morte" ("Wouldst thou the boast of ending") is an aria in G minor from act 3 of Alessandro Scarlatti's 1697 opera La caduta de' decemviri (The fall of the decemviri) to a libretto by Silvio Stampiglia.Caduta de' decemviri, La, roles and details The da capo aria is accompanied only by a basso continuo. Its time signature is 12/8 to a tempo of andante and it is 24 bars long. The vocal range for a castrato soprano is from D4 to F5.

2042 (accessible for free online at Internet Archive). It is likely to be a legend. Whatever the case, at the beginning of 1732 he was urgently called upon to replace the castrato Nicolò Grimaldi (Nicolini), who suddenly died on 1 January during the rehearsals of Pergolesi's first opera La Salustia at the Teatro San Bartolomeo in Naples.Maria Grazia Sità, Salustia, in Piero Gelli and Filippo Poletti (eds), Dizionario dell'opera 2008, Milan, Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2007, pp. 1176-1177, (the article is reproduced online at OperaManager.

It was commissioned by Frederick II of Prussia for the opening of the newly built Königliches Opernhaus (Royal Opera House) in Berlin, and was notably the inaugural performance of the newly formed Berlin State Opera. Although construction of the opera house was not entirely complete, the opera premiered in the new theatre using a German language translation on 7 December 1742 under the baton of the composer. The production starred soprano Maria Giovanna Gasparini as Cleopatra VII and castrato Paolo Bedeschi as Julius Caesar.

Metastasio accepted, but kept his authorship secret. He wrote "Gli orti esperidi", which was set to music by Nicola Porpora, and sung by Porpora's pupil, the castrato Farinelli, making a spectacular début, it won the most enthusiastic applause. The Roman prima donna, Marianna Bulgarelli, who played Venus in this opera, spared no pains until she had discovered its author. Bulgarelli persuaded the poet to give up the law, and promised to secure for him fame and independence if he would devote his talents to the musical drama.

Born in Naples, Mirate was a pupil of Alessandro Busti and the famous castrato Girolamo Crescentini at the Regio Collegio di Musica. His first opera performance was in a school production in 1834. His official opera début came three years later at the Teatro Nuovo in Naples as the title hero in Donizetti's Torquato Tasso. From 1836 through 1839 he worked primarily in Naples, although he did appear as a guest performer at the Teatro San Cassiano in Venice as Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor.

Ferrier in Orfeo & Eurydice (1949) The opera was first performed in Vienna at the Burgtheater on 5 October 1762, for the name day celebrations of the Emperor Francis I. The production was supervised by the reformist theatre administrator, Count Giacomo Durazzo. Choreography was by Gasparo Angiolini, and set designs were by Giovanni Maria Quaglio the Elder, both leading members of their fields. The first Orfeo was the famous castrato Gaetano Guadagni. Orfeo was revived in Vienna during the following year, but then not performed until 1769.

Pope Alexander the Seventh and the College of Cardinals, > p. 70. Camden Society The production began with a prologue consisting of a dialogue between Thetis and Amor praising the virtues of Queen Christina. The opera itself had lavish stage machinery and multiple ballets and choruses incorporated into the action. Apart from Dorisbe which was sung by Anna Renzi and King Atamante which was sung by Cesti himself, all the principal roles, including the title role of Princess Argia were sung by male castrato singers.

While a bishop, he came into conflict with the local foot guards with whom he had a disagreement about local ecclesiastic jurisdiction.Pope Alexander the Seventh and the College of Cardinals by John Bargrave, edited by James Craigie Robertson (reprint; 2009) When the disagreement was elevated to armed conflict, a castrato in Brancaccio's employ killed the captain of the guard. The Vice-KingNote: usually a local count or other noble charged with the administration of the kingdom. ordered the bishop to stand trial and he obeyed; making arrangements to travel to Naples to give his account.

132 and was, according to a contemporary source, "as skillful in acting as she [was] excellent in music".Ringer, p. 238 On the basis of the casting of the opera which shared the theatre with L'incoronazione during the 1642–43 season, it is possible that Poppea was played by Anna di Valerio, and Nerone by the castrato Stefano Costa. There are no surviving accounts of the opera's public reception, unless the encomium to the singer playing Poppea, part of the libretto documentation discovered at Udine in 1997, relates to the first performance.

Portrait of Giovanni Battista Lamperti Giovanni Battista Lamperti was born in 1839 in Milan to Italian singing teacher Francesco Lamperti. He was a chorister at the great cathedral and studied voice and piano at the conservatory. A student and later accompanist for his father at the conservatory, Giovanni knew better than anyone else the method his father taught (which he claimed descended from the great castrato- teacher Antonio Bernacchi). Appropriating it for teaching his own students, Giovanni also began teaching voice at the Milan conservatory and then for 20 years in Dresden, followed by Berlin.

Richard and Maria had one child together, Louisa Paolina Angelica, but the couple eventually separated. Maria often travelled on the continent, on one occasion accompanied by Luigi Marchesi, a famous Italian castrato. (Richard Cosway had painted his portrait, which afterward was engraved by Luigi Schiavonetti (1790).) At the same time Richard was having an open affair with Mary Moser, with whom he travelled for six months. In his notebooks he made "invidious comparisons between her and Mrs Cosway," implying that she was much more sexually responsive than his wife.

Pandolfi was born in Montepulciano in 1624, where he was baptised on 27 November, the second son of Giovanni Battista Pandolfi and the fourth son of his father's second wife, Verginia Bartalini, the widow of Mario Mealli. His name at baptism was Domenico; it would appear that he adopted the names Giovanni Antonio on entering religious orders at some stage of his life. His father was the servant of a lawyer. Pandolfi's stepbrother Lorenzo, at the age of around 8, had become a castrato singer at the court of Krakow.

" Mesfin Fekadu from The Huffington Post also saw similarities, writing that the song "looks like a bad Coldplay cover." Adam Markovitz from Entertainment Weekly agreed, calling it "a Coldplay-ish song." Markovitz also wrote that the song "has choruses so thickly produced that the only physical instrument you can reliably pick out is Levine's larynx. Not that he comes off as particularly organic either, since his voice is usually processed into a kind of high, disaffected whine — like a male Rihanna or an android castrato — that's ideal for tracing the contours of a pop hook.

In regards to the duets, we can find one for two Nymphs, homorythmic and with light accompaniment on the violin: "Sans l'indifférence" (act II). Exacerbated vocalists At the start of the XVIIIth century, the French public began to clearly favor vocalizations, which became more and more virtuosic with a penchant for Italianism. The recruited singers receive more and more vocally demanding music. For example, in 1716, during a performance of Ajax by Bertin de la Doué, the Haute-contre Louis/Claude Murayre sang an aria composed for the castrato Nicolini in its original tonality.

At the conservatory Florimo became a singing instructor and director of vocal concerts. His conservative Metodo di canto (Naples, 1840?; Milan, 1841–1843; enlarged 1861) was influential and widely praised. It claimed to be based on the teaching methods of the castrato Girolamo Crescentini, who was still head of the Naples Conservatory singing school at the time, and was meant to restore the 'antico bello', or true Italian style of singing from the time of Alessandro Scarlatti, Nicola Porpora, and Francesco Durante, which had been largely supplanted by the then fashionable 'la moda barocca'.

Addison did, however, praise the singing of Nicolò Grimaldi, the celebrated alto castrato known as "Nicolini", in the title role. Steele compared the production unfavourably to a Punch and Judy show, particularly criticising certain bungled scene changes and the poor quality of effects such as thunder and lightning.Dean and Knapp, pp. 182–83 Hogarth made light of such comments: "Notwithstanding the influence which the Spectator influenced over the taste and manners of the age, its attacks ... seem to have had little effect in turning people from the entertainment".

Negri was born in Bologna to Teresa née Maranelli and Antonio Negri. Little is known about her early life or training, although according to François-Joseph Fétis she studied under the castrato singer Antonio Pasi in Bologna. She was barely 15 when she made her debut at the Teatro Formagliari Bologna during the 1719 carnival season in Bononcini's Il trionfo di Camilla and Predieri's La Partenope. She sang in various theatres in Italy until 1724 when she joined the opera company of Antonio Denzio who ran Franz Anton von Sporck's theatre in Prague.

Armitage has directed operas from the baroque and contemporary repertoire for many of the prestigious houses of Europe. These include the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, the Lyric Opera in Athens and Het Muzik Theater in Amsterdam. Her most recent production of Orfeo ed Euridice for the Teatro di San Carlo Opera House in Naples from 2015 was filmed for RAI television and made into a DVD. In 2007 Armitage directed and choreographed counter tenor Anthony Roth Costanzo's Princeton production of Zefirino - The Voice of a Castrato.

Cristofori's instrument spread at first quite slowly, probably because, being more elaborate and harder to build than a harpsichord, it was very expensive. For a time, the piano was the instrument of royalty, with Cristofori-built or -styled instruments played in the courts of Portugal and Spain. Several were owned by Queen Maria Barbara of Spain, who was the pupil of the composer Domenico Scarlatti. One of the first private individuals to own a piano was the castrato Farinelli, who inherited one from Maria Barbara on her death.

In a macabre touch, the queen maintains a group portrait of the family; she paints in the members – grandmother, parents, infant child – as she kills them off. (In a sudden frenzy of rage, Fredigond stabs the painting.) The queen is assisted in her villainy by a Moorish eunuch called, with brutal literateness, Castrato. Childerick is poisoned by Fredigond; Lamot and Dumain are blamed for the death, but manage to escape. The prince Clovis is in love with Aphelia, and she with him; but his elder brother, and now king, Clotair is envious.

390, Sadie (2006) Stanley Despite being a missa brevis, the Agnus Dei is very long and there is "a prolonged setting for soloists and choir of 'Dona nobis pacem', ending piano." The Dona nobis is set as a gavotte, "like a vaudeville and has been compared with the specimen of this genre at the end of Die Entführung aus dem Serail."p. 661, Heartz (1995) Daniel The first known performance took place on December 21, 1777, with castrato Francesco Ceccarelli among the soloists singled out for praise for his performance,p. 390, Sadie (2006) Stanley.

According to Michael Talbot in The Vivaldi Compendium, for its time Giusti's libretto "evinces a rare degree of sympathy for the Mexican emperor and his queen Mirena." At the premiere the role of Mirena was sung by Anna Girò, who was a protégée of Vivaldi and whom he considered his "indispensable" prima donna. The title role was sung by the German bass Massimiliano Miler. Unusually for Vivaldi who preferred castrato singers with contralto voices, he wrote two roles for soprano castrati—Fernando (Cortés) and Asperano, the Mexican general.

He also studied voice with Faustina Bordoni-Hasse, and castrato Domenico Annibali. Bilohradsky eventually became one of the highest trained musicians in the Russian Court Capella. In 1739 Bilohradsky returned to St Petersburg, where he continued to work as a court musician. In 1741 he returned to Germany where he became known as a virtuoso lutenist and singer and for some time lived in Königsberg where he had a number of students - notably Johann Reichardt (father of Johann Friedrich Reichardt), and Johann Georg Hamann, the Sturm-und-Drang philosopher.

Alessandro Melani (4 February 1639 – 3 October 1703) was an Italian composer and the brother of composer Jacopo Melani, and castrato singer Atto Melani. Along with Bernardo Pasquini and Alessandro Scarlatti, he was one of the leading composers active in Rome during the 17th century. He is also ranked among the second school of Roman opera composers which began with his brother's 1668 opera Il Girello. He is chiefly remembered today for his large output of liturgical music that he wrote while serving in various musical posts in Rome.

Richard Crosby Pearce (born 9 July 1961 in St Albans, England) is a British voice actor, primarily in voice acting. Pearce has appeared in over 500 radio dramas and was twice a member of the BBC Radio drama company. He played opposite Sir John Gielgud in Tales My Father Taught Me and in a variety of radio parts ranging from The Mekon in Dan Dare to the last castrato in Angel of Rome. In 1992 and 1993, Pearce appeared in the BBC Radio adaptation of The Adventures of Tintin, playing the eponymous hero.

Nicolini, by Marco Ricci Nicolò Francesco Leonardo Grimaldi (5 April 1673 (bap) - 1 January 1732) was an Italian mezzo-soprano castrato who is best remembered today for his association with the composer George Frideric Handel, in two of whose early operas he sang. Grimaldi was usually known by his stage name of Nicolini. Nicolini was born in Naples, where he made his operatic début in 1685. He also sang sacred music as a soprano in the Cathedral and Royal Chapel (to which extant libretti from the 1690s identify him as virtuoso).

Sills' performance in the production, and on the cast recording that followed, made her an international opera star. The first uncut performance of modern times with the voices at correct pitch did not take place until 1977 at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham, England. It has subsequently proven to be by far the most popular of Handel's operas, with more than two hundred productions in many countries. In modern productions, the title role, written for a castrato, is sung by a contralto, mezzo-soprano, or, more frequently in recent years, a countertenor.

His influence as a teacher has perhaps been underestimated, since he trained dozens of musicians to sing in the new style, including the castrato Giovanni Gualberto Magli, who sang in the first production of Monteverdi's first opera Orfeo. Caccini made at least one further trip to Rome, in 1592, as the secretary to Count Bardi. According to his own writings, his music and singing met with an enthusiastic response. However, Rome, the home of Palestrina and the Roman School, was musically conservative, and music following Caccini's stylistic lead was relatively rare there until after 1600.

