The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850

Author(s): John Rosselli

Source: Acta Musicologica, Vol. 60, Fasc. 2 (May - Aug., 1988), pp. 143-179
Published by: International Musicological Society
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Accessed: 28-11-2016 11:42 UTC

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 143

The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social

Phenomenon, 1550-1850*
JOHN ROSSELLI (BRIGHTON)

i. Introduction
The castrati are recognised as an important phenomenon in the history of Western
vocal music, first noticed in the latter half of the sixteenth century, dominant in
Italian music through most of the seventeenth and eighteenth, and coming to an end
for practical purposes at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth. A certain amount
has been written about them as a group, much more about individual singers and
about institutions in which they played an important part. The purpose of this study
is not to produce a great deal of new information, though some will be brought
forward. It is rather to bring together the knowledge already available, much of it
won by recent scholarship, to raise questions about the quality of this knowledge,
and to suggest new or partly new ways of situating the castrati within the society of
their time.

The castrati - we had better acknowledge at once - have long been an

embarrassment. That substantial numbers of boys should have been castrated, not
in antiquity or in another continent but in early modern times and at the heart of
Western Christendom, arouses fear, distaste, sometimes a prurient interest. Those at
any rate have been the usual reactions since the mid eighteenth century. One need
not accept in every particular Freud's notion of the castration complex to see why
comments on this group have often been jocular or hostile, or why so much of the
literature has been anecdotal, concerned with the eccentric and the grotesque. Jokes
and anecdotes have kept the castrati safely on the margin of everyday life.
Awareness of our own feelings should help us to see that, on the contrary, they were
for many years at the centre of social life in the courts and towns of Italy, and played
some part in that of areas under Italian cultural influence, particularly southern
Germany and the Iberian peninsula.
We should also begin by acknowledging how much we do not and probably
cannot know. We cannot hear castrato voices; the few recordings made in the
infancy of the gramophone only hint at a sound now lost. We cannot interrogate
castrati; this is true of many people studied by historians, but even when there were
still castrati living those scholars who were interested in them were too embarrassed

* The present study is based on research carried out on a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council of the
United Kingdom. I am grateful to Peter Burke and Thomas Walker for commenting on an early draft. The following
abbreviations are used (in addition to those listed in MGG): GB-Lbl: British Library, London; I-Bas: Archivio di Stato,
Bologna; I-Bc: Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale, Bologna; I-MOe: Biblioteca Estense, Modena; I-MOs: Archivio
di Stato, Modena; I-Na: Archivio di Stato, Naples; I-Nc: Biblioteca del Conservatorio di S. Pietro a Majella, Naples; I-
Nn: Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples; I-Ras: Archivio di Stato, Rome; I-Rvat: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rome; I-Sc:
Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, Siena; I-Vas: Archivio di Stato, Venice; I-Vmc: Museo Civico Correr, Venice;
Note d'Archivio: Note d'Archivio per la Storia Musicale; NRMI: Nuova Rivista Musicale Italiana; RIDM: Rivista
Italiana di Musicologia.

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144 J. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850

to ask searching questions.' We do not really know how they were operated on or
what the effects were on human characteristics other than the voice. Nor do we even
know exactly who were or were not castrati; hence we can make only a rough
estimate of how many there were at any time.
As often happens, the castrati attracted most notice when they were in decline.
The sources that have most influenced later accounts are the writings of travellers to
Italy in the last two-thirds, particularly in the last third of the eighteenth century.
Most influential of all were the French astronomer and travel writer Lalande and the
English musicologist Charles Burney. Lalande, after confirming the myth of Naples
as "the chief source of Italian music, of great composers and excellent operas,"
asserted that nearly all castrati were made ("fa<onnes") in Naples and, by
implication, that they trained in the music schools (conservatorii) of that city to sing
in opera; those who failed were allowed to become priests. Burney reported that
Italians "are so much ashamed at the practice of making them that every single city
says it is not there, but names some other place"; in Naples he was told that they
came chiefly from Lecce in Apulia - about as far from the capital as it was possible
to get. Surgeons who operated on them, he believed, risked the death penalty and
excommunication. He too dwelt on the importance of Neapolitan music and of the
conservatorii; he deplored the number of voiceless or mediocre castrati to be found
"in every great town throughout Italy... Indeed all the musici in the churches at
present are made up of the refuse of the opera houses..."2 Thus castrati were firmly
associated with Naples (or the Kingdom of Naples), with the Naples conservatorii,
with opera, and with a deep sense of shame and repugnance in the Italian society
that had produced them. All this probably matched well enough, if not the reality, at
least people's real impressions of Italy about 1770.
Such impressions were further vulgarised by republicans and democrats of the
Napoleonic period (who denounced the castrati and the opera seria they had
specialised in as luxuries cultivated by effete absolutist courts) and by their
Risorgimento successors: to make the point that opera singers of the 1860s were
respectable, Antonio Ghislanzoni denounced the castrati (still assumed to have been
dedicated to opera) as, in contrast, "degraded beings, the rightful targets of public
contempt."3 Even the most scholarly theatre historians of the late nineteenth century,
such as Alessandro Ademollo, Corrado Ricci, and Benedetto Croce, were scarcely
able to deal with castrati in other than a jocular manner.4 In our own century two
monographs took a more sympathetic attitude, without straying far outside the

1 Hab6ck in 1914 interviewed Alessandro Moreschi, the last notable castrato to sing in the Papal Chapel, but asked him
only anodyne questions: F. HABOCK, Die Kastraten und ihre Gesangskunst (Stuttgart 1927), p. 126-27.
2 [j.-J. LE FRANCOIS DE LALANDE], Voyage d'un Franqois en Italie (Venice-Paris 1769), VI, p. 345-49; CH.
BURNEY, Men, Music and Manners in France and Italy (ed. H. E. Poole, London 1969), p. 128, 163-64. Cf. similar
reports by other travel writers (1764-87), summarised in HABOCK, Kastraten, p 233-47.
3 A. GHISLANZONI, Gli artisti da teatro (Milan 1865), VI, ch. 7 (p. 131), where he also makes sweeping allegations
about the "vicious" and "infamous" character of seventeenth-century women singers. For the Napoleonic period, see
J. ROSSELLI, The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario (Cambridge 1984),
p. 19-20.
4 A. ADEMOLLO, I teatri di Roma nel secolo XVII (Rome 1888); C. RICCI, Figure e figuri del mondo teatrale
(Milan 1920); B. CROCE, I teatri di Napoli (1st version, Naples 1891).

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 i. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850 145

assumptions of Lalande and Burney. Franz Hab6ck, echoing Burney, saw the
Church and church choirs as the mere "refuge of those poor devils who had staked
their lives, partly or wholly in vain, on that unhappy calling";" Angus Heriot, a
close follower of Hab6ck, simply defined his subject as The Castrati in Opera.6
Nor can we be said to be better informed than people in the late eighteenth century
about the physiology and psychology of the castrati. In the 1760s there was still
current a farrago of notions drawn from the writings of ancient authors, particularly
Hippocrates, some of them based on observation (males castrated before puberty
had high pure voices, lacked secondary sexual characteristics such as facial and
body hair and early baldness, were more likely than ordinary males to grow to an
unusual height) and others on the unexamined tenets of ancient science (castration
cured or prevented gout, elephantiasis, leprosy and hernia; castrati tended to have
weak eyes and a weak pulse, lacked fortitude and strength of mind, and had
difficulty in pronouncing the letter R).7 Burney was at pains to deny that castrati
were cowards or lazy, but did not supply a full alternative account.8 The only
"authority" available then or now on the practice of castration turns out to be a
polemical essay by an author whose qualifications are not obvious; it is outstand-
ingly muddled on the question whether prepubertal castration did away with the
sexual drive and with the potestas coeundi along with the potestas generandi - a
question which it answers by implication at one point "yes," at another "no."9
Perhaps not surprisingly, an article in a leading modern work of reference, while
going in considerable detail into the physiological bases of the castrato singer's
unusual vocal power and range (enlargement of the thoracic cavity and slowing
down of the development of the larynx), assumes without giving evidence that
castrati were capable of sexual intercourse though not of fathering children0o - a
view current in the ancient world and in early modern Europe, but rejected around
1936 by most medical opinion."
Since the received account is so doubtfully based, we should go back to the
beginning and ask fundamental questions some of which may be capable of a fresh
answer; even a conclusion that some questions are unanswerable may clear the air.
When did castration for the purpose of producing high male adult voices begin to

s HABOCK, Kastraten, p. 292-93.

