Denaturing the Castrato

Denunciations

In the late-eighteenth century, the brilliant vocal art of the castrati had started to cloud over with charges of aristocratic luxury, vanity, and decadence, charges that were inseparable from Enlightenment critiques of castration itself. The Bolognese marquis Francesco Albergati Capacelli (1728–1804) penned strident denunciations on both fronts, including them in the inflated preface he attached to his newly printed comedy Il ciarlator maldicente (The Badmouthing Chatterbox):

I owe. . . a public pronouncement to Truth. In speaking against castrati, . . . I inveigh against their profession, their state, and the unworthy principle of maintaining, feeding, fomenting, cherishing, and rewarding it. . . . the time has come to stop sacrificing these wretched victims. Is it not enough that a throat and the [lure of] luxury should expose the lives of so many people to such calamities? . . . that people should nevertheless want to reduce men to vile disgusting monsters simply to have their ears tickled with a little aria?¹

Albergati remonstrated in the teeth of the still-wide popularity of castrati onstage and in church, in Italy, London, and elsewhere, much of it perpetuated not just by their singular command over virtuosic agility singing but also by the capacity of many for highly nuanced, immaculately controlled expressivity. Yet at the same time, there were coercive new moral forces at work that made castrati out as the depravities of the age. A central character in Il ciarlator maldicente is a foppish castrato with the ridiculous name of Meneguccio Sfrontati detto lo Scarpinello, a name reminiscent of the blind singer of tales Menecuccio in Alessandro Tassoni's mock-heroic epic La secchia rapita (1621), who is chased away by laughter.²

Ironically so, for by the 1780s castrati were not the laughing matter they had been in satires fifty and a hundred years earlier. Denunciations of them had now become commonplace, even de rigueur. To denounce castrati was to utter a liberal cry to preserve Nature by condemning any cruel perversions that might threaten to disfigure her, where "Nature" was a new Enlightenment divinity that had to be protected from threats of disfiguration and where safeguarding her was a matter of social, political, and metaphysical principle.³ Drawing on a bourgeois language of moral outrage, Albergati continued: "After such barbarity has made these miserable men vile and deformed, destined for denatured song, a . . . dreadful education, the study of nothing but singing, [and] the frequent burden of conversing with others of like kind, then caresses, ignorant applause, [and] the gold of madmen and squanderers add to making them ever more audacious and wicked."⁴

Caresses, adulation, money. This unholy trinity had often attached to castrati in earlier decades, but there was a new lug and tow to Albergati's words.⁵ It was not just that castrati were impudent wastrels or that their fans were dissolute boors, but that their very humanness was challenged by what had only recently come to seem their ambiguous sex. A telling dictum in the front matter of Albergati's play thus required that lo Scarpinello be played either by a real castrato or by a young actor speaking in falsetto, "but never by a woman dressed like a man."⁶ Acting the part of the wrong sex was now one degree removed from being (like a castrato) denatured, vile, and deformed. In the new order, Claudius would have to be played by Claudio and Claudia by Claudia. Though in practice no consistency on the matter existed for decades to come, the impulse to typify sexual difference by representing ideal sexual categories onstage (and elsewhere) was coming of age. It was of a piece with new bourgeois notions that wanted clear dimorphic sexual morphologies, that gave new moral sanction to intersex marriage and proscribed same-sex affairs, and that elevated the status of parenthood and the nuclear family.⁷ The subtext in all such reorientations (not always so "sub") was a quest for "truth to" Nature—that most promiscuous of signs—a quest to make things seem what they allegedly were, or were supposed to be. In this new sexual order, castrati were negatively recruited as antitypes to ideal men.

Skies had never...