There his first opera, Artaserse was performed on 26 December 1741, dedicated to Otto Ferdinand von Abensberg und Traun. Set to a libretto by Metastasio, the opera opened the Milanese Carnival of 1742. According to one anecdote, the public would not accept Gluck's style until he inserted an aria in the lighter Milanese manner for contrast. Nevertheless, Gluck composed an opera for each of the next four Carnivals at Milan, with renowned castrato Giovanni Carestini appearing in many of the performances, so the reaction to Artaserse is unlikely to have been completely unfavourable.

Katarina Karnéus as Serse in a 2009 production of Serse at the Royal Swedish Opera. Sarah Bernhardt as Prince Hamlet in June 1899. A travesti is a theatrical term referring to the portrayal of a character in an opera, play, or ballet by a performer of the opposite sex. More specifically, a theatrical or operatic role in which an actress appears in male clothing is called a "breeches role" ("pants role" or "trouser role"), and roles once performed by a male soprano castrato may instead be performed by a female mezzo-soprano or contralto.

One of his duties was to supervise opera rehearsals and give directions to the singers. When Jommelli's Merope was to be performed in 1749, Metastasio delegated his directorial duties to Migliavacca. Tensions arising from a feud between two of the opera's star singers, Migliavacca's close friend Vittoria Tesi, and the castrato Caffarelli, and from Caffarelli's refusal to attend rehearsals reached a climax when he and Migliavacca fought a duel at Vittoria Tesi's house. However, her entreaties to the combatants ended the incipient sword fight before anyone was hurt.

The operatic concept assumes that the character is male, and the audience accepts him as such, even knowing that the actor is not. Cross-dressing female characters (e.g., Leonore in Fidelio or Gilda in Act III of Rigoletto) are not considered breeches roles. The most frequently performed breeches roles are Cherubino (The Marriage of Figaro), Octavian (Der Rosenkavalier), Hansel (Hansel und Gretel) and Orpheus (Orpheus and Euridice), though the latter was originally written for a male singer, first a castrato and later, in the revised French version, an haute-contre.

Alessandro Moreschi was born into a Roman Catholic family in the town of Monte Compatri in the Papal States, near Frascati (Lazio). It is possible that he was born with an inguinal hernia, for which castration was still thought to be a cure in nineteenth-century Italy.Clapton, N: Moreschi and the Voice of the Castrato (London, 2008), pp. 60–62 Another possibility is that he was castrated later, around 1865, which would have been more in line with the centuries-old practice of castrating vocally talented boys well before puberty.

Also, he was an honoured lifetime member and president of the musical organisation "Società Musicale Romana" in Rome. He came close to returning to the operatic stage when Richard Wagner considered casting him as Klingsor in Parsifal in 1882. However, the whole idea was abandoned shortly afterwards due to a role confusion—the emasculated Klingsor was not a castrato, but a eunuch castrated past puberty and thus singing baritone, not soprano. Domenico Mustafà was also a teacher and he gave music lessons to the famous French soprano Emma Calvé in 1892.

No reaction is recorded over Denzio's ironic decision to cast a castrato singer as the world's greatest seducer. In spite of the unfamiliar setting in Naples, the Denzio drama features many incidents and characters familiar to operatic audiences from Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. The central character, the seducer Don Giovanni, is also dragged down to hell for murdering an aged military officer (the Commendatore) who angered Don Giovanni by trying to defend the honor of his beloved daughter. Denzio included the daughter's ineffectual fiancé and Don Giovanni's cowardly servant besides other characters that originate in the Don Juan dramas of Tirso and Cicognini.

A castrato (Italian, plural: castrati) is a type of classical male singing voice equivalent to that of a soprano, mezzo-soprano, or contralto. The voice is produced by castration of the singer before puberty, or it occurs in one who, due to an endocrinological condition, never reaches sexual maturity. Castration before puberty (or in its early stages) prevents a boy's larynx from being transformed by the normal physiological events of puberty. As a result, the vocal range of prepubescence (shared by both sexes) is largely retained, and the voice develops into adulthood in a unique way.

A caricature of Farinelli in a female role, by Pier Leone Ghezzi 1724. Although the castrato (or musico) predates opera, there is some evidence that castrati had parts in the earliest operas. In the first performance of Monteverdi's Orfeo (1607), for example, they played subsidiary roles, including Speranza and (possibly) that of Euridice. Although female roles were performed by castrati in some of the papal states, this was increasingly rare; by 1680, they had supplanted "normal" male voices in lead roles, and retained their position as primo uomo for about a hundred years;see Heriot, A: The Castrati in Opera (London, 1956), pp.

Novalis, 18th-century German philosopher In the 17th and 18th centuries, most Italian castrato singers used mononyms as stage names (e.g. Caffarelli, Farinelli). The German writer, mining engineer and philosopher, Georg Friedrich Philipp Freiherr von Hardenberg (1772–1801), became famous as Novalis. The 19th-century Dutch writer Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820–87), better known by his mononymous pen name Multatuli (from the Latin multa tuli, "I have suffered [or borne] many things"), became famous for the satirical novel, Max Havelaar (1860), in which he denounced the abuses of colonialism in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia).

Soon many other opera houses had sprung up in the city, performing works for a paying public during the Carnival season. The opera houses employed a very small orchestra to save money. A large part of their budget was spent on attracting the star singers of the day; this was the beginning of the reign of the castrato and the prima donna (leading lady). The chief composer of early Venetian opera was Monteverdi, who had moved to the republic from Mantua in 1613, with later important composers including Pier Francesco Cavalli, Antonio Sartorio, and Giovanni Legrenzi.

In his biography of Kingsley Amis, Richard Bradford devotes a chapter to The Alteration, its origins and context within the author's life. In 1973, Amis had heard a reproduction of the voice of Alessandro Moreschi, the last known European castrato. Amis disagreed with the proposition that Moreschi's performance could be considered "great art", because Moreschi had been castrated, and "true" art centred on the celebration of human sexuality. Bradford argues that this was a matter of considerable importance for Amis himself, as he may have been suffering from impotence or sexual dysfunction in his marriage, due to advancing age.

He maintained a collaboration similar to that with Josef Mysliveček later in life with Angelo Tarchi. Perhaps his most important roles in the later part of his career were Megacle in Domenico Cimarosa's L'Olimpiade and Lovinski in Simon Mayr's La Lodoiska. Serious opera was the natural realm for his voice type, and he rarely sang comic roles after his early appearances in Rome. In person Marchesi might have been the handsomest castrato of all time; during his London engagement in the 1790s, Maria Cosway deserted her husband and children and followed the singer around Europe for several years.

At first, he finds it difficult even to associate with his fellow castrati. As time goes on, he has a love affair with another castrato boy, Domenico, and after Domenico leaves, with Guido himself. He comes to dominate the conservatorio—in addition to being a star student, he soon befriends all the boys his age, and becomes something of a leader and confidant. Tonio also continues his studies in fencing and firearms, which, in Guido's words, make him into a "hero" to his fellow students, especially after, in self-defense, he kills a student who vowed to kill him.

Because Zambinella has the voice of a woman Sarrasine assumes La Zambinella is a woman. La Zambinella suggests that her womanhood might be in question, but Sarrasine is too enthralled with Zambinella as the perfect woman to pay any attention. When Sarrasine finally learns Zambinella is a castrato, he first denies the possibility, then tries to kill Zambinella, upon which he is himself killed. Critics point out that Sarrasine may fear a kind of contagion of castration, or may feel that manhood in general or the division between men and women is threatened by possibility of castration.

In reprisals against those suspected of supporting or sympathizing with the Republicans, Montecchiani was dismissed from the choir, while Chiari, Poli and Mustafà were made to undergo "spiritual exercises" before resuming their activities with the choir. Further disruption came in 1870 when the Capture of Rome permanently ended the Papal States and caused the suspension of the First Vatican Council. The choir finally received a perpetual director in 1878 when Pius IX appointed Mustafà to the post. Mustafà, who had entered the choir in 1845, had been a virtuoso soprano castrato in his prime and was also a composer and skilled conductor.

Wagner (1813–1883) decried the Italian singing model, alleging that it was concerned merely with "whether that G or A will come out roundly". He advocated a new, Germanic school of singing that would draw "the spiritually energetic and profoundly passionate into the orbit of its matchless Expression." French musicians and composers never embraced the more florid extremes of the 18th-century Italian bel canto style. They disliked the castrato voice and because they placed a premium on the clear enunciation of the texts of their vocal music, they objected to the sung word being obscured by excessive fioritura.

King moved to England to take up a position as a post-doctoral research fellow at University College London. It was at this time that he began writing his first novel. King's first novel, Domino, (1995), tells the story of a castrato singer seen through the experience of an aspiring painter in the London of the 1770s. In 1998, King published Ex-Libris, his second work of historical fiction. Set in London and Prague, it chronicles how a London bookseller's search in the 1660s for a missing manuscript leads him unwittingly into a world of deception and murder.

Danise was born in Salerno, near Naples, to Pasqualina Capaldo, an amateur musician, and Enrico Danise, an official in the Italian government. Though he began studies in law, he was urged to take up a career in singing, as he had a natural singing voice. He attended the Conservatorio di San Pietro a Majella in Naples, where he was trained first by Luigi Colonnese, a baritone of the previous generation whose own pedagogical lineage included Alessandro Busti and the castrato Girolamo Crescentini. According to Danise, for the first year he was only allowed to sing tones—no scales and no songs.

The cornett and violin were considered interchangeable; and a good cornettist doubled between either cornetts and trumpets or cornetts and recorders. Cornetts were used to reinforce the human voice in choirs, and many commentators suggested that the sound of a well-played cornett, heard at a distance, could be mistaken for a "choice castrato". The place of the cornett was never really filled by any other instrument and it was not until the second half of the 20th century that the cornett revival gave music lovers a chance to hear the sound of this instrument again in its proper context.

His powers of singing seem to have been limited and by the time of his Handel roles his voice was declining but he is reputed to have been a fine actor. Charles Burney noted that "his voice was feeble, and his execution moderate", but Cibber praises his acting enthusiastically: "his hearers bore with the absurdity of his singing the part of Turnus in Camilla, all in Italian, while every other character was sung and recited in English". Urbani was the first castrato to sing regularly in London,George J. Buelow, Hans Joachim Marx. 1983. New Mattheson Studies.

However, Handel composed an aria for Nireno for a later revival in 1730. Although a caricature, the contemporary engraving of Senesino on the left, Francesca Cuzzoni and castrato Gaetano Berenstadt on the right, provides valuable information about the visual aspect of the original performances of Handel operas. The illustration is probably of a scene from Handel's Flavio, presented by the Royal Academy of Music in 1723, although it has sometimes been identified as a scene from Giulio Cesare. The elongated bodies of the castrati tower over Cuzzoni, who was described by Horace Walpole as "short and squat".

A performance of Lully's opera Armide at the Palais-Royal in 1761 French opera was now established as a distinct genre. Though influenced by Italian models, tragédie en musique increasingly diverged from the form then dominating Italy, opera seria. French audiences disliked the castrato singers who were extremely popular in the rest of Europe, preferring their male heroes to be sung by the haute-contre, a particularly high tenor voice. Dramatic recitative was at the heart of Lullian opera, whereas in Italy recitative had dwindled to a perfunctory form known as secco, where the voice was accompanied only by the continuo.

The premiere sparked a huge controversy, almost a war, such as had not been seen in the city since the Querelle des Bouffons. Gluck's opponents brought the leading Italian composer, Niccolò Piccinni, to Paris to demonstrate the superiority of Neapolitan opera and the "whole town" engaged in an argument between "Gluckists" and "Piccinnists".Viking p. 371 On 2 August 1774, the French version of Orfeo ed Euridice was performed, with the title role transposed from the castrato to the haute-contre, according to the French preference for high tenor voices which had ruled since the days of Lully.

Gluck seems to have spent most of 1751 commuting between Prague and Vienna. The year 1752 brought another major commission to Gluck, when he was asked to set Metastasio's La clemenza di Tito (the specific libretto was the composer's choice) for the name day celebrations of King Charles VII of Naples. The opera was performed on 4 November at the Teatro di San Carlo, and the world-famous castrato Caffarelli took the role of Sextus. For Caffarelli Gluck composed the famous, but notoriously difficult, aria "Se mai senti spirarti sul volto", which provoked admiration and vituperation in equally large measures.

It uses the new stile recitativo, as well as canzonettas in the style of the concerto delle donne. The opera's orchestration calls for a lirone, and somewhat remarkably for the period the cast does not require a castrato. The piece is balanced towards higher voices, with six sopranos, two altos, seven tenors, and only one bass, as well as a trio of recorders. A compositional scheme is used within the work that associates flat keys with the feminine (the female protagonist Alcina and her attendants) and sharp keys with the masculine (the male protagonist Ruggiero and the other male roles).

She found a noteworthy castrato teacher named Giusto Fernando Tenducci and because she could not afford the full cost of the lessons with the help of Tenducci's attorney they drafted up an agreement. She had no idea of Tenducci's plan to scam her out of money so he could pay off his debts. While traveling towards her father, she got news that her father had died and so she was forced to change her plans. Tenducci was not able to execute his plan because she no longer had a reason to visit and drop off a large sum of money.

Handel had put together similar works before, fitting the music of pre-existent arias to new words, but this was the first time he had made an opera in this way using entirely his own music. He assembled a collection of his arias from the previous years, ranging from Agrippina of 1709 to Sosarme of 1732, binding the pre-existent music seamlessly together with the newly-written recitatives to create a new musical drama. The opera is in Italian, although it was written and performed in England. The lead role was written for the castrato Giovanni Carestini.

