Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage, and Music in the Life of Atto Melani by Roger Freitas (review)

Discussions of opera or of the cantata in the scholarly literature revolve ever more strongly around the protagonists of performance, particularly the singers whose physical accomplishments we treasure when we enjoy their art. Indeed, concern for singers and their accomplishments has often permitted scholars to ignore what the virtuosos are singing or to examine it principally from a viewpoint that composers such as Verdi would have scorned (Verdi would not sanction even a phrase such as “singer Y created role X”: as far as he was concerned, only the composer created a role.)

No bodies have fascinated modern authors more than those of the castrated males whose art was fundamental to the contemporary success of much seventeenth- century cantata and opera, and to the works of no less a composer than George Friedrich Handel in the eighteenth century. (By the nineteenth, the practice of castrating young boys so their voices would not change no longer prevailed, not even in Italy.) As works by Cavalli, Carissimi, or Handel have been heard with increasing frequency in modern venues, and as countertenors have emerged to sing parts originally written for castratos, the nature of the castrato voice has demanded our attention. Martha Feldman’s work on an eighteenth-century castrato and her studies of the family of the man normally referred to as the “last” of the professional castratos, Alessandro Moreschi, have extended our knowledge enormously. And now, Roger Freitas’s book about Atto Melani from Pistoia (an important center of castrati in the seventeenth century) and his brothers offers new insights into the life of the man who was considered to be the most important singer of his age.

What, unfortunately, such books do not (cannot) do is allow us to understand better Atto’s art. An enormous amount of documentation in the form of letters to one patron or another pertaining to Atto survives, and from it we learn about his efforts to put aside his musical gifts, which were those of a paid underling, in order to embrace the life of a courtier, whose most important gifts to his patrons often involved trading information about other courts and political situations. Although Atto spent much of his life as a musical servant of Prince Mattias de’ Medici of Florence, he sought a different position in the French court, first supported by an Italian patron, Cardinal Mazarin. But after the latter’s death and a period in disgrace, Atto had to settle for a far weaker position in the court of Louis XIV. Yet this was not the only time he sought to trade his status as a musician for the higher status of a gentleman or courtier. There are fascinating letters to members of the papal court in Rome (he was apparently an intimate of Giulio Rospigliosi, who became Pope Clement IX), to the rulers of Mantua and Modena, and to others of that ilk.

From the point of view of Atto, the desire to leave behind his musical art is fully intelligible. From our point of view, however, his musical art is fundamental to why we care about him at all. Freitas writes a chapter devoted to the few surviving secular cantatas written by Atto: it is, however, rough going for nonmusicians. About Atto’s singing, though, there is apparently very little solid evidence. Presumably a great deal could be learned by examining closely the repertory he actually sang, but Freitas makes no effort to investigate this matter. What he does do, however, is quite amazing: there is so much outstanding material about Atto’s life here that one is hardly surprised to find many references to other scholars who have attempted, always partially, to look at some of this material before. Indeed, with his many citations of the work of Margaret Murata, Lorenzo Bianconi, Stefano Guazzo, Gloria Rose, John Hill, Carolyn Gianturco, and countless others, Freitas’s book serves as a...