6 A. HERIOT, The Castrati in Opera (London 1956).
7 J. PH. L. WITHOF, De castratis commentationes quatuor (Lausanne 1762), p. 30-41. For ancient views on castration,
P. BROWE, Zur Geschichte der Entmannung (Breslau 1936), p. 53-58.
8 CH. BURNEY, A General History of Music (ed. F. Mercer, London 1935), II, p. 528-30.
9 C. D'OLLINCAN [pseud. of CH. ANCILLON], Traiti des eunuques ([Berlin] 1707), esp. p. 115-21, 158-64. Ancillon
was a Huguenot refugee, an erudite lawyer and historian. His pamphlet was directed against the attempts of certain
Italian castrati in Germany to marry, which had prompted theological discussion in the Lutheran Church some thirty
years earlier and perhaps more recently as well. Like Withof, he depended heavily on ancient and humanistic sources; he
nowhere states how he came by his alleged knowledge of castration practice in his own day.
10 F. D'A[MICO], Evirato, in: Enciclopedia dello Spettacolo (Rome 1954-65), IV, cols. 1719-23.
1 BROWE, Entmannung, p. 7-8, 10-11. Hab6ck, a little earlier, thought that castration did not remove the "cerebral"
sexual drive; he was more doubtful about the potestas coeundi. His views rested on a theory that sexuality was
hormonally caused (with homosexuality a result of hormonal imbalance) and that the source of hormones was not
glands but supporting tissue: Kastraten, p. 4-10. Browe, a Jesuit (whose inquiry was prompted by the growing use of
castration as a supposed cure for "sexual pathology" in early twentieth-century Germany and America), seems
marginally the more careful scholar, though he too accepted some unexamined evidence.

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146 J. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850

spread? Where? Why? What sort of people was it practised on? What was the
attitude of political and religious authority? Roughly how many castrati were there
at any one time? What was their career pattern and how did it change? How did
they fit into the society of their time? Why did they vanish?

2. Origin and condition

There seems to be no evidence of castrati singers in Western Europe before the 1550s,
though their presence for centuries in the Byzantine Church (and, in the twelfth
century, at such an outpost as Smolensk) may make one wonder about possible
links with Venice. Two Spanish castrati were hired for the Duke of Ferrara's chapel
in the late 1550s; the Duke in 1556 inquired about another castrato (due to arrive
from Savoy) in phrasing that suggests a fairly routine matter.12 A little later, agents
of Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga of Mantua were looking for new singers, particularly
castrati.13 At some point in the late sixteenth century a castrato connected with
Ferrara offered to take a post singing for the Pope, provided that the salary enabled
him to keep "a servant or two and horses, since I am not accustomed to go on foot."'4
By that time there were soprani castrati in the Papal (Sistine) Chapel choir,
though they were not formally described as such until 1599; the first, a Spaniard,
entered the choir in 1562. The choir had earlier recruited "Spanish falsettists" who
may possibly have been undeclared castrati. This early Spanish connection at both
Ferrara and Rome is puzzling, since we have no further evidence that Spain was a
centre for the making of castrati; suggestions that castrati were a feature of Moorish
Spain (and presumably were driven into Italy by the expulsion of unconverted
Moors after 1492) remain just that. In the Cappella Giulia - the choir of St. Peter's -
Pope Sixtus V authorised the recruitment of castrati in an official Bull of 1589.
There were also castrati, apparently of Italian origin, in the Munich court chapel
under Lassus (from 1574 at the latest).'5

12 A. NEWCOMB, The Madrigal at Ferrara 1579-1597 (Princeton 1980), I, p. 30-31; minute of letter from Duke of
Ferrara to Count Masino, 2 April 1556, I-MOs, Archivio per materie, Musici b. 3. (The Duke had already asked through
the Piedmontese nobleman Collegno "che mi fossero mandati li due cantori luno contrabasso e laltro castrato de quali me
ne sarea compiaciuto lo [Link] S. Duca di Savoia..." but they had been held up "nel paese de Francesi" by wartime
conditions.)
13 I. FENLON, Music and Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Mantua (Cambridge 1980), I, p. 110.
14 Fragment of letter addressed to a monsignore in Rome, following up an earlier (missing) one sent via "Moreleto
Falconiero del Cardinale di Ferrara"; the name "lionardo" appears at the foot but may not be a signature: I-MOs (where
catalogued as 16th century), Archivio per materie, Musici b. 3. (,...piiu volunt[ieri] serviria Sua Sanctita che tute le
potentie del mondo et per cantare uno soprano ne faria honore del fato de la capella la segnoria vostra sa ben che io non 6
voce tropo possenta n6 forta mo io 16 alta et bassa assai tanto, et quanto uno puto de quindese anni non andara piii alto da
mi n6 in falceto ne in voce piena [?per] del cantare lopera [?lauldara] et maistro io sun al presente disposto melio che
mai perche la dio gracie me sento sano et galiardo vero et per quando avesse dandare aroma voria essere ben atractado
per modo che io potesse tenire uno familio ou dui et cavali per che io non sun uso de andare a piede Et le spese como se
intende dela resta io faria tal portamente che la Segnoria Vostra averia honore del fato mio et si per [?] di quela
conseguisse avere alcuno bene sempre ineternamente ser6 vostro fidelissimo servidore.")
15 A. MILNER, The Sacred Capons, in: MT 114 (1973), p. 250-53; TH. WALKER, Castrato, in: The New GroveD (ed. S.
Sadie, London 1980), III, p. 875-76; E. V. FOREMAN, A Comparison of Selected Italian Vocal Tutors of the Period
circa 1550 to 1800 (University of Illinois DMA thesis, 1969), p. 12-13; HABOCK, Kastraten, p. 428. BROWE,
Entmannung, p. 86-91, thought it highly unlikely that there could have been castrati singers in the Western Church
before the sixteenth century, because theological works earlier than the seventeenth never mentioned them even though
they sometimes discussed castration for non-musical purposes - a persuasive though not quite conclusive argument.