These afforded great opportunity for virtuosic singing and during the golden age of opera seria the singer really became the star. The role of the hero was usually written for the high-pitched male castrato voice, which was produced by castration of the singer before puberty, which prevented a boy's larynx from being transformed at puberty. Castrati such as Farinelli and Senesino, as well as female sopranos such as Faustina Bordoni, became in great demand throughout Europe as opera seria ruled the stage in every country except France. Farinelli was one of the most famous singers of the 18th century.

Francesco Gasparini - Tamerlano - title page of the libretto - Venice 1711 sketch of Francesco Gasparini Tamerlano (“Tamerlane”) was a tragic opera in three acts by Francesco Gasparini based on a libretto by Agostino Piovene. It was first performed at the Teatro San Cassiano in Venice on 24 January 1711. Piovene’s libretto was based on Tamerlan ou La mort de Bajazet by Jacques Pradon (1675). It was Piovene’s second libretto as well as his second collaboration with Gasparini. Tamerlano was Gasparini’s most famous opera, distinguished by the unusual decision to assign the role of Bajazet to a tenor, Giovanni Paita, rather than to a castrato.

A singing pupil of Moreschi's, Domenico Mancini, was such a good imitator of his master's voice that Perosi took him for a castrato (for all that castration had been banned in Italy in 1870), and would have nothing to do with him. Mancini became a professional double-bass player.again see Clapton, pp. 158–72 for further details Officially, Alessandro was a member of the Sistine choir until Easter 1913 (at which date he qualified for his pension after thirty years' service), and remained in the choir of the Cappella Giulia of St Peter's, Rome until a year after that.

Constanze Mozart, for whom the Great Mass was composed, portrayed by Hans Hansen in 1802 In October 1772, aged sixteen, Mozart made his third visit to Italy, accompanied by his father Leopold. The most important work that he composed there was his opera seria Lucio Silla, premiered in Milan's Teatro Regio Ducale on 26 December as part of the city's carnival festivities. Mozart was so impressed by Venanzio Rauzzini's performance as Cecilio that he was inspired to compose a motet specially for the castrato as a showcase for his virtuosity. Rauzzini premiered Exsultate, jubilate in Milan's Theatine Church on 17 January 1773.

In the castrato role of Sesto, the infatuated instrument of Vitellia's scheming, Yvonne Minton delivered a performance that was arguably more impressive still. She was equally successful at portraying both sides of Sesto's character: the youth besotted with his vengeful mistress, and the "Roman of the highest standards of honour, courage and resolve" torn by the competing claims of duty and desire. And as well as singing with "real dramatic power", Minton displayed "virtuosity of a high order". Pure, superb and magnificent were just some of the accolades that Sadie bestowed on her vocalism, although he acknowledged that sometimes.

Neither castrato nor chalumeau were to survive. In both the Italian and French version Orfeo's lyre is represented by the harp, and it was this use of the instrument in 1774 that it is usually thought introduced the harp to French orchestras. Each verse of the strophic "Chiamo il mio ben cosi" is accompanied by different solo instruments. In Vienna these were flute, horns, and English horns, but in 1774 Gluck was required to change this orchestration to that of a single horn and two clarinets, again replacing uncommon instruments with those in far more widespread usage.

By far his most famous composition, and one of the most significant operas of the early Baroque, is his setting of the life of fifth-century Saint Alexis, Il Sant'Alessio. Not only is it the first opera to be written on a historical subject, but it carefully describes the inner life of the saint, and attempts psychological characterization of a type new to opera. Most of the interspersed comic scenes, however, are anachronistically (and hilariously) drawn from contemporary life in 17th-century Rome. The part of Sant'Alessio himself is extremely high, and was meant to be sung by a castrato.

Diego Fernández (1703–1775) was as an Andalucian musical instrument maker at the Spanish court in Madrid. He is known to have supplied harpsichords to Domenico Scarlatti and several of his pupils at court. He built instruments in the Iberian style, somewhat resembling Italian instruments, typically involving Pythagorean string scales and 2×8 foot choirs, but with construction elements more reminiscent of northern building styles, including heavier casing. He is, however, known to have supplied the famous castrato singer Farinelli with a four choir, five register, double manual harpsichord, operated using pedals and made at the behest of Queen Maria Barbara.

One of the cast members was the great castrato Luigi Marchesi, a close professional associate of the composer, whose career was critically aided by Mysliveček's intervention. Following his appearances in Mysliveček's operas La Calliroe and L'Olimpiade the following autumn, Marchesi was able to establish himself permanently as one of the leading singers in Italy. La Calliroe was very well received by the Neapolitan musical public, one of the most successful of the nine operas Mysliveček composed for the Teatro San Carlo. It was revived in Pisa and Pontremoli in the spring of 1779 and in Siena the following summer.

Il Palazzo Incantato (The Enchanted Palace) or Il Palagio d’Atlante, overo La Guerriera Amante (The Palace of Atlantes, or The Warrior Woman in Love) is an opera in a prologue and three acts by the Italian composer Luigi Rossi. The libretto, by Giulio Rospigliosi, the future Pope Clement IX, is based on Ariosto's Orlando furioso. It was first performed in Rome in a lavish production at the Teatro delle Quattro Fontane (Palazzo Barberini) on 22 February 1642. Rossi was criticised for giving too much music to his friend, the castrato Marc'Antonio Pasqualini, who played Bradamante, at the expense of the other roles.

During his time in Italy, he converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism and devoted much time to the composition of church music, including music for a Requiem Mass and a Te Deum."The Catholic Bach", Cantica Nova Publications His first major work was a Mass, which received an excellent performance and acclaim in 1757. In 1762, Bach travelled to London to première three operas at the King's Theatre, including Orione on 19 February 1763. In 1764 or 65 the castrato Giusto Fernando Tenducci, who became a close friend, created the title role in his opera Adriano in Siria at King's.

The famous castrato Farinelli caricatured in one of his female roles Until the late 17th century in England and the late 18th century in the Papal StatesThe ban on women performing on stage was imposed by Pope Sixtus V in 1588. It was never legally enforceable in the Legations (Bologna, Ferrara and the Romagna) and was occasionally disapplied in Rome too, in particular from 1669 (during the papacy of erstwhile librettist Clement IX) to 1676, at the instigation of Queen Christina of Sweden, who was a fan of opera (Celletti, Rodolfo (2000). La grana della voce. Opere, direttori e cantanti (2nd edition).

Nicolò Grimaldi (Nicolini) in the role of Idaspe opposite Francesca Cuzzoni in a 1730 production in Venice. Title page of Songs In The New Opera Call'd Hydaspes, 1710 Aria from Songs In The New Opera Call'd Hydaspes, 1710 Hydaspes (also L’Idaspe fedele) is an opera by Francesco Mancini with a libretto by Giovanni Pietro Candi. It was first performed at the King's Theater in the Haymarket, London, on 23 March 1710. It was the second opera in England to be sung entirely in Italian, after Almahide, and was an early London success for the famous castrato Nicolò Grimaldi in the title role.

Rehearsal, said to be for Pyrrhus and Demetrius - Nicola Haym at the harpsichord, Nicolo Grimaldi (Nicolini) standing and singing, Dr. Pepusch entering the room on the right Nicolò Grimaldi (Nicolini) Alessandro Scarlatti Pyrrhus and Demetrius was a 1708 adaptation for the London stage of the 1694 opera Il Pirro e Demetrio by Alessandro Scarlatti with a libretto by Adriano Morselli, first performed at the :it:Teatro San Bartolomeo. Pyrrhus and Demetrius was the second most successful opera in early 18th century London, after Camilla. It had 58 or 59 performances between 1708 and 1717. The opera marked the London debut of the castrato Nicolò Grimaldi (Nicolini).

" But he also wrote that: "Van Halen's secret is not doing anything that's original while having the hormones to do it better than all those bands who have become fat and self-indulgent and disgusting. Edward Van Halen has mastered the art of lead/rhythm guitar in the tradition of Jimmy Page and Joe Walsh; several riffs on this record beat anything Aerosmith has come up with in years. Vocalist Dave Lee Roth manages the rare hard-rock feat of infusing the largely forgettable lyrics with energy and not sounding like a castrato at the same time. Drummer Alex Van Halen and bassist Michael Anthony are competent and properly unobtrusive.

The German-born Handel had brought Italian opera to London stages for the first time in 1711 with his opera Rinaldo. An enormous success, Rinaldo created a craze in London for Italian opera seria, a form focused overwhelmingly on solo arias for the star virtuoso singers. Handel had presented new operas in London for years with great success. One of the major attractions in Handel's operas was the star castrato Senesino whose relationship with the composer was often stormy and who eventually left Handel's company to appear with the rival Opera of the Nobility, set up in 1733 and with the Prince of Wales as a major sponsor.

Sylvain Ballot de Sauvot (1703 – Decembre 1760) was an 18th-century French lawyer at Parlement de Paris and man of letters amateur, belonging to the entourage of Jean-Philippe Rameau (Sylvain Ballot, his brother, was Rameau's notary). He reworked the librettos of Pygmalion, acte de ballet set in music by Rameau, and that of the comédie lyrique Platée for the revival at Académie royale de musique 9 February 1749, after the première had taken place in Versailles, four years before.Le magazine de l'opéra baroque During the Querelle des Bouffons, he defended Rameau, whom he greatly admired, and fought a duel in 1753 with the castrato Gaetano Caffarelli.

Born in Siena in about 1735, Tenducci became a castrato, and he was trained at the Naples Conservatory. Castration was illegal in both Church and civil law, but the Roman Church employed castrati in many churches and in the Vatican until about 1902; and throughout the 17th and 18th centuries the public paid large sums of money to listen to the spectacular voices of castrati in the opera houses. In 1753, when he was about seventeen, Tenducci made his professional opera appearance in Venice, as Gasparo in Ferdinando Bertoni's Ginevra. In 1757 and 1758 he was active at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples.

Colfer has stated in interviews that when his voice began to change at puberty he sang in a high voice "constantly" in an effort to retain his range. Actor and singer Alex Newell has soprano range. Voice actor Walter Tetley may or may not have been a castrato; Bill Scott, a co-worker of Tetley's during their later work in television, once half-jokingly quipped that Tetley's mother "had him fixed" to protect the child star's voice-acting career. Tetley never personally divulged the exact reason for his condition, which left him with the voice of a preteen boy for his entire adult life.

Sacchini had already dealt with the subject of El Cid twice before. The first occasion was in Rome during the Carnival season of 1769, when, under the title of Il Cidde, he had set a libretto by Gioacchino Pizzi, previously used by Niccolò Piccinni, which retained its popularity for at least another decade. The star of the work was the soprano castrato, , then at the height of his fame. After he moved to London, Sacchini returned to the subject for his English debut (Il Cid, 1773), using a reworking of Pizzi's libretto made by Giovanni Gualberto Bottarelli, the official poet of the King's Theatre.

A prolific writer of church music, Bertoni also composed 70 operas which fell into oblivion, except Orfeo (Venice, Teatro San Benedetto, 1776), based on the same libretto of Ranieri de' Calzabigi of the work of Christoph Willibald Gluck, Orfeo ed Euridice (Burgtheater, Vienna, 1762). Bertoni composed this work especially for his friend Gaetano Guadagni, a castrato, who would interpret the role of Orfeo (the same role he had interpreted in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice). Bertoni generally ignored Gluck's reforms and composed the work in the old style of opera seria. Bertoni composed at least 200 sacred works (including about 50 oratorios) and cantatas, instrumental work and chamber music.

Theatre Royal Covent Garden where Ariodante was first performed The German-born Handel had brought Italian opera to London stages for the first time in 1711 with his opera Rinaldo. An enormous success, Rinaldo created a craze in London for Italian opera seria, a form focused overwhelmingly on solo arias for the star virtuoso singers. Handel had presented new operas in London for years with great success. One of the major attractions in Handel's operas was the star castrato Senesino whose relationship with the composer was often stormy and who eventually left Handel's company to appear with the rival Opera of the Nobility, set up in 1733.

The young Doudou showed an early musical aptitude from the age of six, when he successfully joined France's national youth choir, which has long since been disbanded. Despite rumours that he may have been a modern-day castrato, he continued to climb the ladder to stardom well into his teens when his career took an unexpected turn. At the age of 16, he saw his prized cocker spaniel, Monsieur Grenouille, gunned down in what was later discovered to be a turf war between local French gangs.Interview de Doudou Masta This pivotal event caused the fragile young singer to turn to a brutal and violent life of crime.

Dean, W. & J.M. Knapp (1995) Handel's operas 1704-1726, p. 298. The Royal Academy of Music collapsed at the end of the 1728 - 29 season, partly due to the huge fees paid to the star singers. Handel went into partnership with John James Heidegger, the theatrical impresario who held the lease on the King's Theatre in the Haymarket where the operas were presented and started a new opera company with a new prima donna, Anna Strada. In 1733, a second opera company, The Opera of the Nobility was set up to rival Handel's, employing several of Handel's former star singers including the celebrated castrato Senesino.

Domenico Trimarchi, "particularly alert to textual nuances", painted a persuasive portrait of Buonafede, the wealthy old innocent being duped by his daughters' and maidservant's lovers. Luigi Alva was equally enjoyable as Ecclitico, the bogus astronomer - styled an astrologer by a librettist too ignorant to know the difference - who tricked his future father-in-law into believing that he had been miraculously transported to the moon. Anthony Rolfe Johnson, playing the servant Cecco, "[made] the most of his moment of glory as the mock Lunar Emperor". The opera's other male role, Ernesto, originally an alto part sung by a castrato, was undertaken by Lucia Valentini Terrani in the album's least successful performance.

