The Castrato as Theater by Claire van Kampen (review)

"Farinelli… he will be known when we are long extinguished," opines the character of Elizabeth Farnese, the wife of Philip V of Spain, toward the end of Claire van Kampen's recent play Farinelli and the King. "Time will record us as echoes only; distant stars; tricks of the light." ¹It is a bit of a sentimental moment, but van Kampen is right that the famous castrato, born Carlo Broschi (1705–1782), has remained almost continuously present in the minds of the opera-loving public since the heyday of his career in the 1720s and 30s, thanks to reimagining after reimagining of his voice and life. The stories began during his lifetime, continued into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in the last twenty-five years have become part of a kind of postmodern opera folklore. There was Gérard Corbiau's film Farinelli(1994), which did for Farinelli a little of what Amadeusdid for Mozart, making him glamorous and sexy (and clichéd). There was the turn-of-the-century opera seriarevival and the echoes of his voice and body in performances of works by Johann Adolf Hasse and Nicola Porpora. There have been recorded homages, by mezzo-sopranos, countertenors, and even conductors. There have been popular novels and scholarly studies. And now there is van Kampen's play, which premiered in London as part of the Globe Theatre complex in 2015, transferred a few months later to the West End, and just enjoyed a run in New York City on Broadway.

There is, ofcourse, a profound irony to Farinelli's imaginative omnipresence, for the singer and the larger figure of the castrato are among the most irretrievably lost of all the voices and presences of our operatic past. As is well known, boys began to be castrated for music in Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century, and the resulting full-voiced adult sopranos became central to the aesthetics and practice of opera for about one hundred and fifty years, from approximately the 1640s to the 1790s, though as early as the 1740s the custom was coming under moral and aesthetic pressure, and by the early nineteenth century it had fallen out of favor. We have not only lost Farinelli's voice, but we will—hopefully—never again hear anything like it. But this is one of the reasons for Farinelli's appeal, and why we keep retelling his story. We tell stories to compensate for absences, and the continuous reimaginings have perhaps been one way in which the operatic world has kept not only Farinelli's but also opera's many other lost voices and presences still resounding and alive.

Farinelli and the Kingoffers a new version of these stories. The play focuses not on Farinelli's years of greatest celebrity, when first in Italy and then in London he became renowned for the power and beauty of his voice, his extraordinary agility and yet also his ability to communicate deep pathos, and his skillful negotiation of the many demands of an international singing career. Rather, van Kampen sets her play toward the end of this period, when Farinelli was hired by the real Elizabeth Farnese as a kind of personal singer-therapist for her husband, who had long suffered from insomnia and depression (or, as it was called at the time, "melancholy"). Farinelli and the Kingbegins with a withdrawn and troubled Philip trying to converse with a goldfish while courtiers prepare to have him removed from power and his wife tries anxiously to save him. Farnese hears Farinelli on a trip to London and arranges for him to come to Madrid, and his singing does indeed seem to soothe and even "cure" the monarch. In the central section of the play, Philip, Farnese, and Farinelli retreat to Philip's country estate and live happily together (Philip was French and there is a lot of Marie...