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i. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850 147

By the early years of the seventeenth century there were castrati employed all over
Italy as the court singers of ruling princes (in camera or cappella or both), in
Wiirttemberg from about 1610, in Vienna from 1637 or earlier, and by mid-century in
Dresden. So far as we can tell they were all Italians or at any rate had been castrated
and trained in Italy, except for some in Germany who were locally produced and
who seem to have been employed only in their ruler's chapel.'16 From then on
castration for artistic purposes remained a practice known to be carried on almost
exclusively in Italy and associated with Italian music. Even if we allow the
possibility of a hidden tradition of castrato singing before 1550 there seems to be no
doubt that the practice spread quickly and on an unprecedented scale. Why?
The rise of opera coincided with but did not in any obvious way cause that of the
castrati. Chronology, if anything, might suggest "that the popular taste for the
castrato voice reflected in the singers chosen for opera was largely created by church
practice."" Nor did this taste at once dominate the new form. A castrato sang the
prologue and two female parts in Monteverdi's L'Orfeo at Mantua in 1607, but the
lead part was sung by a tenor.'8 Several decades were to go by before the custom
became established of having a castrato singing the protagonist's part (primo
uomo); the ban on women appearing on stage in Rome (which meant a steady
demand for young castrati to sing female leads in opera) was not fully enforced until
the late 1670s - even then with occasional exceptions in favour of performances in
noblemen's palaces.19
The Pauline ban on women's uttering in church is a necessary but not a sufficient
cause, since boys and falsettists could sing the higher parts. It is commonly said that
people became dissatisfied with choirboys because they were no sooner trained than
lost, with falsettists because their sound came to seem weak and reedy compared
with that of castrati. This is clearly true: not only were such opinions expressed at
the time;20 although some falsettists went on being employed in church music, none
was among the most famous singers of the day. When they sang soprano parts they

"Silvio di Spagna," who sang in two Roman chapels in 1694, was listed in one as an alto, in the other as a tenor,
suggesting either a continuing Roman practice of taking on some Spanish falsettists or a close identity between the
understood ranges of alto and tenor voices. 0. MISCHIATI, Una statistica della musica a Roma nel 1694, in: Note
d'archivio n. s. 1 (1983), p. 209-227.
16 HABOCK, Kastraten, p. 249-54, 422-58. The Wiirttemberg practice went on into the late eighteenth century,
producing singers for the court chapel only. The well-known incident of the choirboy Joseph Haydn being offered the
possibility of castration suggests a continuing practice in Vienna as well: H. C. R. LANDON, Haydn: Chronicle and
Works, I, The Early Years (London 1980), p. 38-39. There was in the late seventeenth century a French castrato singing
at Versailles - an extreme rarity: M. BENOIT, Versailles et les musiciens du Roi 1661-1733 (Paris 1971), p. 156, 187. A
castrato described as a "Frenchman" had served three generations of the English noble family of Spencer by the early
1640s, when this information was recorded by the then Lord Spencer's father-in-law (the second Earl of Leicester); the
"Frenchman" was then said to be about 80 and had presumably been singing for the Spencers already in the 1590s, a
time when another patron, Sir Richard Champernown, writing in 1595 to Sir Robert Cecil, found it necessary to deny
rumours pointing to him as a gelder of boys for the purpose of preserving their voices: information kindly communicated
by Lynn Hulse, of King's College, London, whose forthcoming dissertation on musical patronage by great families of late
Tudor and early Stuart England will document it.
17 MILNER, Sacred Capons, p. 250.
18 I. FENLON, Monteverdi's Mantuan 'Orfeo': Some New Documentation, in: Early Music 12 (1984), p. 163-72.
19 A. CAMETTI, II Teatro di Tordinona poi di Apollo (Tivoli 1938), I, p. 70-77, 93-101.
20 P. DELLA VALLE, Della musica dell'eta nostra... (1640), in: A. SOLERTI (ed.), Le origini del melodramma (Turin
1903), p. 163-66.

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148 J. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850

seem to have been used because castrati were hard to find or were too expensive.21
Falsettists singing alto parts remained more common; successive Popes forbade (to
little effect) the admission of castrati to the Sistine Chapel as altos, though they
accepted the need for them as sopranos.22 This discrimination is at first sight
puzzling, since the actual ranges of the soprano and alto (or contralto) voices were
not clearly distinguished in the seventeenth or even the eighteenth century; the
range of many castrato voices spanned both (as they eventually came to be
understood) and in any case tended to become lower with age, as happens with
some women's voices today.23
What really mattered was perhaps the idea of the high, in particular the soprano,
voice as specially valuable (and therefore calling for the exotic powers of castrato
singers). Its value may have resided in an association with youth - as has been
suggested - but more likely with superiority. "Soprano" means "higher," a notion
not taken lightly by a society that was at once intensely hierarchical-minded and
accustomed to displaying hierarchical order in forms readily perceived by the
senses. A maestro di cappella writing when the system had been going for a long
time assumed that higher voices took precedence ("prelazione") of lower; in the
case he was dealing with, a "natural" alto (that is, a castrato) must as a rule take
precedence of a bass singing alto as a falsettist.24 This superiority found practical
expression when public opera houses developed from the late 1630s; the fees paid to
high voices in leading parts (castrati and women) were almost invariably higher
than those paid to tenors and especially to basses. In church choirs and other
institutions the matter was complicated by seniority, but here too the high voices
(castrati and tenors) were generally paid better than basses, the comm6nest male
voices. Even among castrati a discrimination was suggested in the Imperial Chapel
at Vienna; one who now and then sang contralto might be called a "mezzo castrato"
so that a salary rise granted him should not set off a claim for equivalent treatment
by others, presumably full-time sopranos anxious to maintain their differentials.25

21 J. W. HILL, Oratory Music in Florence, II, in: AMI 51 (1979), p. 256-57.

22 BROWE, Entmannung, p. 86-91.
2 Discussed by S. DURANTE, II cantante, in: Storia dell'opera italiana (ed. L. Bianconi and G. Pestelli), IV, II sistema
produttivo e le sue competenze (Turin 1987), p. 360-64, 382-83.
24 Francesco Poncini, maestro di cappella at Parma, in a letter-to Padre G. B. Martini of 10 July 1778 (I-Bc, I. 1. 158),
stated as a truism that there was a "prelazione del contralto sopra al tenore, ed al basso, ma eziandio, che [il maestro di
cappella] deve conoscere la diferenza, che passa fra un contralto naturale, ed un basso, che per ripiegho canti il
contralto." His problem was that he wished to keep out a "foreign" (Romagnolo) natural contralto in favour of certain
falsettists in his choir; he therefore wanted Padre Martini's authority for upholding an alternative superiority, that of
"natives" over "foreigners." The association of high voices with youth is suggested by DURANTE, II cantante, p.
387-88, who points to the youth of the heroes whose parts (especially in the eighteenth century) were sung by
castrati. They were also, however, superior twice over - as a rule (a) the most important part in an opera, (b) royal or
noble. Fascination with high voices if anything increased in the course of the century, so that by 1770 the Venetian writer
G. M. Ortes was complaining of the shortage of contraltos (both male and female): ,,Quando la musica servia piit al
sentimento, i musici passavano facilmente dopo qualche tempo dal soprano al contralto; ma ora che essa e ridotta tutta a
violenza, voglion tutti tenersi al soprano, e massime le donne, se credessin scoppiare": to J. A. Hasse, 22 Dec. 1770, I-
Vmc, Cod. Cicogna 2658 no. 193.
25 The maestro di cappella at Vienna in 1656 urged that Filippo Vismari, who had asked for an increase in his monthly
salary, should instead be given an annual gratification "alsz allein ain mezzo castrato, damit di andern nit dadurch
aufgewiglt werden." There are signs that he thought of "castrati" as a category equivalent to "sopranos"; some
contraltos then in the Vienna choir were certainly falsettists: H. KNAUS, Die Musiker im Archivbestand des

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i. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850 149