He soon was given commissions from every major operatic center in Italy. The cast of the Turin production of Il trionfo di Clelia included the noted soprano Caterina Gabrielli, who had contributed enormously to the success of Il Bellerofonte in Naples. Francesca Gabrielli, probably her sister, also appeared in the Turin production along with the aging castrato Sebastiano Emiliani. Mysliveček's opera Il trionfo di Clelia was never performed in Prague, but he clearly brought the music with him when he returned to Prague for a visit early in 1768, since arias from it were copied into ecclesiastical collections in Bohemia for decades after the 1760s.

Gluck made a number of changes to the orchestration of Orfeo when adapting it from the original Italian version to the French version of 1774. Cornetts and chalumeaux are replaced by more common and modern oboes and clarinets, while the part played by trombones considerably decreases, possibly due to a lack of technical ability on the part of the French trombonists. Cornetts were instruments that were typically used for church music, and chalumeaux were predominant only in chamber music: both cornetts and chalumeaux were unpopular in France in 1774. In many ways the change from chalumeau to oboe corresponds to that from castrato to high tenor.

Senesino, Cuzzoni and Berenstadt, probably in a scene from Flavio Although a caricature, the contemporary engraving of Senesino on the left, Francesca Cuzzoni and castrato Gaetano Berenstadt on the right, provides valuable information about the visual aspect of the original performances of Handel operas. The illustration is probably of a scene from Flavio. The elongated bodies of the castrati tower over Cuzzoni, who was described by Horace Walpole as "short and squat". The set is architectural and generic, not a specific locale, and the costumes for the men are also generic, with some inspiration from ancient Roman military attire, breastplates and leg armour, combined with plumes on the headdresses.

This voice type was called haute-contre, and the majority of heroic and amatory parts were written for it in grand opera and in opéra-comique. This type reached its apex in the age of Rameau. It was, in fact, a type of tenor voice extremely light and widely ranged, but nearly systematically uttered in falsettone in the high pitch, so as to somehow re-echo the castrato "contraltista" of the Italian stamp.Caruselli, Grande, vol 4, p 1197, article: "tenore". This thesis, evidently borrowed from Rodolfo Celletti’s positions, does not seem to have been fully shared explicitly, in Potter's recent work about the tenor voice.

At Paris, presumably as the result of a duel, he suffered an injury to his hand with a sword. As a consequence of this injury, he gave up the violin in favor of the violoncello. Antoniotto is credited with negotiating for the Queen of Spain, Elisabeth of Parma, the arrangement by which Farinelli (Carlo Maria Broschi), a famed castrato, moved from London in 1737 to sing for the rest of his performing career at the Spanish court. Antoniotto traveled frequently to England and it was there that in 1760 he published his book L’arte armonica, written in Italian but translated and published in English.

In 1781, 24 years old, he was called upon to perform the role of Idamante in Mozart's Idomeneo re di Creta at Munich, although after his first collaboration Mozart was not impressed by dal Prato. From the letters which Mozart wrote to his father up to 1780, it appears that all his dealings with castrati had been difficult. Mozart stated Manzuoli was brilliant but stubborn, Rauzzini was immature and unpredictable, Tenducci was a renowned libertine, but he had a naturally charming voice and seemed a natural for the role. Mozart had been commissioned to write Idomeneo for the carnival of 1781 and the role of Idamante was to be given to a castrato.

The German-born Handel, after spending some of his early career composing operas and other pieces in Italy, settled in London, where in 1711 he had brought Italian opera for the first time with his opera Rinaldo. An enormous success, Rinaldo created a craze in London for Italian opera seria, a form focused overwhelmingly on solo arias for the star virtuoso singers. Handel had presented new operas in London for years with great success. One of the major attractions in Handel's operas was the star castrato Senesino, whose relationship with the composer was often stormy and who eventually left Handel's company to appear with the rival Opera of the Nobility, set up in 1733.

Handel was not only to compose operas for the company but hire the star singers, supervise the orchestra and musicians, and adapt operas from Italy for London performance.Dean, W. & J.M. Knapp (1995) Handel's operas 1704-1726, p. 298. Handel had composed numerous Italian operas for the Academy, with varying degrees of success; some were enormously popular. The castrato Senesino and the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni had appeared in a succession of Handel operas for the Academy (he was not the only composer who composed operas for the company) most of which had been successful with audiences, and in 1726 the directors of the Academy brought over another internationally renowned singer, Faustina Bordoni, to add to the company's attractions.

The German- born Handel, after spending some of his early career composing operas and other pieces in Italy, settled in London, where in 1711 he had brought Italian opera for the first time with his opera Rinaldo. An enormous success, Rinaldo created a craze in London for Italian opera seria, a form focused overwhelmingly on solo arias for the star virtuoso singers. Handel had presented new operas in London for years with great success. One of the major attractions in Handel's operas was the star castrato Senesino, whose relationship with the composer was often stormy and who eventually left Handel's company to appear with the rival Opera of the Nobility, set up in 1733.

Francesco wrote to the Duke of Tuscany on 8 March, asking if he could retain the services of the castrato Magli for a little longer. However, the visit was cancelled, as was the celebratory performance. There are suggestions that in the years following the premiere, L'Orfeo may have been staged in Florence, Cremona, Milan and Turin, though firmer evidence suggests that the work attracted limited interest beyond the Mantuan court. Francesco may have mounted a production in Casale Monferrato, where he was governor, for the 1609–10 Carnival, and there are indications that the work was performed on several occasions in Salzburg between 1614 and 1619, under the direction of Francesco Rasi.

Handel was not only to compose operas for the company but hire the star singers, supervise the orchestra and musicians, and adapt operas from Italy for London performance.Dean, W. & J.M. Knapp (1995) Handel's operas 1704-1726, p. 298. Handel had composed numerous Italian operas for the Academy, with varying degrees of success; some were enormously popular. The star soprano Francesca Cuzzoni had partnered with internationally renowned castrato Senesino as the leading performers in a long series of Italian operas by Handel and other composers for the Academy, and to increase audience interest, the directors decided to import another celebrated singer from Italy, soprano Faustina Bordoni, so that the operas would have not one but two leading ladies onstage.

Originally composed to be sung by a soprano castrato (and sung in modern performances of Serse by a countertenor, contralto or a mezzo- soprano), it has been arranged for other voice types and instruments, including solo organ, solo piano, violin and piano, and string ensembles, often under the title "Largo from Xerxes", although the original tempo is marked larghetto. In the opera, the aria is preceded by a short recitativo accompagnato of 9 bars, setting the scene ("Frondi tenere e belle"). The aria itself is also short; it consists of 52 bars and typically lasts three to four minutes. The instrumentation is for a string section: first and second violins, viola, and basses.

Quoted in Streatfeild > (1910) p. 111 When Merighi returned for the 1736 season after an absence of several years, Delany wrote: > Merighi — with no sound in her voice, but thundering action, a beauty with > no other merit Quoted in Streatfeild (1910) p. 139 Merighi's acting ability (and that of the castrato, Nicolo Grimaldi) was also noted by Giambattista Mancini in his 1774 Pensieri e riflessioni pratiche sopra il canto figurato: > Nicola Grimaldi, alias Cavalier Niccolino, possessed the art of recitative > and acting to such perfection that although he was very poor in other > talents and did not have a beautiful voice, he became very singular. The > same is true of Madame Merighi.

He also comments on the problems raised for scholars by the extensive revisions to the music that took place during Handel's lifetime, but suggests that the available admixture creates interesting opportunities in the preparation of modern performing versions. The initial popular success of Rinaldo was assisted by the employment of virtuoso singers, in particular Nicolini in the title role. This part has remained in its original pitch, though in his various revisions Handel transposed the music of other leading roles to different voice types. Thus Goffredo had originally been an alto part, but in the 1717 revisions became a tenor; the Magician was transposed from alto castrato to bass, and Armida from soprano to contralto.

Von Stade dispatched it "with élan, finding just the right castrato timbre for its grave utterance of another faithful soul".The National Arts Centre, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada "È destin" from La Bohème - Leoncavallo's little known setting of the story, not the famous Puccini version - concluded the recital with a venture into a territory peripheral to von Stade's repertoire, nineteenth-century verismo. Despite Musetta's heartbroken outpourings being very unlike her usual material, she expressed them with unqualified success. The playing of the National Arts Centre Orchestra and Mario Bernardi's "alert and refined conducting" were both beyond reproach, as was CBS's audio quality, which had "more forward presence" than most of the company's output.

He sang three additional performances of the role at the Staatsoper in November and December 2010.Wiener Staatsoper schedule - Max Emanuel Cencic. A studio recording of operatic arias by George Frideric Handel, notably containing music composed for the mezzo-soprano castrato Giovanni Carestini, was released on the EMI/Virgin label in the UK on 1 March 2010. In 2015 Decca released a recording by Parnassus Arts Productions of Leonardo Vinci's Catone in Utica co-produced by Cenčić, in which he sang the role of Arbace. Cencic appeared as Nerone role in Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea for the Opéra de Lille in 2012, with Sonya Yoncheva as Poppea, Tim Mead as Ottone and Emanuelle Haïm conducting Le Concert d’Astrée.

The Valle di Comino nearby is considered to be strong Samnite and subsections of the tribes home lands and the language generally spoken up to the Roman assimilations was Oscan part of the "Co" group of Indo-European languages. Ancient Roman basalt pavement in Arpino In the early Middle Ages, the Roman duchy and the Duchy of Benevento contended for its strategic position. After the 11th century it was ruled by the Normans, the Hohenstaufen and by the Papal States. It was destroyed twice; in 1229 by Frederick II and in 1242 by Conrad IV. The castrato sopranist Gioacchino Conti, known as Il Gizziello or heb ceilliau, was born in Arpino in 1714.

Francesco Ceccarelli (1752, in Foligno – 21 September 1814, in Dresden) was a castrato soprano known for his grace and excellent singing technique. After early opera appearances in his native Umbria, he sang mainly in the German- speaking countries and was thought better suited to church and concert music. He was notably engaged by Count Hieronymus von Colloredo as a court singer at Salzburg (1777–88), where he became a friend of the Mozart family; Mozart wrote a mass, K275/272b, and a rondò, K374, for him. At the premiere on 21 December 1777 of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Missa Brevis, K. 272b, Ceccarelli was among the soloists singled out for praise for his performance.p.

He was particularly proud of his Don Giovanni, a role that he learned from his predecessor, the Italian baritone Antonio Tamburini, and which Cotogni then passed on to the inheritor of his traditions, Mattia Battistini. Cotogni sang in the company of many of the most famous opera singers of his time—sopranos Adelina Patti, Teresa Stolz, Thérèse Tietjens, Marcella Sembrich, Christina Nilsson, Emma Albani, and Gemma Bellincioni; castrato Alessandro Moreschi; the Marchisio sisters; contralto Sofia Scalchi; tenors Mario, Francesco Marconi, Julián Gayarre, Angelo Masini, Pietro Mongini, Lodovico Graziani, Enrico Tamberlick, and Francesco Tamagno; baritones Charles Santley, Jean-Baptiste Faure, Francesco Graziani, Leone Giraldoni, and Mattia Battistini; and basses Foli, Eraclito Bagagiolo, and Édouard de Reszke.

"... and the opera of Attilio Regolo, for the birthday of the emperor Charles VI.; but that prince dying before it had been represented, it was laid aside, and not performed till 1750, when it was set by Hasse, for the court of Dresden. The poet laments the death of his patron with great sensibility, in a letter to a friend. Indeed it was a calamity to all Europe, by the general war which immediately ensued. This prince found in Metastasio a man who encouraged and confirmed his love of virtue," The role of Regolo was taken by the castrato Domenico Annibali, while the role of Attilia was composed for Hasse's wife Faustina Bordoni.

Handel had composed numerous Italian operas for the Academy, with varying degrees of success; some were enormously popular. The castrato Senesino and the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni had appeared in a succession of Handel operas for the Academy (he was not the only composer who composed operas for the company) most of which had been successful with audiences, and in 1726 the directors of the Academy brought over another internationally renowned singer, Faustina Bordoni, to add to the company's attractions. The two prima donnas had appeared in continental European countries in operas together without incident, but in London they developed rival groups of fans that interrupted the performances with rowdy displays of partisanship for one lady or another.

Colin W. Sargent, Ph.D., is an American author, magazine publisher, and playwright. His best-known works include his debut novel Museum of Human Beings, included in the National American Indian Heritage Month Booklist, which delves into the heart-wrenching life of Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, the son of Sacagawea; the play 100 Percent American Girl; and poetry books Luftwaffe Snowshoes, Blush, and Undertow. His novel, The Boston Castrato, was published in 2016 by Barbican Press of London and Hull, UK. According to London's Morning Star: "An extraordinary literary expression of the American nightmare." His newest book, Red Hands, is an account of the Romanian revolution in the voice of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s daughter-in-law.

In a 1717 revival of this opera Handel created a new scene for her and Nicolini, the brilliant castrato who had earlier originated the title role in Rinaldo. Around 1719 it seems that an illness caused her voice to drop from that of a soprano to that of a contralto. Upon the formation of Handel's Royal Academy of Music in 1719, Robinson was engaged on a yearly salary of £1000 and originated many new roles, most notably Zenobia (Radamisto), Irene (Muzio Scevola), Elmira (Floridante), Matilda (Ottone), Teodata (Flavio) and, most famously of all, the pathos-filled role of Cornelia in Giulio Cesare. She also sang in works by Bononcini and Ariosti, as well as a number of pasticcios.

