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13 “BENEATH MY WINDOW” On the night of 15 May 1829, Felix Mendelssohn had a nightmare about Giovanni Battista Velluti, the last great operatic castrato. Velluti’s voice had been in the German ’s head since that afternoon, when they crossed paths at a concert at the Argyll Rooms on Regent Street in London. There he had heard the “poor wretched creature ,” as he called him, sing an aria by Bonfichi and a duet with Henriette Sontag, Mayr’s “Deh! Per pietà” from Ginevra di Scozia. The singing of the “confounded” Italian “so excited my loathing,” Mendelssohn remembered, “that it pursued me into my dreams that night.”1 Three days later the young composer-performer was at his desk at 103 Great Portland Street writing to a friend. Outside he again spied the castrato going about his chores. “Velluti,” he wrote, “is just passing beneath my window.” His simple observation seemed to pinpoint the cultural position of a singing species that would not go away.2 This was the fate of the castrato: he haunted cosmopolitan European culture, lurking just below its “window.” When the critic for the New Monthly Magazine heard Velluti’s London debut as Armando in Meyerbeer’s Il crociato in Egitto and his opening accompanied recitative, “Popoli dell’Egitto,” in 1825, he wrote that they “came upon the ear like the spectral moan of an unearthly being.”3 The critic’s language , as we shall see, was fired by a press dispute instigated by the Times in relation to this performance. A year later, the New Monthly Magazine rejoined that Velluti’s Armando “had to us something unearthly in it.” “On seeing the thin, tall form tread the stage in armour, we felt a sensation which we cannot describe,” the writer mused. “It seemed as if we saw a spirit glide before us.”4 The male soprano, 1 “Veluti in Speculum” The Twilight of the Castrato 14 “Veluti in Speculum” for this critic, was a “twilight figure,” encountered as if one were inhabiting a dream. It was little consolation that Meyerbeer had composed Armando for and in collaboration with Velluti. In Paris, Honoré de Balzac constructed the hallucinatory world of Sarrasine (1830) around the specter of the castrato’s presence. The novella was probably written with Velluti in mind, the singer having visited Paris in April 1825 on his way to London.5 “I was deep in one of those daydreams,” the now-famous story opens, “which overtake even the shallowest of men.” By way of explaining the strange wealth of the De Lanty family and the “fragile machine” who lives in their midst, Balzac’s narrator tells the tale of a castrato and a young sculptor named Sarrasine. While in Rome, the Frenchman falls madly in love with the singer, believing him a woman. Sarrasine’s error is revealed too late, only after he has desired too much. The story ends when Cardinal Cicognara, the castrato’s patron, has the dangerously unstable sculptor murdered in order to protect his prize singer. As events unfold, it becomes clear that the source of the De Lanty’s wealth is the shadowy half man who now lives in their mansion. The “real” backdrop for this story of extravagance, deception, and death—told in terms of reminiscence and metaphor—rests on his unsettling provision.6 The generation of Balzac and Mendelssohn, in other words, imbued the figure of the castrato with its phantasmic charge.7 Donning my psychoanalytic cap, I might claim that this generation pressed the whole notion of castration into its psychological or culturally repressed sphere. This would be the argument of Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More (2006), which—in well-rehearsed Freudian style—links our “fascination” for vocal sound to castration. (Dolar defends psychoanalytical notions of “the object voice” by describing it not in the Derridean sense as productive of fantasies of self-presence, but as always already differentiated—as proof of subjective lack.)8 Beguiled by this uncanny sense of voice, I could argue that castration anxiety emerged as the founding moment of adult sociability and subjectivity at the time of Mendelssohn’s dream.9 (The word “subconscious” in the English language, after all, was apparently first used by essayist Thomas De Quincey as late as 1823.) Such a position might seek out early articulations of the phallus as causative principle not only for gender differentiation but for the whole possibility of intersubjective desire. Mendelssohn’s eerie encounters with Velluti thus might...

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