We still need to explain why a preference, even a craze for high voices should have
led ordinary people to undertake (and people in authority to condone) so drastic a
step as castration. One possible answer is that the cultivation of the solo voice in the
new genres of the early seventeenth century, not only in opera but also in monodic
cantata and oratorio, called for a new vocal professionalism unknown or uncalled for
in the previous age of polyphonic music; and that the castrati - thanks to an
unbroken period of study from childhood, less hampered by social custom than the
education of girls - were best able to meet this new demand.26 This is of some help.
But before we accept it in full we need to ask: was the step taken as drastic as we
think, or as Burney and other late eighteenth-century commentators thought?
For Europe as a whole the early seventeenth century was a period of severe
economic crisis. For Italy the years around 1620 marked the onset of general
deindustrialisation (already under way earlier in some areas); war and plague
followed shortly. The upper classes retreated into landholding as their main source
of income; sometimes the retreat was accompanied by a new imposition of feudal
tenures or by a strengthening of entails to safeguard the line of descent. With it went
an increase in the numbers of monks and nuns, probably most marked in the period
1580-1650: by the 1670s they seem to have accounted for some 5 % of the population
in Florence and Catania, for about 9, 10 or 11 % in decayed Central Italian towns such
as Siena, Pistoia, and Prato; in more populous cities - Venice, Rome, Naples - the
proportion was lower but absolute numbers higher, with monks alone numbering
well over 3,000 in Rome, well over 4,000 in Naples. For rich families, getting a son or
a daughter into the regular clergy cost less than setting up the son in an official
career or than marrying off the daughter; in a lean time it could bring privileges
such as tax concessions. For many middling or poor people a child who became a
monk or a nun held out the hope of security in highly insecure times, not just for the
individual but for the family as a whole. Such decisions about a child's future were a
matter of family strategy. Material explanations of this kind need imply no denial of
the intense religious feeling common in baroque Italy - itself stirred by the sense of

Kaiserlichen Oberhofmeisteramtes (1637-1705) (Vienna 1967-69), I, p. 65; see also L. VON KOCHEL, Die Kaiserliche
Hofmusikkapelle in Wien von 1543 bis 1867 (Vienna 1869); P. NETTL, Zur Geschichte der Kaiserlichen Hof-
musikkapelle von 1636 bis 1680, in: StMw 16-19 (1929-32). There are useful series of individual payments to members of
church choirs at Bergamo (1650-1715), Bologna (1655-1795), and Naples (c. 1735-1768) in R. BOWMAN, Musical
Information in the Archives of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore Bergamo 1649-1720, in: I. BENT (ed.), Source
Materials and the Interpretation of Music (London 1981), p. 332-35; O. GAMBASSI, La cappella musicale di San
Petronio. Musici, organisti, cantori e strumentisti dal 1436 al 1920 (Florence 1987), part 2; I-Na, Scrivania di Ragione,
reg. 38 (payments to musicians of the Naples royal chapel). I propose to document movements in opera singers' fees in
a separate study. There are signs that from time to time individual basses were highly valued in every sense, but that
they needed to be quite exceptional: e. g. Giulio Cesare Brancaccio at Ferrara (after whose departure in 1583 basses
remained subordinate to high voices: NEWCOMB, Madrigal at Ferrara, I, p. 23), the baritone Celidone at Santa Maria
Maggiore, Bergamo, in 1671, Benedetto Sarti at San Petronio in 1670 and 1681, Ippolito Fusai in sacred music and opera
about 1670, and the well-known examples of Giuseppe Boschi and Antonio Montagnana in Handel's operas of the early
eighteenth century.
26 D'AMICO, Evirato; A. MAUGARS, Riponse faite a un curieux sur le sentiment de la musique en Italie (ed. J.
Lionnet), in: NRMI 19 (1985), p. 686, 694, praised the ability to sing difficult music at sight shown by Rome choirs of
the 1630s in general and by castrati in particular. R. STROHM, Aspetti sociali dell'opera italiana del primo Settecento, in:
Musica/Realtta 2, no. 5 (Aug. 1981), p. 117-41, makes the same point about the connection between castrati and increasing
professionalism but places it about 100 years later. One could perhaps talk about successive waves of specialisation.

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150 J. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850

danger and decline. These conditions broadly held through the whole of the
seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century.27
Monks, according to a late eighteenth-century German journalist, were "so to
speak, castrati who had not been operated upon."28 They were celibates, not always
of their own choice. A castrato could be thought of as an enforced celibate with an
unusual chance of securing for his family an income, perhaps a fortune. There were
in fact castrato monks who sang in or directed church choirs: one entered the Duke
of Modena's chapel in 1649;29 another took part - though only after prolonged
diplomatic pressure by Cardinal Mazarin - in the Paris performance of Cavalli's
opera Ercole amante (1660), singing the part of a woman disguised as a man.30 Some
other castrati became monks late in life; many more became priests. But literal vows
were not necessary for the castrato's "vocation" to have something in common with
that of the monk.
We need to stand as far as we can away from modern assumptions. Central to
these is the right of human beings to sexual fulfilment. The tradition of Christian
asceticism began to decline even in Southern Europe from about the mid eighteenth
century; it is now virtually lost. But around 1600 it was still strong. Renunciation of
sexual life could seem not just a possible but an ideal course. Sexuality could
anyhow be a burden when (as happened in at least parts of Italy) celibacy was on
the increase in the period 1600-1750 through the workings of economic hardship and
the efforts of families to safeguard property;31 while the vigilance of those same
families probably did much to prevent sexual relations outside marriage. Celibacy
was a means to birth control. According to a foreign observer in eigtheenth-century
Naples, the practice of castration "attracts no notice in a country where the

27 General studies are T. H. ASTON (ed.), Crisis in Europe 1560-1660 (London 1965); G. QUAZZA, La decadenza
italiana nella storia europea (Turin 1971); 0. CHADWICK, The Popes and European Revolution (Oxford 1981), esp. p.
212-13, 246 - a much more intensive study of Church history, particularly in Italy, than the title suggests; and esp. P.
STELLA, Strategie familiari e celibato sacro tra '600 e '700, in: Salesianum (Turin), 41 (1979), p. 73-109. Statistics of
monks and nuns as a proportion of population in: E. BOAGA, II Seicento, in: Dizionario degli Istituti di perfezione, ed.
G. Pelliccia and G. Rocca (Turin 1974ff.), s. v. "Italia," V, cols. 205-10, and esp. C. J. BELOCH, Bevilkerungsgeschichte
Italiens (Berlin-Leipzig 1937-61), I, p. 73-86, 187, II, p. 19. As Beloch repeatedly points out, such statistics raise problems,
chiefly the shifting criteria by which they were drawn up (so that lay brothers and sisters or servants or pupils might or
might not be counted); some of the documents he abstracts give varying figures for the same year. Percentages of town
populations seem more meaningful than percentages of the population as a whole, because by the seventeenth century
monks and especially nuns were heavily concentrated in towns. Boaga suggests that by 1650 there was in all Italy one
religious per 165 inhabitants (but that religious who were also priests numbered only one per 280 inhabitants).
28 "Gleichsam unoperierter Kastraten": W. L. WECKHRLIN, Chronologen (Frankfurt 1779-81), I, p. 174, quoted in
HABOCK, Kastraten, p. 148. He may have been thinking of Matthew xix. 12.
29 The Augustinian Fra Mario Agatea; he later (1665) became director of the Modena Cathedral cappella; he eventually
retired, on a pension, to his order's priory at Bologna, where in 1691 he appealed to the Duke for support against the
Archbishop of Bologna's order forbidding him (and other monks) to attend the opera: G. RONCAGLIA, La cappella
musicale del Duomo di Modena (Florence 1957), p. 127-35.
30 Padre Don Filippo Melani (1628-c. 1703), a Servite monk, brother of the more famous Atto Melani. Getting Filippo to
Paris to sing in opera took Mazarin six years' negotiations: he had to overcome both the unwillingness of the Pope to
grant a dispensation and that of the Servite order to lose their singer: H. PRUNIERES, L'opira italien en France (Paris
1913), p. 16 (note), 174-77.
31 G. DELILLE, Famille et propriete dans le Royaume de Naples (XVe-XIXe siecles) (Paris 1985), p. 189-90, 208,
gives evidence of a conscious policy of maintaining high celibacy rates among noble families in the Kingdom of Naples,
and of a rise in female celibacy among the general population of Apulia in this period. Rates of lifelong male celibacy are
particularly elusive because of the possibility that a man registered in a census as celibate may have been married earlier
or later; and monks (and nuns) were not included in Neapolitan censuses: p. 188.