Ned Raggett in his review for AllMusic writes, "The bombastic 'Innocence and Wrath' starts To Mega Therion off on just the appropriate note – Wagnerian horn lines, booming drums, and a slow crunch toward apocalypse. ... With that setting the tone, it's into the maddeningly wild and woolly Celtic Frost universe full bore, Warrior roaring out his vocals with glee and a wicked smile while never resorting to self-parodic castrato wails. 'The Usurper' alone is worth the price of admission, an awesome display of Warrior's knack around brute power and unexpectedly memorable riffs." According to Raggett, "other prime cuts" include "Circle of the Tyrants", "Dawn of Megiddo", "Tears in a Prophet's Dream", "Eternal Summer" and "Necromantical Screams".

Earlier in 1786, Mozart had produced a previous (musically only distantly related) score based on the same text, as an insertion aria for the character Idamante in a revised version of his 1781 opera Idomeneo, made for a private performance in Prince Auersperg's palace in Vienna. For that revival, Mozart reworked the role of Idamante (originally a castrato) for the tenor voice, and the substitution of this scena (recitative and rondò "", KV 490) for that of 1781 was only one of many changes that resulted from this recasting. The K. 505 setting was written for Nancy Storace, probably for her farewell concert from Vienna on 23 February 1787 at the Theater am Kärntnertor. Mozart himself very likely played the obbligato piano part (K.

Frederick, Prince of Wales by Philip Mercier Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, Princess of Wales by Charles Philips The German-born Handel had brought Italian opera to London stages for the first time in 1711 with his opera Rinaldo. An enormous success, Rinaldo created a craze in London for Italian opera seria, a form focused overwhelmingly on solo arias for the star virtuoso singers. Handel had presented new operas in London for years with great success. One of the major attractions in Handel's operas was the star castrato Senesino whose relationship with the composer was often stormy and who eventually left Handel's company to appear with the rival Opera of the Nobility, set up in 1733 and with the Prince of Wales as a major sponsor.

A Byzantine castrato from the 11th century Castration as a means of subjugation, enslavement or other punishment has a very long history, dating back to ancient Sumer. In a Western context, eunuch singers are known to have existed from the early Byzantine Empire. In Constantinople around 400 AD, the empress Aelia Eudoxia had a eunuch choir- master, Brison, who may have established the use of castrati in Byzantine choirs, though whether Brison himself was a singer and whether he had colleagues who were eunuch singers is not certain. By the 9th century, eunuch singers were well-known (not least in the choir of Hagia Sophia) and remained so until the sack of Constantinople by the Western forces of the Fourth Crusade in 1204.

In a letter written on 5 January, Francesco Gonzago asks his brother, then attached to the Florentine court, to obtain the services of a high quality castrato from the Grand Duke's establishment, for a "play in music" being prepared for the Mantuan Carnival. Striggio's main sources for his libretto were Books 10 and 11 of Ovid's Metamorphoses and Book Four of Virgil's Georgics. These provided him with the basic material, but not the structure for a staged drama; the events of acts 1 and 2 of the libretto are covered by a mere 13 lines in the Metamorphoses. For help in creating a dramatic form, Striggio drew on other sources—Poliziano's 1480 play, Guarini's Il pastor fido, and Ottavio Rinuccini's libretto for Peri's Euridice.

Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame often receives credit for fueling the movement to preserve the Gothic architecture of France, leading to the establishment of the Monuments historiques, the French governmental authority for historic preservation.Mapping Gothic France: Victor Hugo Rita Monaldi and Francesco Sorti's historical mystery saga Imprimateur Secretum Veritas Mysterium has increased interest in European history and features famous castrato opera singer Atto Melani as a detective and spy. Although the story itself is fiction, many of the persona and events are not. The book is based on research by Monaldi and Sorti, who researched information from 17th-century manuscripts and published works concerning the siege of Vienna, the plague and papacy of Pope Innocent XI.’’Imprimatur’’, p.

For the settings, she relied on her travels to Venice and Rome a few years earlier, and read the diary of German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe detailing his trip to Naples, although she found a lack of material on the conservatories. Rice wrote the first two hundred pages of Cry to Heaven as a contrast to Tonio's life as a castrato for the rest of the novel. She quickened her narrative pacing to suit her audience, in an attempt to remedy an issue that she felt had hindered the success of The Feast of All Saints (1979). Parts of her largely unpublished novella Nicholas and Jean (1963) were incorporated into Cry to Heaven, among them a female role being played by a man.

Ludovico Magnasco receiving the new constitution for the choir from Pope Paul III in 1545 Pope Sixtus IV, who reigned from 1471 to 1484, established the Cappella Musicale Pontificia as his permanent personal choir. It sang in the chapel of the Apostolic Palace which Sixtus had renovated to become his private chapel, originally called the Cappella Magna and later known as the Sistine Chapel. The choir was and remains all-male and sang without musical accompaniment (a cappella). It initially consisted of between 16 and 24 singers with the men singing the bass, tenor, and alto parts and pre-adolescent boys singing the soprano parts, although from the mid-16th century, adult castrato singers began to replace the boy singers.

In another application, the term bel canto is sometimes attached to Italian operas written by Vincenzo Bellini (1801–1835) and Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848). These composers wrote bravura works for the stage during what musicologists sometimes call the "bel canto era". But the style of singing had started to change around 1830, Michael Balfe writing of the new method of teaching that was required for the music of Bellini and Donizetti (A New Universal Method of Singing, 1857, p. iii),Toft, Bel Canto: A Performer's Guide, p. 92 and so the operas of Bellini and Donizetti actually were the vehicles for a new era of singing. The last important opera role for a castrato was written in 1824 by Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864).

In 1852, after much insistence from Faldi and castrato Domenico Mustafà, among others, he agreed to sign a contract for his debut at Rome's Teatro Metastasio, as Belcore in L'elisir d'amore. For the next year, he did not sing in public at all but rather studied assiduously with Faldi to build his repertoire. After an initial contract at Spoleto for Il trovatore and Maria di Rohan, he began to pick up consistent work in the Italian regional operatic circuit: Lanciano for Trovatore, Rigoletto, and Maria di Rohan; Orvieto for I masnadieri; Lucrezia Borgia in several cities; I puritani at Perugia. In the spring of 1857, he was signed by the impresario Jacovacci for Lucia di Lammermoor and Gemma di Vergy at Rome's Teatro Argentina.

The Foundling Hospital's own charity children did not sing in these performances, but instead the choir was formed from the Children of the Chapel Royal. At the performance of the revised score, the soloists were John Beard (tenor), Gaetano Guadagni (castrato), and two boy trebles from the Chapel Royal. It is not known why Handel chose to conclude this work with the "Hallelujah" chorus; the subject matter of the anthem is concerned with reward for the charitable, and Handel he may have intended to draw a theological connection with "the Kingdom of this world" becoming "the kingdom of our Lord", as illustrated in Christ's Parable of The Sheep and the Goats (). Equally, Handel may simply have wanted a rousing conclusion to the anthem.

In his Doktor Faustus, Thomas Mann refers to the first performance of Adrian Leverkühn's work Apocalypse as being under Otto Klemperer in 1926 at Frankfurt. The narrator role 'is here written for a tenor..., one of castrato-like high register, whose chilly crow, objective, reporter-like, stands in terrifying contrast to the content of his catastrophic announcements.... This extremely difficult part was taken and sung by a tenor with the voice of a eunuch,This description is a direct quote from Richard Wagner's disparaging expression for a high lyric tenor, see Ernest Newman, Life of Richard Wagner III (Knopf, New York 1948), 59. named Erbe ('von einem Tenoristen eunuchalen Typs names Erbe gesungen')... the singer had with the greatest intelligence grasped the idea.' (Ch XXXIV, conclusion).

Gluck revised the score again for a production by the Paris Opera premiering on 2 August 1774 at the second Salle du Palais-Royal. Renamed Orphée et Eurydice, this version had a French libretto by Pierre-Louis Moline, which expanded as well as translated Calzabigi's original. Gluck composed additional music and made other adjustments such as shifting Orpheus down to a high tenor, or haute-contre, from castrato, to suit the convention in French opera for heroic characters (the French almost never used castratos). The opera now had more ballet sequences, conforming to Paris taste, including the long "Dance of the Furies" originally written for Gluck's ballet Don Juan and the "Dance of the Blessed Spirits" for flute and strings.

215 (The Boydell Press); Winton Dean: "Handel's Sosarme, a Puzzle Opera", in: Essays on Opera . Handel composed Partenope, Poro, and Orlando, but with mixed success with the public. In the long run Handel failed to compete with the Opera of the Nobility, who had engaged musicians such as Johann Adolf Hasse, Nicolo Porpora and the famous castrato Farinelli. Frederick, Prince of Wales and the anti-German faction of the English nobility who backed the Opera of Nobility sought to gain ground against the German court by attacking the foreigner Handel, little concerned about the paradox of the situation: the nationalistic faction fought with the weapon of the foreign Italian opera and summoned the aid of foreigners such as Hasse, himself an Italianized German like Handel.

The cast included the great castrato Luigi Marchesi, who had earlier appeared only in minor roles, but was given one of the leading roles in this production. His singing was considered superb by the court of Munich, and Mysliveček used his influence with the management of the Teatro San Carlo to engage him for a series of operas in Naples in 1778-79. Mysliveček's intervention enabled Marchesi to establish himself permanently as one of the leading singers in Italy. Except for Marchesi's singing, the opera was not considered to have been particularly successful, and it was overshadowed by the overwhelming success of Mysliveček's oratorio Isacco, figura del redentore, which was performed in the same theater only a few weeks after the run of Ezio ended.

By the reign of João V, castrati had already been performing in Italy and other European countries since the mid-16th century, and by the mid-18th century there were many on the opera stage and in the patriarchal choir. The first to arrive in Lisbon were members of the choir of St Peter's Basilica, Rome who came to Lisbon in 1716 coinciding with the elevation of the collegiate church to patriarchal status. There was great curiosity among the public and many approved of what they were hearing. At the same time, there were negative responses: a report about gossip regarding the price at which meat from the castrati (carne de castrato) would be sold led the king to say he would punish anyone who derided them.

Although Mathias sent both of his future-composer sons away from home when they were young, he certainly did not lose interest in them. This is attested, for instance, by the letter quoted above, and by two visits he made to Vienna that were remembered decades later by Joseph and related to biographers. Of these, the more dramatic was one in which Mathias rescued Joseph from being turned into a castrato. Griesinger (1810) relates the tale thus:Griesinger 1810, 11 > At that time there were still many castrati employed at the court and in the > churches in Vienna, and the director of the Choir SchoolGeorg Reutter > doubtless supposed he was making young Haydn's fortune when he came up with > a plan to turn him into a soprano, and actually asked the father for > permission.

Walsh 1981, pp. 106, 311. Other successful revivals under Carvalho's leadership at the Théâtre Historique included André Grétry's three-act opéra comiqe Richard Coeur-de- lion (23 May 1856; 302 performances); Les noces de Figaro, a French translation by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré of Mozart's four-act comic opera Le nozze di Figaro (8 May 1858; 200 performances); L'enlèvement au sérail, a French translation by Prosper Pascal of Mozart's two-act opéra comique Die Entführung aus dem Serail (11 May 1859; 87 performances); and Gluck's Orphée (18 November 1859; 138 performances). The last had been translated from the original Italian by Pierre-Louis Moline when Gluck had adapted his Vienna version in 1774 for the Paris Opera, replacing the alto castrato role of Orfeo with the high tenor (haute-contre) role of Orphée.

The German-born Handel, after spending some of his early career composing operas and other pieces in Italy, settled in London, where in 1711 he had brought Italian opera for the first time with his opera Rinaldo. A tremendous success, Rinaldo created a craze in London for Italian opera seria, a form focused overwhelmingly on solo arias for the star virtuoso singers. Rinaldo, a "magic" opera featuring enchantments, sorceresses and scenic ingenuity, was followed by Il Pastor Fido, a shorter and simpler opera, which was not a success with London audiences at its first performances. The substantial revision of 1734, with the famed castrato Carestini, was much more successful, and the subsequent revival the same year featured dances by celebrated French ballerina Marie Sallé and her troupe, with specially composed music by Handel.

His successors have included such singers as Enrico Tamberlik, Jean de Reszke, Francesco Tamagno, Enrico Caruso, Giovanni Martinelli, Beniamino Gigli, Jussi Björling, Franco Corelli and Luciano Pavarotti, among others. After the unification of Italy in 1861, castration for musical purposes was officially made illegal (the new Italian state had adopted a French legal code which expressly forbade the practice). In 1878, Pope Leo XIII prohibited the hiring of new castrati by the church: only in the Sistine Chapel and in other papal basilicas in Rome did a few castrati linger. 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), and in 1902 a ruling was extracted from Pope Leo that no further castrati should be admitted.

Mount Edgcumbe, for instance, wrote in his Musical Reminiscences: "Her voice was of most extensive compass, rich and even, and without a fault in its whole range – a true voce di petto throughout".Mount Edgcumbe, R, Musical Reminiscences of an Old Amateur Chiefly Respecting Italian Opera in England for Fifty Years from 1773 to 1823, London, 1824, quoted by Grove Dictionary , I, p 304. She possessed, in fact, an exceedingly powerful voice, with an exquisite timbre and such remarkable flexibility, that she could fearlessly confront any kind of coloratura. Her singing style, according to sharpest comment by Vigée Le Brun, was very similar to the castrato Pacchiarotti's (alongside whom, in fact, Banti happened to be on stage in numberless occasions); which meant she was able to excel at expressive intensity.

