In 1902, in the Sistine Chapel's choir loft, a forty-three-year-old Italian singer named Alessandro Moreschi stood before the horn of a primitive gramophone and recorded a voice from another century. The recordings that survive — wobbly, ghostly, strange to modern ears — are the only solo audio testimony we have of the castrati: male singers castrated before puberty so that their boyish vocal range would ride, for life, on the lungs and chest of a grown man. For over two centuries this voice dominated European music. Moreschi, who died in 1922, was its last professional carrier; when he fell silent, an entire category of human voice went extinct.
The practice grew out of a prohibition. Following the apostle Paul's instruction that women keep silent in churches, women were barred from Catholic church choirs, and in the sixteenth century the papal choir needed high voices that boys — whose voices broke just as their training matured — could not reliably supply. Castrati, long known in Byzantine church music, offered a solution, and by 1600 they were established in the Sistine Chapel itself. The operation, performed on boys typically between eight and ten, prevented the larynx from maturing while the body grew — often unusually tall, with an enormous ribcage that gave the adult singer a child's pitch delivered with overwhelming power and legendary breath control. It was also illegal, mutilating and frequently lethal; families and surgeons maintained elaborate fictions about riding accidents and animal bites to explain each boy's condition.
The first superstars
What made the castrati a mass phenomenon was not the church but opera. As Italian opera conquered Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, castrati became its leading men — and its first international celebrities, complete with extravagant fees, fan hysteria and diva behaviour. The heroic roles Handel wrote in London for stars like Senesino assumed a castrato's combination of soprano brilliance and adult stamina. Greatest of all was Farinelli — born Carlo Broschi in 1705 — whose voice was described by contemporaries in the language of miracles. At the height of his fame he abandoned the stage for the strangest residency in musical history: engaged by the Spanish court, he sang for King Philip V, who suffered from crippling melancholia, in private performances night after night — the same handful of arias, legend insists — for around a decade, becoming one of the most influential men at court without holding office. He died wealthy in Bologna in 1782.
Behind each Farinelli stood thousands of forgotten boys. In eighteenth-century Italy, historians estimate that thousands were castrated each year, overwhelmingly from poor families gambling a son's body against a conservatory education and a shot at fortune. The overwhelming majority never achieved fame: the mediocre voices ended up in provincial church lofts, or nowhere. Enlightenment critics condemned the trade even as audiences applauded its products, and the contradiction was never resolved — merely exported to the next generation.
Extinction
The decline came with changing taste and changing law. Opera abandoned the castrato hero for the tenor in the early nineteenth century; Napoleonic and then Italian law banned castration for musical purposes, with the unified Kingdom of Italy outlawing it in 1870. The Sistine Chapel remained the final refuge, employing castrati to the century's end, until Pope Pius X formally ended the practice of admitting them in 1903, decreeing that high parts belong to boys. Moreschi — nicknamed in his prime "the Angel of Rome" — was pensioned rather than replaced, and his 1902 and 1904 recordings, made when he was past his best and the technology worse, remain a tantalising, contested document: some hear a ruin, others the last flicker of what audiences once fainted over.
Today the castrato repertoire survives in other throats — countertenors singing in falsetto, and mezzo-sopranos in trousers — while films and novels circle Farinelli's strange glamour. The fascination is uncomfortable by design: this was a musical culture that accepted the surgical alteration of children as a price of beauty, and its masterpieces cannot be separated from that bargain. Moreschi's records preserve about as much of the truth as a photograph preserves a cathedral. The rest we take on the word of the eighteenth century, which swore it was the most beautiful sound in the world — and made sure, boy by boy, that we would never be able to check.
Quiz nuggets
- Castrati were male singers castrated before puberty; women were banned from Catholic church choirs, and castrati sang in the Sistine Chapel from around 1600.
- Farinelli (Carlo Broschi, 1705–1782), the most famous castrato, sang privately for Spain's King Philip V night after night for about a decade.
- Alessandro Moreschi, the last Sistine castrato, made the only solo castrato recordings in 1902–1904 and died in 1922.
- The unified Kingdom of Italy banned castration for musical purposes in 1870, and Pope Pius X ended castrati admissions to the Sistine choir in 1903.
- Handel wrote heroic London opera roles for castrato stars such as Senesino.