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i. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850 151

population is huge in relation to the amount of work available."32 To become a

castrato - still more, to make your son become one - need not in these conditions
seem a total misfortune.
Nor was it a step condemned by the Church. It was indeed forbidden by Roman
law as codified by Justinian, which was generally valid in the Italian states. But it
was not forbidden by ecclesiastical law. Theologians of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries accepted Aquinas's view that we are caretakers, not owners of
our bodies. Most agreed with him that castration was licit only for the purpose of
saving life, on medical advice and with the boy's consent. A minority, however, held
that on a balance of advantage castration for artistic purposes could be licit: the
argument chiefly used was that the benefit to the community (to the effectiveness of
church services or the supposed needs of rulers) outweighed the damage to the
individual, though the Theatine Zaccaria Pasqualigo also argued (1641) that a boy's
throat was more valuable to him than his testicles. Among Italian theologians there
were few outright opponents; until about 1750 it was discussed as a matter finely
balanced between "probable" and "more probable" opinions, and even when
opposition began to build up Pope Benedict XIV advised (1748) against a proposal
that castration should be forbidden by all bishops - essentially on prudential
grounds: it was better to avoid disturbance and work for a compromise that would
bring about partial or gradual change.33
The operation itself may have been relatively mild and safe. We know little about
it. According to the dubious source already mentioned, the testicles might be
removed, or they might be caused to wither through pressure, maceration or the
cutting of the spermatic cord; none of these methods amounted to the horrific "total
castration" (removal of the penis as well as of the testicles) said to have been
inflicted mainly in Africa on slaves intended for Turkish and Persian harems, and to
have killed most of them.34 An account of the cost of castrating a Modenese boy,
perhaps datable 1687, and drawn up by an experienced person, assumed "about 13
days" as the time needed for the operation and the period of convalescence.35 This
does not suggest a very grave wound. People gossiped about operations that had
supposedly failed to castrate a boy fully. One such is documented; the boy had been
"castrated on one side only," so that as he turned 14 his voice broke.36 We do not

32 LALANDE, Voyage en Italie, p. 348.

33 BROWE, Entmannung, p. 99-117.
34 ANCILLON, Traiti des eunuques, p. 10-13; BROWE, Entmannung, p. 2-5. The reason for "total castration" was the
belief that only removal of the penis would disable a eunuch from sexual intercourse.
31 "Nota della spesa che andara per far castrare il N.," I-MOs, Archivio per Materie, b. 2. This account mentions the
costs incurred on "other occasions" (see note 47).
36 Francesco Pocaterra, a Sienese widow's son, was admitted as a soprano to the choir of St. John Lateran in Rome. Six
months later his mother confessed that "he was castrated on one side only"; his teacher-manager therefore abandoned
him ("... nella fine di sei mesi si seppe per via di sua madre da Siena, che l'era castrato da una parte sola si che il suo
maestro romano che si dilettava insegnarli ad aria, per farlo sentire all'accademie, e buscarci all'8/of [perhaps =
all'ottavo soldo (two-fifths of earnings)? or = 8 paoli per scudo (four-fifths of earnings)?] lo lasci6..."). Chiti then
took him on as a pupil for free: "da un mese o piii la voce comincia a calare per fondo [?entrato] nelli 14 anni. Questo
figliolo ritrovandosi cosi andiede da Padre Francesco San Giorgi esponendo, e supplicando volersi fare religoso
conventuale ritrov6 difficolth per la poca scienza..." Pocaterra's vocation held; after a few more months he expressed a
wish to become a Franciscan lay brother. Chiti, who thought him a promising singer ("potr? dare in ottima voce grossa,
e canta di giusto... capace, e spiritoso, e adattabile al tutto, benche indietro in tutto"), asked for Padre Martini's help in

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152 J. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850

however hear of deaths caused by castration. Such deaths may have happened, and
may have gone unreported in times when early death, and death through medical
error, were common. But the impression one gets is that the operation was a routine
one.

This impression is strengthened by the wording of apprent

between boy's families and teachers, of boys' own applications f
having themselves castrated (for there were such applications), and
them in government archives. In the seventeenth and early eigh
any rate there was little attempt at euphemism or concealmen
authority had no compunction about approving or even paying
Many contracts survive that bind young Italians to be taugh
singing teacher for a term of years in exchange for an obligation t
teacher a proportion or the whole of their earnings; examples can b
sixteenth to the twentieth century. Some of these notaria
documents, to be deposited in an official archive) openly set as a
boy should be castrated. Thus the parents and uncle of Paolo Nannin
1671 promised to have him castrated within a few weeks at the tea
that he "may learn music and keep his voice.""' A contract of 1
more drastic, effectively sold an 8-year-old Apulian boy t
(perhaps the well-known singer of parti buffe) who was to have
brother Bonaventura Tricarico, a canon and cantor of Gall
explained that the boy's father had "resolved, for the greater bene
his family, and of [his son] to have him perfectly taught the p
canto figurato, and in due time to have him castrated," but t
necessary means; the decision to have the boy operated on was l
to make sometime in the coming six years, clearly on the basis
showed in the meantime." A much later contract of 1773, also drast

getting the boy admitted to the monastery chapel of SS. Apostoli, Rome; Martini rather curi
disliked taking on castrati singers ("tutta la difficolta, che vi puol nascere, sara che la re
lontana dal prender castrati musici, perch6 ne ha avuto facilmente motivi giustissimi": Chiti t
Chiti, 18 Feb. 1750, I-Bc, I. 12.106-07). Other alleged (but undocumented) cases concern so-ca
given out (to justify an adult castrato's marriage or supposed fatherhood) that he had h
operation had missed one of them. These stories are probably fanciful.
37 Contract of 3 Aug. 1671 between Salvatore and Olimpia Nannini, represented by Sant
Antonio Masini: "Acci6 detto Paolo possa habilitarsi alla musica e mantenere la voce detti
come detto signor Santo promette far castrare il detto Paolo nel mese di settembre prossimo futu
sia tenuto a somministrare a tutte sue spese, le spese che abbisogneranno tanto per I'operati
per farlo medicare et d'ogni altra cosa a quest'effetto, e ritenerlo in casa propria con car
capitolini, Ufficio 16, atti Moro vol. 260 c. 582rv, quoted in G. L. MASETTI ZANNINI, V
canto e famiglie tra rinascimento e barocco, in: Strenna dei Romanisti 41 (Rome 1980), p. 33
3 Contract of 30 Nov. 1697 between Giovanni Donato Rizzo, of Castellana, and Nicola or Nicc
quoted in G. A. PASTORE, Un raro documento su l'evirazione dei cantanti nel secolo XVII
Salentina di Lettere Scienze e Arti 1, no. 2 (April 1955): "... havendo un suo figlio legittimo et
di anni otto, nominato Francesco Rizzo, havesse risoluto per maggior profitto d'esso Giovann
detto Francesco di farli imparare perfettamente la professione seu arte di cantar figurato, et in t
per divenir eunuco; et non havendo modo di farli tutti quelli dispendi necessari... ," the fat
the unusually long period of 15 years, during which all the son's earnings were to go to Trica
wherever he wished; this was in effect an outright sale of a child. Tricarico's brother Bonav
Gallipoli Cathedral, was to teach the boy for six years; it is reasonably clear from the muddle
end of that period the Tricarico brothers would decide whether to have him castrated or not
operation).