From February 2019 will be Head of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology. She is also Adjunct Assistant Professor at IUPUI Department of History, IU School of Liberal Arts Her research covers a wide range of themes, from the history of how a new kind of consumer society emerged in Britain during the eighteenth century, to how global trade and economics shaped personal experiences, families and communities. She also has interests in the history of the mass media from the late-seventeenth century onwards; coffee house sociability and politeness; the history of gender and sexuality, particularly in the shifting definitions of marriage over time. Her most recent book, The Castrato and His Wife (published by OUP in 2011)explores the impact of Italian culture in the British Isles.

This was only a short engagement; but for most of the carnival season he was busy closer to home at Cesena where he impressed the audience with his performance in Valentino Fioravanti's dramma giocoso per musica Il bello piace a tutti. He delivered his main aria in the old rondo style imitating the celebrated mezzo-soprano castrato Gaspare Pacchierotti; his falsetto stunned the public and an ovation followed. De Begnis went on to Vincenzo Pucitta's farsa giocosa per musica La burla fortunata ossia I due prigionieri, and concluded the carnival season with the opera buffa La guerra aperta by Pietro Carlo Guglielmi. The latter he repeated in Mantova during spring, but before that, he appeared for the first time in Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri as the bey of Algiers, Mustafà.

The principal tenor role was handed to the experienced baritenor Giovanni Battista Pinacci, who had enjoyed a career lasting twenty years and had recently returned from London where he had performed in Handel operas;Winton Dean, Pinacci, Giovanni Battista, in Sadie, III, p. 1014. the second lady was sung by the young castrato Giovanni Tedeschi, later to become famous in the 1760s as the impresario of the Teatro San Carlo.Dennis Libby (with John Rosselli), Tedeschi [Amadori], Giovanni, in Sadie, IV, p. 674. The rest of the cast was made up of two obscure comprimario singers, Nicola Licchesi (Lucchesi?), a tenor, and Carlo Brunetti, a contralto (the only singer with this vocal register among the group of high voices), who were nevertheless gratified by the extra attention Pergolesi paid their roles in his score.

Cardinal Mazarin, raised in Rome, was an enthusiastic supporter of Italian culture, and imported Italian painters, architects and musicians to work in Paris. In 1644, he invited the castrato Atto Melani to Paris, along with his brother Jacopo and the Florentine singer Francesca Costa, and introduced the Italian singing style to the French capital. The Italian style was much different than the French style of the day; voices were stronger and the singing expressed stronger emotions, rather than the finesse of the classical French style. The following year the first performance of an Italian opera, La finta pazza by Marco Marazzoli, at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal on February 28, 1645, followed in 1647 by the more famous Orfeo of Luigi Rossi at the Petit-Bourbon theater next to the Louvre.

Plan by Lediard for on-stage firework display in the epilogue to the spectacle In Hamburg, where Handel had himself been a violinist in the opera orchestra, the arias were sung in Italian but the recitatives were translated into German by the Englishman Thomas Lediard. He also designed the stage set. The score was modified and augmented by the musician J. G. Linike: he added orchestral accompaniments in some of the recitatives and introduced six ballet scenes, with one for Cleopatra's attendants during the Parnassus scene and a grand ballet before the final chorus. Unlike the Braunschweig performance and perhaps because Linike had recently been to London, not all the male roles were sung by tenors and basses: Cesare was sung by a castrato and Sesto by a soprano.

Caricature of a performance of Handel's Flavio, featuring three of the best- known opera seria singers of their day: Senesino on the left, diva Francesca Cuzzoni in the centre, and art-loving castrato Gaetano Berenstadt on the right. Opera seria (; plural: opere serie; usually called dramma per musica or melodramma serio) is an Italian musical term which refers to the noble and "serious" style of Italian opera that predominated in Europe from the 1710s to about 1770. The term itself was rarely used at the time and only attained common usage once opera seria was becoming unfashionable and beginning to be viewed as something of a historical genre. The popular rival to opera seria was opera buffa, the 'comic' opera that took its cue from the improvisatory commedia dell'arte.

Born Giuseppe Francesco Finco in Este, he assumed the professional name of Farinelli after the famous castrato of that name in gratitude to the singer for his help in his musical education and his protection. He studied with Lionelli in Este and with Antonio Martinelli in Venice before going to Naples in 1785 to pursue studies at the Conservatorio della Pietà dei Turchini. While at the conservatory he was a pupil of Lorenzo Fago (harmony), Nicola Sala (counterpoint), Giacomo Tritto (composition), and Barbiello (singing). His first opera, Il dottorato di Pulcinella, displayed a talent for comedy and was performed at the conservatory in 1792 to an enthusiastic reception. His first opera performed in one of the public Italian opera houses was L’uomo indolente in Naples at the Teatro Nuovo in 1795.

When a castrato played Achilles, the unveiling of the "girl" forced the observation of a contrast between the fictional character who sheds his false gender identity on Scyros and the singer who cannot. Some directors such as Giulio Strozzi, Ippolito Bentivoglio, and Carlo Capece, chose to embody the spirit of Carnival: the greatest hero of antiquity puts on a female disguise to pursue his love and sexual desires. For later writers such as Pietro Metastasio and Paolo Rolli, the myth teaches that gender is essential, in that the masculinity of Achilles is a primal force of nature that cannot be hidden, and it is a crucial component of his heroism. The first treatment of the "Achilleid" for the operatic stage was La finta pazza, "the woman feigning madness," performed in Venice in 1641.

Giacomo David represents the typical baritonal tenor of the late 18th century, gifted with remarkable voice volume, but not lacking in high-pitching capability, though singing sharp notes in falsettone. He had mastery of coloratura for which he was famous: "he was able to compete with the castratos in the florid music and far exceed them in his dramatic intensity",Forbes and, by 1786 he was the first tenor in the history of Turin's Teatro Regio that was paid more than the primo uomothe leading castrato in the company during the carnival season. "Here was a sign that, with the castrati in decline, the tenor voice was beginning to engage the audience's interest as more than the stereotype utterance of kings and old men ...".John Rosselli, Singers of Italian opera.

Senesino, the famous castrato from Siena Handel's compositions include 42 operas, 25 oratorios, more than 120 cantatas, trios and duets, numerous arias, chamber music, a large number of ecumenical pieces, odes and serenatas, 18 concerti grossi and 12 organ concertos. His most famous work, the oratorio Messiah with its "Hallelujah" chorus, is among the most popular works in choral music and has become the centrepiece of the Christmas season. The Lobkowicz Palace in Prague holds Mozart's copy of Messiah, complete with handwritten annotations. Among the works with opus numbers published and popularised in his lifetime are the Organ concertos Op. 4 and Op. 7, together with the Opus 3 and Opus 6 Concerti grossi; the latter incorporate an earlier organ concerto The Cuckoo and the Nightingale in which birdsong is imitated in the upper registers of the organ.

King Philip V of Spain suffers from mental troubles which have made his counsellors deem him unfit to rule. As the play opens, he is seen fishing for his pet goldfish in a large brandy glass, then panicking when his Queen and second wife, the Italian Isabella Farnese, lights some candles, and extinguishing them with the water from the goldfish glass. Isabella travels to London, where she hears the famous castrato Farinelli sing and gets the idea that the inspiring and soothing power of his music could help her husband emerge from depression. She asks the impresario Rich, producer of The Beggar’s Opera, to present this proposal to Farinelli; he treats her contemptuously as just another crazed fan of Farinelli until she leaves and he reads her note and realizes to his horror that she really is the Queen of Spain.

The ceremony was to take place on 6 September; Guardasoni had been approached about the opera in June. No opera of Mozart was more clearly pressed into the service of a political agenda than ', in this case to promote the reactionary political and social policies of an aristocratic elite. No evidence exists to evaluate Mozart's attitude toward this, or even whether he was aware of the internal political conflicts raging in the kingdom of Bohemia in 1791.The political and social conditions surrounding the performance of ' in Prague in 1791 are carefully documented in In a contract dated 8 July, Guardasoni promised that he would engage a castrato "of leading quality" (this seems to have mattered more than who wrote the opera); that he would "have the libretto caused to be written...and to be set to music by a distinguished maestro".

The Royal Academy of Music collapsed at the end of the 1728 - 29 season, partly due to the huge fees paid to the star singers. Handel went into partnership with John James Heidegger, the theatrical impresario who held the lease on the King's Theatre in the Haymarket where the operas were presented and started a new opera company with a new prima donna, Anna Strada. In this new venture, Handel had found that revisions of previous English language works such as Acis and Galatea and Esther, together with a new oratorio in English, Deborah, were extremely popular with audiences, albeit with the same Italian singers who were currently appearing in his operas on the same stage, including the star castrato Senesino, who had been a mainstay of Handel's operas for years, and whose pronunciation of the English texts caused some ridicule.

The Royal Academy of Music collapsed at the end of the 1728 - 29 season, partly due to the huge fees paid to the star singers. A bitter rivalry had developed between the supporters of the two prima donnas who had appeared in Handel's last few operas, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni, culminating in June 1727 with a brawl in the audience while the two prima donnas onstage stopped singing, traded insults and pulled each other's hair, to enormous public scandal satirized in the popular The Beggar's Opera of 1728 and bringing Italian opera of the kind Handel composed into a certain amount of ridicule and disrepute. At the end of the 1729 season, both ladies and the star castrato Senesino who had appeared to great acclaim in numerous operas by Handel left London for engagements in continental Europe.

Handel opened his first season at Covent Garden with a re-working of his earlier Il Pastor Fido with an entirely new prologue, Terpsichore, featuring the internationally famous French dancer Marie Sallé. The pasticcio Oreste, which followed, also features dances unlike the operas Handel had previously composed for London. Anna Strada, who alone of the stars of Handel's previous operas had not defected to the rival opera company, was in the cast of Oreste, as she was in all of Handel's large-scale vocal works from 1729 to 1737. She was joined by celebrated castrato Carestini, of whom 18th century musicologist Charles Burney wrote: > “His voice was at first a powerful and clear soprano, which afterwards > changed into the fullest, finest, and deepest counter-tenor that has perhaps > ever been heard... Carestini’s person was tall, beautiful, and majestic.

Additionally, in a section in the book entitled, "Open Letter to My Lost France", Bardot writes that "my country, France, my homeland, my land is again invaded by an overpopulation of foreigners, especially Muslims". For this comment, a French court fined her 30,000 francs (€6,000 in 2019 euros) in June 2000. She had been fined in 1997 for the original publication of this open letter in Le Figaro and again in 1998 for making similar remarks.Bardot and John Paul II in Rome, 1995 In her 2003 book, Un cri dans le silence (A Scream in the Silence), she contrasted her close gay friends with today's homosexuals, who "jiggle their bottoms, put their little fingers in the air and with their little castrato voices moan about what those ghastly heteros put them through" and said some contemporary homosexuals behave like "fairground freaks".

In revising the latter opera, Gluck adapted for high tenor the male title role, originally intended for the alto castrato Gaetano Guadagni. During the long rehearsal bad-tempered Gluck is reported to have sometimes been very abrupt with the singer who seemed unfit to conform to his instructions. While coaching him in the opening chorus, Gluck addressed him like this: Nevertheless, Legros submitted himself to Gluck's rude coaching without protest and proved able to profit by it: at the premiere he turned out a quite new performer, to the Parisian musical circles' great surprise. "In considering what the role of Orpheus has done for M. Le Gros," commented Abbé Arnaud, a big fan of Gluck, "I am tempted to believe that the chevalier Gluck's music is more stirring and theatrical than that of any other composer".

His arrival upset the casting: the eccentricity of entrusting the role of a wicked father to a castrato, even though it might have been feasible with a tried and tested singer in his sixties, became unacceptable in the hands of a novice who was under 18, so it was decided to make some face-saving alterations. The part of Marziano was handed to the tenor Tolve while Giziello took over the less demanding role of Claudio, thus reverting to the standard company casting but forcing Pergolesi to revise his score at the last minute.Cotticelli, Patrizi, Puggioni. "Some arias were substituted, others were transposed downwards (from contralto to tenor) or upwards (from tenor to soprano)" and by the end the most satisfied performer was probably Tolve, whose character remained musically central, even keeping the virtuoso aria in the finale originally intended for Nicolino.

Between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the shortage of castrati among available opera singers compelled coeval composers to contrive substitutes for the roles of "primo musico" Viz leading castrato singer. in operatic companies. The solution that seemed the most immediate and the most according to tradition, was the so-called "contralto musico", or female singers—usually mezzo-sopranos rather than real contraltos—who could perform the roles originally written for castrati as well as the parts composed with female singers in mind. According to Rodolfo Celletti, in the first 35 years of the 19th century, more than 100 cases of original resort to the "contralto musico" can be counted up, and it was employed also by musicians of the rising post- Rossini generation, such as Donizetti, Mercadante, Pacini and Bellini.

The word "soprano" comes from the Italian word sopra (above, over, on top of),"Soprano", Encyclopædia Britannica as the soprano is the highest pitch human voice, often given to the leading female roles in operas. "Soprano" refers mainly to women, but it can also be applied to men; "sopranist" is the term for a male countertenor able to sing in the soprano vocal range, while a castrato is the term for a castrated male singer, typical of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, and a treble is a boy soprano who has not reached puberty yet and still able to sing in that range. The term "soprano" is also based on the Latin word superius which, like soprano, referred to the highest pitch vocal range of all human voice types. The word superius was especially used in choral and other multi- part vocal music between the 13th and 16th centuries.