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i. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850 153

terms, provided that the teacher would pay for the castration of Domenico Bruni,
son of a builder (muratore) of Fratta in Umbria (the present Umbertide);
Domenico became one of the last famous castrato opera singers. The teacher,
incidentally, was maestro di cappella to the religious confraternity of which the
boy's father was a member, so this was almost a family affair.39 A slightly different
type of contract, an eighteenth-century one providing for a boy to be taught and
boarded at the school attached to the basilica of San Francesco in Assisi, stated that
if the boy was to be castrated the father should pay.40
In a different type of contractual arrangement, but one equally frank, the 10-year-
old Gaetano Majorano's grandmother gave him the income from two vineyards so
that he could study grammar and especially music, "to which he is said to have a
great inclination, desiring to have himself castrated and become an eunuch." This
was in 1720; the boy was to become famous under the name Caffarelli.41 A little later,
the retired castrato Filippo Balatri pointed out in his will the name of the surgeon
who had operated on him as a boy; he did so in a spirit of burlesque rather than
denunciation.42
Openness and family strategy were combined in the fortunes of the Melani family
of Pistoia. Domenico Melani was appointed bellringer of Pistoia Cathedral in 1624,
when the eldest of his seven sons was one year old; he kept the job for the remaining
25 years of his life. Of the seven sons - all born within 15 years of his appointment -
at least three were castrated and became singers; three more became composers or
singers and there is some question whether one of them may not have been a
castrato too. Only the fourth son's marriage produced children and perpetuated the
family; this son inherited the bellringer's post. Several of the musician sons had
distinguished careers; some engaged in international diplomacy or in a local
struggle for control of the cathedral music, and the next generation climbed into the
Tuscan nobility. There were also two Melani cousins, born about the same time as
the seven brothers, who became castrati singers.43 It is inconceivable that the
cathedral authorities in Pistoia did not realise what their bellringer's family was up

3 This contract has not been found, but its terms are summarised in a Naples contract of 7 Feb. 1783 rescinding it. It was
made between Pietro Bruni and the teacher Francesco Paciotti: N. LUCARELLI, Domenico Bruni (unpublished
typescript biography), p. 14. I am grateful to Dr. Lucarelli for letting me read this work.
40 C. PAMPALONI, Giovani castrati nell'Assisi del Settecento, in: Musica/Realta' 8, no. 23 (Aug. 1987), p. 142
("occorrendo farlo castrare, [il padre] sia obligato del proprio"). An earlier contract, of 19 December 1639, between the
Jesuit Collegium Germanicum in Rome and the family of an Ancona boy, Michele Pellegrino, was to run for four years
but stated that the boy would be kept on subject to the college doctor's advice about the likelihood of his keeping his
voice and being "sufficiente a servire per soprano." This may have been a veiled reference to a future decision to have
him castrated, or it may mean that the college was not sure he had already been castrated. He was in adult life a castrato:
TH. CULLEY, The Influence of the German College in Rome on Music in German-Speaking Countries during the 16th
and 17th Centuries, 2, in: Analecta Musicologica 9 (1970), p. 44.
41 ..... ut ille proficere possit studio gramaticae, et etiam dare operam cum majori decentia Musicae, in qua dictus
Cajetanus magnam habere dicitur inclinationem, cupiens se castrare et eunucum fieri": quoted in: E. FAUSTINI-
FASSINI, Gli astri maggiori del bel canto napoletano, in: Note d'archivo 15 (1938), p. 124.
42 F. BALATRI (?1676-1756), Frutti del mondo (ed. K. Vossler) = Collezione Settecentesca, ed. S. Di Giacomo, XXIV
(Milan 1924), p. 12. The surgeon (cherusico) was one Accoramboni, of Lucca.
43 R. L. WEAVER, Materiali per le biografie dei fratelli Melani, in: RIDM 12 (1977); ID., Melani, in: The New Grove D,
XII, p. 96-98. Alessandro, one of the (presumably) non-castrated brothers, married in 1677, that is, too late to affect his
parents' audacious family strategy. There were no children: J. LIONNET, La Cappella musicale di S. Luigi dei Francesi a
Roma nel XVII secolo, in: Note d'Archivio n. s. 3 (1985), supplement no. 3, p. 155-58.

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154 J. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850

to. Of another church establishment, the music school attached to the collegiate
church of Santa Maria Maggiore, Bergamo, we know that in 1650 it paid a
substantial sum to have one of its choirboys castrated; the surgeon was one of its
own string players and the payment was authorised by the governing council of the
Misericordia, the important charity that was responsible for the school.44
After all this it is not surprising to find an orphaned Roman boy in 1613 reported as
having expressed "a great desire to have himself castrated" so that he could serve
the Duke of Mantua.45 Another Rome agent in 1661 told the then Duke of a promising
boy of 13, not yet castrated - but "that can be done."46 Later in the century, at least
two boys petitioned the Duke of Modena for financial help in getting themselves
castrated; one got it, the other probably got it, and the accounts, already mentioned,
detailing the costs of castration (perhaps for yet another boy) give the fee for the
operation as five doble "in conformity with what was done on other occasions by
order of His Most Serene Highness." Both boys stated that they were afraid of
losing the quality of their voice if it was allowed to break; both pleaded poverty.
Silvestro Prittoni asked discreetly "to be made to be without those instruments" that
"might" cause his voice to break. Rinaldo Gherardini stated his resolve "to have
himself castrated through Your Highness's goodwill, so as to make progress in [the
singing] profession and give much better service both to Our Lord and to Your
Highness"; he also wished to become a priest, and implied that this was suitable in
terms of family strategy by pointing out that he had two married brothers. When the
Duke authorised payment of four doble to Silvestro "for the aforementioned
purpose" the only precaution used was to state in the order to the treasurer that it
was issued "for reasons known to us"; the papers were left in the archives.47

44 BOWMAN, Musical Information, p. 323. Payment of 22 scudi was made to the ripieno string player "Lazzaro
Norsino". "Norsino" seems to be not the man's surname but the local pronunciation of "norcino" ("surgeon," originally
"pork butcher," associated with Norcia in Umbria. The legend that many castrati were operated on at Norcia must stem
from the use of this term).
45 So the Duke's agent in Rome, Paolo Facconi (a bass singer in the Sistine Chapel choir), reported on 9 February 1613.
The boy had been placed with the organist at Frascati for training: "il puttino ha buona voce, pronto, e con buona
dispositione, et ha gran desiderio di farsi castrare et a me ne fa grandissima istanza": A BERTOLOTTI, Musici alla
corte dei Gonzaga in Mantova dal secolo XV al XVIII (Milan 1890), p. 90.
46 -"... ci6 pu6 farsi": Anna Vittoria Ubaldini to Duke of Mantua, 27 Oct. 1661, ibid. p. 109.
47 "Silvestro Prittoni servo, e suddito di Vostra Altezza Serenissima ritrovandosi in istato, che gode una voce alquanto
buona per esercitare il canto, e bramando di ritenerla, supplica la bont? di Vostra Altezza Serenissima volerli far gratia,
che sia reso senza quelli instrumenti, che li potrebbero cagionare la mutatione della voce, coll'avansarsi degl'anni; che il
tutto ricevera per carita, stante che non si trova il modo di poterlo fare a causa di sua povertY" (minute on the petition:
"Si ? fatto ordine di d[oble]quattro o valuta al Signor Zerbini pagabile al Supplicante per l'effetto suddetto e si e
espresso nell'ordine per cosa nota questo di 11 maggio 1687"). Another petition: "Rinaldo Gherardini d'anni 13 in
14... arrivato a segno di essere sicurissimo nel canto al pari degli altri, temendo nella mutazione della voce, che
presentemente ha di soprano, di dare in altra cattiva, per la non buona influenza del pianeta dominante il paese, e che
produce d'ordinario tenori pessimi, con nessuna abilitY, nd disposizione, ha proposto, e risolto di farsi, con buona grazia
di Vostra Altezza castrare, per havere a tirare inanzi in tale professione a fine di servire molto meglio con essa et al Signor
Dio, et alla Altezza Vostra...pensa altresi di camminare per la strada ecclesiastica, con farsi prete, tanto piui havendo
egli due fratelli ammogliati. Ma perche la poverta di suo padre non gli permette di venire all'esecuzione sudetta
pretendendo il Norsino, che ha da fare I'operazione, e che assicura della vita l'oratore, 4 doble per sua fatica; ricorre
perci6 alla somma generosita di Vostra Altezza (non alla pietosa umanita di Lei, che per qualche ragione doverebbe
essergli contraria et impedirlo)..." (no date; endorsed, like Prittoni's petition, "Si riporti," i. e. a report was called for,
but as the archive also contains a first draft of this petition it appears that Gherardini was helped to write it by the
Duke's secretary, so it too is likely to have been granted). Finally, an account, which may or may not relate to Prittoni or

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i. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850 155

There are signs that in the course of the eighteenth century this kind of frankness
became less acceptable. Burney's and Lalande's informants stressed that boys were
never operated on in the Naples conservatorii. More castrations were explained as
having been necessitated at an early age by illness or by an unspecified "need."48 A
favourite cause, already mentioned by the humanist Paolo Giovio apropos of a
Turkish pasha, was the bite of a wild swan or a wild pig. According to Benedetto
Marcello's satire of 1720, the hangers-on of a castrato opera singer would explain
away his condition with one or other of these tales, and in 1784 the Franciscan
biographer of Farinelli sent round a questionnaire virtually asking to have his
subject's voice explained in the same way; the cause he was supplied with was a fall
from a horse. By the mid nineteenth century the surviving castrati of the Sistine
Chapel had apparently all fallen victim to pigs.49 Yet even in a more shamefaced age
boys could still allege that they had consented to, even begged for castration. The 11-
year-old Angelo Villa did so in 1783, and - even in a Lombardy ruled by the
austerely enlightened Joseph II - succeeded in having his teacher and adoptive
father let off five years' hard labour.5s We need not take the boys' petitions at face
value. But they - and their acceptance by rulers - show that for many years
castration was almost a routine matter, calling at best for perfunctory concealment.
What sort of people allowed their sons to be castrated? We do not know. Most of
the boys operated on - it is reasonable to suppose - came of modest but not
necessarily poverty-stricken families. A rare nobly-born example dates from the
very first years of the seventeenth century: his father, a Piedmontese count, caught

Gherardini:
Nota della spesa che andara per far castrare il N.
Per tutto quello fara bisogno alla spetiaria per medicarlo sara in circa ? 12
Per cibaria del putto per 13 giorni in circa ? 30
Per candele per arder in camera ? 3
Per l'operatione conforme hanno fatto in altre occasione per ordine di Sua Altezza Serenissima dobole cinque (i. e. the
total cost was about 6 doble).
All these papers are in I-MOs, Archivio per Materie, Musici b. 2. Silvestro Prittoni sang the ultima parte in Ariodante
(Salvi/Pollarolo), Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo, Venice, 1716: T. WIEL, I teatri musicali veneziani del Settecento
(Venice 1897). Rinaldo Gherardini (or Ghirardini) in 1683 became a member of the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna,
in whose records he is described as a Bolognese soprano and a virtuoso of the Duke of Parma, in whose court he lived all
his life: 'G. B. MARTINI' [actually O. PENNA], Catalogo degli aggregati della Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna (ed.
A. Schnoebelen, Bologna 1973). This suggests either an early flight from Modena to Parma, or an error by Penna; it also
suggests a date for Gherardini's petition and castration sometime in the 1670s.
48 . . . castrato da piccolo per bisogno": contract of 1763 concerning the admission of Sante Banchi, of Pescia, to the
chapel of San Francesco in Assisi, quoted in PAMPALONI, Giovani castrati, p. 140. The 1773 contract arranging for
Domenico Bruni's castration likewise justified it by referring to "alcuni incomodi nelle parti genitali, da' quali ? giudizio
de' Periti non avrebbe altrimenti potuto liberarsi": LUCARELLI, Bruni (unpublished), p. 14.
49 ANCILLON, TraitW des eunuques, p. 66; B. MARCELLO, II teatro alla moda (ed. A. D'Angeli, Milan 1956), p. 32;
questionnaire enclosed with Fra Giovenale Sacchi to Padre Martini, 11 Dec. 1782, I-Bc, 1.10.45 (some questions clearly
expected an edifying answer, e. g. "si desidera... alcuna notizia sul modo lodevole, in cui si contenesse il sig. Broschi"
towards the moral dangers incurred by theatre people; question 2 asked "se fosse destinato all'ufficio di soprano per
naturale imperfezione, o per malattia, o dall'arbitrio del padre?"; cf. G. SACCHI, Vita del cavaliere Don Carlo Broschi
[Venice 1784], p. 7-8); HABOCK, Kastraten, p. 197, 202-03.
so C. A. VIANELLO, Teatri, spettacoli, musiche a Milano nei secoli scorsi (Milan 1941), p. 211-12. Villa was the son of a
bailiff (fattore) to a count; after his father's death he had been adopted by the violin maker Pietro Testore or Testori and
the criminal trial (brought about by a denunciation from the count) seems to have turned on his having been castrated
without his mother's consent. The boy's petition stated that his voice had been judged by qualified musicians to be
promising and "intesa la necessita della mutilazione, quella decise istantemente, e supplic6 il Testori che gliela
accordasse"; Testori had eventually agreed, "considerando l'universale toleranza, ignorando le leggi vetative..."

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156 J. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850

his wife committing adultery, killed her, and had their son castrated; the boy later
sang in the Duke of Savoy's chapel."' Farinelli's parents were said to be of noble
descent, but impoverished; his father was a minor government official. Other
castrati were described as the sons of "bourgeois" or "honest" parents (probably
meaning tradesmen), of a shoemaker, of a midwife, of an immigrant German
timpani player, of a wandering valet-cum-fencing and dancing master.52 Yet others,
as we have seen, were the sons or grandsons of minor landowners or building
workers. These few known examples probably define the range of social origin
among the very many we do not know about. Because a good singing voice was a
prerequisite for castration (even though at times a delusive one) castrati were
probably less likely than other singers to come of families of professional musicians,
where the trade went down by inheritance and a child might be trained up to it
without necessarily showing uncommon promise; but there is no way of demon-
strating this.
What can be said is that they came from all over Italy. The Kingdom of Naples as
the main source of castrati is a legend - the result of overconcentration on the
Naples conservatorii, where indeed most pupils came from the hinterland. Recent
research has shown that castrati were trained in many other institutions, far more
than have yet been fully studied (typically orphanages or choir schools attached to
important churches, monasteries, or seminaries); many studied privately with
individual teachers.53 Certain cities were important teaching centres - Rome and
Bologna as well as Naples - but enough castrati emerged from other parts of Italy to
suggest a country-wide practice.