There is a large body of music for the male soprano that was written when it was common to use a castrato – a voice type which, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists, as the practice of castrating trebles was abolished before the end of the 19th century. Sopranists are very rare, since most countertenors are altos and mezzos. In fact, probably because early famous countertenors were altos (like Alfred Deller), it was believed for a long time that countertenors can only be altos (and later, mezzo countertenors, like David Daniels or Jochen Kowalski were recognized). While there is some modern repertoire written for countertenors (sometimes written specifically for certain singers, like Britten's Death in Venice, which has a part that was written specifically for James Bowman), at present there are only a small number of modern pieces written specifically for the sopranist vocal type.

Autograph of Tolomeo, 1728 Tolomeo, re d'Egitto ("Ptolemy, King of Egypt", HWV 25) is an opera seria in three acts by George Frideric Handel to an Italian text by Nicola Francesco Haym, adapted from Carlo Sigismondo Capece's Tolomeo et Alessandro. It was Handel's 13th (or 14th if the one act Handel contributed to the collaborative opera Muzio Scevola is counted) and last opera for the Royal Academy of Music (1719) and was also the last of the operas he composed for the triumvirate of internationally renowned singers, the castrato Senesino and the sopranos Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni. The story of the opera is a fictionalisation of some events in the life of Ptolemy IX Lathyros, king of Egypt. An aria from the opera, Non lo dirò col labbro, was adapted by Arthur Somervell (1863–1937) as the popular English-language classic "Silent Worship" in 1928.

Angelica e Medoro is a 1720 serenata by Nicola Porpora to libretto by Metastasio, after Ludovico Ariosto. The opera, written to celebrate the birthday of the Habsburg emperor, Charles VI and performed 28 August 1720 Naples, Palazzo del Principe di Torella, marked the debut of the castrato Farinelli.Daniel Heartz, John A. Rice -From Garrick to Gluck: Essays on Opera in the Age of Enlightenment 2004 1576470814 "Born in Apulia in 1705, he was trained in Naples by Nicola Porpora, the performance of whose serenata Angelica e Medoro, written to celebrate the birthday of the Habsburg emperor, was the occasion of Farinelli 's debut in 1720. The poet was none other than Metastasio, who elaborated on the significance of the event in his preface to La Nitteti, set by Nicola Conforto and sent to Farinelli for its premiere at Madrid in 1756: "the affectionate name of twin, used between the Cavaliere ...

Gli Orazi e i Curiazi was very dear to Napoleon, especially in the Parisian performances of the singer Giuseppina Grassini who was for some time a lover of the Emperor, and of the castrato Girolamo Crescentini — both of whom had been the original creators of the major roles of Horatia and Curiatius in 1796. Grassini would almost always interpolate arias different from the original ones, mostly drawn from Portugal’s version.above all, two scenes and arias of Horatia: "Lascia almen ch’io riprenda ..." and "Frenar vorrei le lacrime ..." in Act One; "Popoli amici ..." and "Ah, pietà del pianto mio..." in Act Two (cf: Morelli-Surian, pp. 41 e 42) The opera has been a matter of renewed interest in modern times with several stagings beginning from the Genoese Teatro dell’Opera Giocosa’s in 1983, which was also the first world recording, with Curiatius played by the soprano Daniela Dessì.

In 1789 Banti returned to Venice's Teatro San Benedetto where she was the first protagonist of Anfossi's Zenobia in Palmira, which became one of her favourite roles, as well as Semiramide, a character she created in Bianchi's La vendetta di Nino, at the end of the following year. In June 1792 she took part in the inauguration of the new theatre La Fenice in Venice, opposite the castrato Gaspare Pacchierotti (who exerted a strong artistic influence upon her throughout her career), in the first performance of Paisiello's I giuochi d'Agrigento. After a brief season in Madrid in 1793, from 1794 to 1802 she was engaged, as the leading soprano, at London's King's Theatre, where she made her début as Semiramide in La vendetta di Nino. There she met Lorenzo Da Ponte, who later reported she had been vulgar, impudent, dissolute and even a drunkard.

She began her professional career specializing in charming portrayals of Rossini comic heroines (Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia, Isabella in L'italiana in Algeri, Angelina in La Cenerentola). She has performed these roles more than two hundred times with many of the major U.S. opera companies (including the Metropolitan, San Francisco, Dallas, Seattle, San Diego, Pittsburgh, and Minnesota Operas), as well as in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Amsterdam, Dresden, Munich, Montreal, Tel Aviv, Verona, Santiago and Perth. Her official debut took place in Florence in October 1994 as Isabella in L'Italiana in Algeri. Her role as the hero in Handel's Arminio was her first baroque role, and she continues to expand her repertoire, which currently includes 28 roles, 20 of which are pants roles (a woman—often a mezzo- soprano—playing a male character), and some of which were originally written for the castrato voice.

Derek Lee Ragin has recorded extensively for the Telarc, Philips, EMI, Erato and Capriccio labels, including Italian lute songs, G.F. Handel cantatas, and a disc of spirituals entitled Ev'ry Time I Feel the Spirit. His recording of Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms and the world premiere of the composer's Missa Brevis with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Robert Shaw won a Grammy Award, and his recording of Giulio Cesare with Concerto Köln received a Gramophone Award in 1992. Shortly after his Salzburg performance of Orfeo ed Euridice, he sang the role of Orfeo on the Philips recording of the opera with Sylvia McNair as Euridice and Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducting the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir. Farinelli, the film about the 18th century castrato won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Film in 1995, and the soundtrack won the Golden Record award the following year in Cannes.

Dean, W. & J.M. Knapp (1995) Handel's operas 1704–1726, p. 298. Handel had composed numerous Italian operas for the Academy, with varying degrees of success; some were enormously popular. The castrato Senesino and the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni had appeared in a succession of Handel operas for the Academy (he was not the only composer who composed operas for the company) most of which had been successful with audiences, and in 1726 the directors of the Academy brought over another internationally renowned singer, Faustina Bordoni, to add to the company's attractions. The two prima donnas had appeared in continental European countries in operas together without incident, but in London they developed rival groups of fans who interrupted the performances with rowdy displays of partisanship for one lady or another. This came to a climax on 6 June 1727 during a performance at the King's Theatre of Astianatte by Giovanni Bononcini with both singers onstage and royalty in the audience.

By the 1717–18 season she had been appointed ("chamber soloist") to Violante Beatrice, Grand Princess of Tuscany, performing at Florence, Siena, Genoa, Mantua, and Reggio nell'Emilia in operas by Orlandini and Carlo Francesco Pollarolo, and in Vivaldi's Scanderbeg . She also made her Venetian debut in 1718, singing the role of Dalinda in Pollarolo's Ariodante, in which, for the first time, she appeared on the same stage as Faustina Bordoni, later her great rival. They also sang together in Venice the following year in Michelangelo Gasparini's Il Lamano, and in Il pentimento generoso by Stefano Andrea Fiorè, in which the redoubtable duo were joined by the famous castrato Antonio Maria Bernacchi. Having appeared at Florence and Milan (1719), Bologna, Florence and Turin (1720), and Padua (1721), she returned to Venice for the season of 1721–22, singing in five operas, including Orlandini's Nerone: she sang Poppea, Faustina Octavia, while the fine contralto Diana Vico was Agrippina.

In 1749 the Benedict XIV decreed that the Accademia could award the title of Maestro di cappella. Among the early members of the academy were Giovanni Paolo Colonna (one of the founders of 1666), Arcangelo Corelli (1670), Giacomo Antonio Perti (1688), Giuseppe Maria Jacchini (1688), Giuseppe Maria Orlandini, Antonio Maria Bernacchi (1722), Giovanni Carestini (1726) and the celebrated castrato singer Carlo Farinelli (1730). The composer and teacher Giovanni Battista Martini taught at the Accademia from 1758; his pupils included André Ernest Modeste Grétry, Josef Mysliveček, Maksym Berezovsky, Stanislao Mattei (who succeeded Martini as teacher of composition), Johann Christian Bach, the noted cellist Giovanni Battista Cirri and, in 1770, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In the 19th and 20th centuries the institution was interlaced with such names as Gioacchino Rossini, Giuseppe Verdi, Arrigo Boito, Richard Wagner, Jules Massenet, Camille Saint-Saëns, Giacomo Puccini, and also with John Field, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, Anton Rubinstein, Ferruccio Busoni and Ottorino Respighi.

Handel went into partnership with John James Heidegger, the theatrical impresario who held the lease on the King's Theatre in the Haymarket where the operas were presented and started a new opera company with a new prima donna, Anna Strada. The cast Handel had assembled for his first opera in the new venture, Lotario, had included a castrato, Antonio Bernacchi, who had not been very popular with London audiences and with Poro Senesino made a triumphant return to the London stage, for even greater fees. Poro was a success with London audiences, as 18th-century musicologist Charles Burney wrote: > This opera, though it contains but few airs in a great and elaborate style, > was so dramatic and pleasing, that it ran fifteen nights successively in the > spring season, and was again brought on the stage in the autumn, when it > sustained four representations more.Charles Burney: A general history of > music: … Vol. 4.

Caricature of Margherita Durastanti, who created the role of Sesto Caricature of Gaetano Berenstadt, who created the role of Tolomeo The roles of Cesare and Cleopatra, sung by the castrato Senesino and famous soprano Francesca Cuzzoni respectively, and which encompass eight arias and two recitatives accompagnati each, make full use of the vocal capabilities of the singers. Cornelia and Sesto are more static characters because they are completely taken by their primary emotions, she with pain because of her husband's death and constantly constrained to defend herself from the advances of Achilla and Tolomeo, and he consumed by vengeance for his father's death. Cleopatra, on the other hand, is a multifaceted character: she uses at first her womanly wiles to seduce Cesare and gain the throne of Egypt, and then becomes totally engaged in the love affair with Cesare. She has great arias of immense dramatic intensity Se pietà di me non senti (II, 8) and Piangerò la sorte mia (III, 3).

Oskar Hagen, the German art historian whose programme of Handel operas in Göttingen led to an international revival in performances of Handel operas Thyra Leisner-Hagen, wife of Oskar Hagen and sister of the celebrated contralto Emmi Leisner, sang Cleopatra in Göttingen in 1922 Handel's operas were revived in the twentieth century by Oskar Hagen and other Handel enthusiasts in Göttingen, starting with Rodelinda in 1920 and Ottone in 1921. The first performance of Giulo Cesare was on 5 July 1922, with designs reminiscent of expressionist art, Bauhaus and silent film. Hagen's performing edition was significantly altered from Handel's score: it was translated into German, heavily edited and reorchestrated, with the male castrato roles transposed down for baritone, tenor or bass. A well as local singers for the chorus, the cast included Wilhelm Guttmann as Cesare, Thyra Hagen-Leisner as Cleopatra, Bruno Bergmann as Tolomeo, Eleanor Reynolds as Cornelia and G. A. Walter as Sesto.

The flowers and damaged fruit, and the cracked body of the lute, suggest the theme of transience: love, like all things, is fleeting and mortal. The choice of Franco-Flemish composers over native Italians – only Layolle was a native Italian – no doubt reflects the cultural (and political) affiliations of the pro-French Del Monte-Giustiniani circle. The still life elements are of an extremely high standard in all versions, the finely rendered fruit and flowers in two versions equalled by the textures of spinetta and flute in the other, and the artist has reproduced the initial notes of the madrigals so exactly that one can recognize the Roman printer, Valerio Dorica. The rather androgynous model could be Pedro Montoya, a castrato known to have been a member of the Del Monte household and a singer at the Sistine Chapel at about this time - castrati were highly prized and the Cardinal was a patron of music as well as of painting.

S. Angelo in the drama entitled Amore di figlia" (by Antonio Maria Zanetti) She was born in Florence in 1701, daughter of Alessandro, a lackey of African origin, nicknamed "il Moretto" (the Moorish one"), and of a Florentine woman, Maria Antonia Rapacciuoli. Her father was in the service of castrato Francesco ("Cecchino") De Castris (c1650 – 1724), who stood as the newborn girl's godfather along with famous soprano as the godmother: Tesi was evidently named after the latter. Thanks also probably to such uncommon connections with the entertainment scene, she had the opportunity to study singing (as well as acting and dance) first in Florence and then in Bologna where his family moved in 1715. The following year she commenced her operatic career at an exceedingly young age, performing in a revival of Emanuele d'Astorga's Il Dafni at Parma and later also appearing at Bologna. By 1718 she was virtuosa di camera for the Prince of Parma at Venice.

In the first, Moreschi's first side from his first recording session in 1902, he sings off key, and continues to do so for several bars.Opal CD 9823, track 7, passage from 2'04 to 2'16 Whatever modern opinion may be of his recordings, the enthusiastic applause of his colleagues attests to their appreciation on at least one occasion, as can be heard at the end of his rendering of Tosti's song "Ideale".this can be heard at the end of track 3 on OPAL CD 9823 The best-known piece Moreschi recorded is the Bach/Gounod "Ave Maria" (though the Sistine Chapel choir recorded Mozart's Ave verum corpus, Moreschi's voice is not individually audible). Perhaps only here does Moreschi's singing approach the type of star quality that the great castrato performances of the Baroque era must have possessed; there is great fervour in the singing – the above- mentioned "tear in every note" – and Moreschi takes the climactic high B natural without apparent effort.

His prospectus is more or less apologetic, but he had secured the services of a fairly good company, and in the course of the season Pasta was prevailed on to accept a portion of the salary due to her from the previous year in lieu of the whole amount, and to return to London. The board of works declaring the King's Theatre to be unsafe, the Haymarket Theatre was taken for a time, from the beginning of March until the middle of April. Rossini's Semiramide was brought out on 20 June, and Giacomo Meyerbeer's Il crociato in Egitto on 23 July, for the first appearance of Giovanni Velluti, the castrato, who was one of the great attractions of the year. At the end of the season Ayrton again retired, possibly on account of a difficulty which the management had had with Manuel García, the correspondence relating to which is published in the ‘Quarterly Musical Magazine,’ vii. 188–91.

It was a matter of tessitura, and not of range, for also the best gifted baritenors were capable, in leap singing, of reaching up to such high-pitched notes as D5. A clear exemplification on the field of the diversity of tessitura between the tenore contraltino and the baritenor is given by Celletti (p 167), comparing Rossini’s evidently different music writing of a same phrase from Ricciardo e Zoraide, whether intended to Ricciardo (David) or to Agorante (Nozzari). Such tenore contraltino characterization would be slightly attenuated after Rossini's moving to France, where it was possible to resort to the tradition of hautes-contre, who were equally versed in high singing, but rather more averse to castrato virtuosity, typical of Italian opera.Which is not to be held to the letter, if Joseph Legros had been nothing daunted by such a boldly virtuoso aria as "L'espoir renaît dans mon âme", perhaps by Ferdinando Bertoni, which had been interpolated in the Parisian version of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice.

Bust of Sabina (Collection of the Getty Center, Los Angeles) The libretto was composed for Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor and premiered in the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna on 4 November 1732. The scenes were designed by Antonio Galli da Bibiena (1697–1774). A revised version was first performed in 1733, with music by Giacomelli. Some of the later operas based on this libretto were also created for royal festivities: the version by Pergolesi was intended for the birthday of Elisabeth Farnese, the Queen of Spain, and premiered at the Teatro San Bartolomeo in Naples on 25 October 1734, with the castrato Caffarelli singing the part of Farnaspe, which was radically altered from the first version of just two years earlier. In the yet again altered version of 1735 by Francesco Maria Veracini, written for the short-lived but ambitious Opera of the Nobility in London, the same role was sung by Farinelli, joined in an all-star cast by Senesino, Francesca Cuzzoni and Antonio Montagnana (Burden 2007, 31).

The work was extremely popular and thus the form of the English oratorio was invented, almost by accident. Also in 1732, the earlier English- language masque Acis and Galatea was revised and presented at the King's Theatre as an English language serenata and in March 1733 a new English oratorio, Deborah, was performed as part of Handel's season at the King's Theatre, with the stars of the Italian opera singing in English, and the composer / impresario was so confident of the work's success that he doubled the price of admission for the first performance, causing some resentment and comment in the press. These three English language works, Esther, Acis and Galatea and Deborah, all contained leading roles for the celebrated Italian castrato Senesino, a star of Handel's operas and a great draw for London audiences since 1720, but he was not comfortable singing in English and although all three works were popular with audiences, his pronunciation of the English texts drew some comment and ridicule.Sherman, Bernard D: Inside Early Music, page 254.

Born at Lodi,See Howard, P: Happy birthday, Gaetano Guadagni (Musical Times, September 2007, pp. 93-96) Guadagni joined the cappella of Sant'Antonio in Padua in 1746, but also made his public operatic debut at Venice that year, which did not meet with ecclesiastical approval: he was dismissed from his position in Padua by 1748, and soon after appeared in London as a member of Giovanni Francesco Crosa ("Dr Croza")'s buffo (comic) company. He does not appear to have had the typical rigorous training that most castrati undertook (see castrato), which may account for his being described by the music historian Charles Burney as a "wild and careless singer" on his arrival in England. He was rapidly taken up in theatrical and musical circles in the capital, and also acquired a reputation for his sexual activities, as did many castrati. This was reported by Horace Walpole in a letter to Horace Mann dated 23 March 1749: > Delaval, a wild young fellow, kept an Italian woman, called the Tedeschi.

For example, Barthes is fascinated by the nuance of the double entendre, which most clearly fractures the traditional conception of signification: this play on words proffers two distinct and incompatible meanings that must be entertained simultaneously by the reader. The title S/Z refers to the clash between the ‘S’ of ‘Sarrasine,’ the male protagonist of the work, and the ‘Z’ of ‘Zambinella,’ the castrato with whom Sarrasine falls in love. Sarrasine is an artist who, functioning under the assumption that all beauty is feminine, regards Zambinella as the epitome of beauty, and therefore as the paradigm of femininity. Sarrasine’s Pygmalion-like sculpted image of the “female” La Zambinella accordingly represents the “complete woman.” This “masterpiece,” however, is highly problematic given its original starting point as a male body — and its refashioning into a female one through the psychological projections and artistic expertise of a man. What ultimately grounds the text is the fundamental destabilisation caused by Zambinella’s anatomy, which is perceived by Sarrasine as masterpiece, origin, and referent: in Zambinella, therefore, lies Sarrasine’s own potential for castration.

Handel's lease on the King's Theatre in the Haymarket expired at the end of the 1733 - 34 season, and the Opera of the Nobility moved into what had been Handel's artistic home for years. In addition to Senesino, the rival opera company had also hired the renowned castrato Farinelli, who created a sensation. These were considered serious setbacks for Handel as the French author Antoine François Prévost wrote in 1734: > He has so suffered great losses and written so many wonderful operas, which > proved to be utter failures, that he will be forced to leave London and > return to his home country but, undeterred, Handel moved into a new theatre, the Theatre Royal Covent Garden, built by John Rich largely on the proceeds of the extremely successful The Beggar's Opera which had parodied Italian opera of the kind Handel supplied for London. Rich had equipped his new theatre with the latest technology in stage machinery and also employed a troupe of dancers, which had not been the case at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket.

The current emphasis on a wide vocal range was primarily an invention of the Classical period. Before that, the vocal virtuosity, not range, was the priority, with soprano parts rarely extending above a high A (Handel, for example, only wrote one role extending to a high C), though the castrato Farinelli was alleged to possess a top D (his lower range was also extraordinary, extending to tenor C). The mezzo-soprano, a term of comparatively recent origin, also has a large repertoire, ranging from the female lead in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas to such heavyweight roles as Brangäne in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (these are both roles sometimes sung by sopranos; there is quite a lot of movement between these two voice-types). For the true contralto, the range of parts is more limited, which has given rise to the insider joke that contraltos only sing "witches, bitches, and britches" roles. In recent years many of the "trouser roles" from the Baroque era, originally written for women, and those originally sung by castrati, have been reassigned to countertenors.

Clapton, pp. 104–07 Moreschi's star status sometimes seems to have turned his head: "Moreschi's behaviour was often capricious enough to make him forget a proper professional bearing, as on the occasion after a concert when he paraded himself among the crowd like a peacock, with a long, white scarf, to be congratulated ..."translated from Devoti, L: Alessandro Moreschi detto "L’angelo di Roma" 1858–1922, in R Lefevre and A Morelli (eds): Musica e musicisti nel Lazio (Rome, 1985), p. 467 The Sistine Chapel Choir was run on traditional lines centuries old, and had a strict system of hierarchies. In 1886, the senior castrato, Giovanni Cesari, retired, and it was probably then that Moreschi took over as Direttore dei concertisti (Director of soloists).Clapton, pp. 116–17 In 1891 Moreschi took his turn as segretario puntatore, being responsible for the day-book of the choir's activities, and the following year was appointed maestro pro tempore, a largely administrative post concerned with calling choir meetings, fixing rehearsals, granting leave of absence and the like.

Critical opinion is divided about Moreschi's recordings:Haböck wrote glowingly of his live performance; see Die Kastraten und ihre Gesangskunst, pp. 185–86 some say they are of little interest other than the novelty of preserving the voice of a castrato, and that Moreschi was a mediocre singer, while others detect the remains of a talented singer unfortunately past his prime by the time he recorded. (Moreschi was in his mid-forties when he made his recordings.) Still others feel that he was a very fine singer indeed, and that much of the "difficulty" in listening to Moreschi's recordings stems from changes in taste and singing style between his time and ours. His vocal technique can certainly seem to grate upon modern ears, but many of the seemingly imperfect vocal attacks, for example, are in fact grace notes, launched from as much as a tenth below the note – in Moreschi's case, this seems to have been a long-standing means of drawing on the particular acoustics of the Sistine Chapel itself.

Dean, W. & J. M. Knapp (1995) Handel's Operas 1704–1726, p. 298. Ottone, an opera by Handel presented for the Academy in January 1723, was the first time London audiences had seen the operatic superstars, castrato Senesino and soprano Francesca Cuzzoni, performing together in an opera, and had been an immense success, with demand for tickets far outstripping supply Flavio, following Ottone in the same year and with the same leading singers, did not create such a sensation as Ottone had, although it was successful enough with audiences to be revived by Handel in a subsequent season. One reason for this may have been Flavio's comparative brevity, as announced in the playbills by the Academy > At the King's Theatre...this present Tuesday...will be performed a New Opera > call'd, FLAVIUS...By reason of the shortness of the Opera, to begin exactly > at Eight a-Clock. Flavio also mixes high tragedy with amorous intrigue and comic interludes, which was perhaps not what London audiences, who had become accustomed to heroic dramas on a consistent note of serious drama in Italian opera, were expecting.

From 1792 she returned fully to the stage in the theatres of Vicenza, Venice, Milan again, Naples and Ferrara. She sang (among others) in the first Scala performance of Zingarelli’s Artaserse (1793), in the première of Portugal’s Demofoonte (1794), in Bertoni’s Orfeo ed Euridice (Euridice), in Mayr’s Telemaco nell’isola di Calipso (première, 1797), in Cimarosa’s Artemisia regina di Caria (première, 1797) and in the first Fenice performance of Nasolini’s La morte di Semiramide (1798, title role). Her year of glory, however, was 1796, when she created two roles which remained in the repertoire for some decades and are now famous, in both appearing beside the soprano castrato Girolamo Crescentini, who was also Grassini's master and whose teachings she followed faithfully throughout her life. Nicola Zingarelli wrote the part of Giulietta for her in his opera Giulietta e Romeo, staged at Milan’s La Scala on January 30, while Domenico Cimarosa composed the role of Horatia (Orazia) in Gli Orazi e i Curiazi, staged instead in northern Italy’s second most important theatre, Venice’s La Fenice, on December 26.

Despite this lack of success he gave England an important legacy in the form of his son Domenico, who settled permanently there, first as a singer and later as a singing teacher, a prominent figure in English musical life of that period. Having returned to Italy, Gaetano pursued his career for several years mainly in the northern theatres, as for example at La Scala, where he sang in La clemenza di Tito at its 1818 revival,After this it had to wait a further 133 years for another performance. cf. Giorgio Guarlerzi, 'Tito era un clemente, ma in Italia pochi lo sanno,' in Silvia Camerini (ed), La clemenza di Tito, Programme of the Teatro Municipale Valli Reggio Emilia Bologna, Nuova alfa editoriale (1988), pp. 146-47 or at Venice’s La Fenice, where he played opposite Giuditta Pasta in the first performance of Giuseppe Nicolini’s La conquista di Granata; in 1821, opposite the prima-donna Francesca Maffei Festa, in the première of Saverio Mercadante’s opera Andronico; and in 1824 in the first performance of Meyerbeer's Il crociato in Egitto, the last major opera with a role for a castrato (played then by Giovanni Battista Velluti).

She could however rely upon a voice of great power and volume and, at the same time, of considerable pliability, to which she added excellent interpretative capability and, moreover, extraordinary physical beauty. This last quality made her not only the subject of many love affairs but also the ideal model for many contemporary painters including Andrea Appiani. Faithful to her "old" Crescentini was in reality only seven years older than Grassini, but, given the very early training undertaken by the castrati, the separation between them in terms of duration of experience and artistic maturity probably appeared wider. master and partner Crescentini's musical ideals, Grassini would always stand beside such singers as the castrato Gaspare Pacchiarotti, the tenors Matteo Babini, Giovanni Ansani and Giacomo David, the prime-donne Brigida Banti and Luísa Todi de Agujar. These were the singers who opposed the belcanto drift of the second half of the 18th century, with its break-neck run after extremely high notes and aimlessly pyrotechnic, inexpressive, and therefore absurd coloratura; and who endeavoured, instead, to recover “the passion and vigour” that had permeated the golden age of singing of the first half of the century.

Change was in sight because José's interest in opera was so strong that he managed to build in the Ribeira Palace library one of Europe's largest collections of opera scores, and before a year of his father's death had passed he was already recruiting Italian opera singers and others to establish a professional opera company within the court's structure.In the first instance, he had the Marquis of Pombal corresponding with their ambassador in Rome offering a contract to the castrato soprano singer Gioacchino Conti (nicknamed Gissiello in honour of his teacher Domenico Gizzi). The original offer was a joint posting to the Patriarchal and the Royal Chamber; but association with the Patriarchal was removed after protests from Conti. The bigger issue was about financial and other benefits, and despite Pombal's concern that the demands were exorbitant, in the end José had no hesitancy in offering Conti house, board and carriage as well as the right to leave after one year of service, and an unspecified sum of money. Other singers were approached at this time including German-born tenor Anton Raaff who sang in Lisbon for three years up to 1755.(See Brito, Opera in Portugal, pp. 24–25.