3. Numbers
How many castrati were there at any one time? We cannot tell with any
precision; possible indicators are ambiguous (a singer described, without further
specification, as a contralto may have been a castrato or a falsettist) or else subject

51 G. CLARETTA, Un nobile piemontese musico al principio del secolo XVII, in: Nuova Rivista, 1883 (offprint in GB-
Lbl). This was Ottavio Cacherano d'Osasco, son of Emanuele conte d'Osasco by a "low-born" wife. In 1637-40 he was a
member of the Imperial Chapel at Vienna: KOCHEL, Hofmusikkapelle in Wien, p. 60.
52 These are: Giovanni Andrea Angelini Bontempi (1624-1705); Girolamo Crescentini (1762-1846); Cristoforo Arnaboldi
(18th cent.-early 19th cent.); Giuseppino (sang women's parts in Rome in 1742); Gaetano Berenstadt (c. 1690-1735);
Giovanni Antonio Predieri (1679-1746): C. MUTINI, Angelini-Bontempi, in: Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Rome
1960ff.), III, p. 216-18; COLIN TIMMS, Bontempi, in: The New GroveD, III, p. 37-38; Girolamo Crescentini (Aus
seiner brieflichen Mittheilung; Neapel 24 April 1837, iibers.), in: AMZ 39 (1837), cols. 614-17; VIANELLO, Teatri a
Milano, p. 283-84; Pierleone Ghezzi's caption to caricature of Giuseppino, I-Rvat Cod. Ottob. Lat. 3117 c. 160 (see. P.
PETROBELLI, Il musicista di teatro settecentesco nelle caricature di Pierleone Ghezzi, in: Antonio Vivaldi. Teatro
musicale, cultura e societa, ed. L. Bianconi and G. Morelli, Florence 1982, p. 415-26); L. LINDGREN, La carriera di
Gaetano Berenstadt, contralto evirato (ca. 1690-1735), in: RIDM 19 (1984); L. BUSI, II padre G. B. Martini (Bologna
1891), p. 31-62.
3 DURANTE, II cantante, p. 376-83; CULLEY, The Influence of the German College in Rome, in: Analecta
Musicologica 8-9 (1969-70); GAMBASSI, La cappella di San Petronio; M. F. ROBINSON, The Governors' Minutes
of the Conservatorio S. Maria di Loreto, Naples, in: RMA Research Chronicle 10 (1972), fuller and more precise (even
though dealing with one conservatorio only) than S. DI GIACOMO, I quattro antichi conservatorii musicali di Napoli
(Milan 1924, 1928). LUCARELLI, Domenico Bruni (unpublished), p. 16, suggests plausibly that, as demand for castrati
fell off in the late eighteenth century everywhere but in the Rome chapels, production of them became limited largely to
the Papal States.

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i. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850 157

to unpredictable fluctuations over time (numbers in princely or church choirs went

up and down with the fortunes of war and the economy; some establishments closed
down and then reopened). We can nevertheless get some notion both of castrati
numbers in particular areas and of changes over time.
A census of nearly all church singers in Rome in 1694 shows a total of 87 male
sopranos and altos, alongside 66 tenors and basses (and 18 maestri di cappella,
some of whom may have been castrati); nine of the sopranos and altos were
pensioners, but some of these were still active.54 There were probably also a few
Rome castrati without a church appointment or pension. In spite of the uncertainties
already mentioned, this suggests that, on a conservative estimate, some 100 or so
castrati were then living in Rome, of whom 80 or 90 were active. A later census, of
1746 - not quite comparable with the first, for it leaves out the Papal Chapel - shows
39 sopranos and altos alongside 48 tenors and basses. The reversal in the ratio of
higher to lower voices is significant: higher voices were already harder to find. Even
if the Papal Chapel is added in, it is clear both that total numbers had fallen
(because some chapels now had fewer singers or none) and that, within the total,
the number of castrati had fallen faster than that of normal male voices. Allowing for
a greater number of opera singers by this date without a church connection, we may
guess that there were then living in Rome some 50 or 60 castrati - at best, two-thirds
or so of the 1694 total. Nor should we take the 1694 numbers to represent a peak; there
are signs that some Rome chapel choirs were already in decline in the latter half of
the seventeenth century.55 We might therefore hypothesise a total (and probably an
historical maximum) of 120 or so castrati in the Rome of about 1650.
Rome had of course the greatest concentration of chapel choirs, and its
development is not necessarily typical. At San Petronio, the most important of
Bologna chapels, where a census has been worked out at ten-year intervals,
sopranos and altos in the years 1658-1688 numbered between 2 and 5 - less than
half the number of tenors and basses. When the chapel reopened in 1701 after a period
of closure numbers were about even, and were higher (between 6 and 12 sopranos
and altos in the years 1701-1748, with a peak in 1718, and numbers almost as high in
1728). After 1748 a rapid decline set in: only 3 of the higher voices in 1758, and none
in 1768 (as against 7 tenors and basses in each of those years). Here at least castrati
were most numerous around 1710-30, years when the choir as a whole was at its peak
in both numbers and reputation; but they disappeared from the establishment
around 1760 and no more were appointed to fixed posts, though some casuals went on
being employed for a time.56 Not enough is known about other Bologna choirs for us
to tell whether this was typical of the city. A study of over 500 singers described
(between 1670 and 1770) as Bologna-based shows from the start a slow decline in the

54 MISCHIATI, Una statistica, studies what appear to be complete returns for 24 chapels (including all the most
important ones); it misses six or seven which however are likely to have had very small choirs, numbering only one or
two in each voice.
" Figures calculated from G. ROSTIROLLA, Maestri di cappella, organisti, cantanti e strumentisti attivi in Roma nella
meta del Settecento, in: Note d'Archivio n. s. 2 (1984).
56 GAMBASSI, La cappella di San Petronio, p. 32-33, 298-306. Here the decline set in from 1742; there was some use of
casually hired castrati after 1758.

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158 J. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850

proportion of castrati; but as the singers' names are taken from opera libretti this
group too may not be wholly representative.57 What is beyond doubt in Bologna as
well as Rome is that castrati declined, both in absolute numbers and as a proportion
of all singers, from about 1740; there remains a possibility, even a strong likelihood,
that the decline had set in at an earlier date, perhaps even as early as the mid
seventeenth century.
Besides Rome and Bologna, important centres for the employment of castrati
were great pilgrimage churches such as those at Padua, Loreto, and Assisi; at
Loreto, where the choir was supposed to number 4S 4A 4T 4B, castrato numbers held
up almost to the end of the eighteenth century, though this probably masked a fall in
the number of pupils awaiting admission: early in the next century sopranos became
hard to find, and the last castrato was admitted in 1827."8 Yet other centres were
capital cities with both court and religious establishments (Turin, Milan, Parma,
Modena, Florence, Naples); many churches, abbeys, and other religious institutions
up and down the peninsula; and the special case of Venice, where public opera
houses developed from 1637 before spreading from about 1660-80 to other cities.
There were, besides, court establishments in many seventeenth-century European
states (even in England, where the castrati in Queen Catherine of Braganza's chapel
disappointed Pepys),59 later followed by opera houses.
There is no point in attempting a precise calculation. At any time between about
1630 and 1750 there must have been living several hundred castrati, nearly all Italians,
with a marked decline setting in about the mid eighteenth century. In Naples, Rome,
Bologna, and Venice especially (all but the first with less than 160,000 population in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and in some smaller towns (Padua,
Assisi, Loreto) there were groups of castrati large and stable enough to be a feature
of everyday life.

4. Career pattern
The career pattern of castrati varied over time, but it changed slowly. Castration,
actual or in prospect, implied a total commitment to the singing profession: as an 11-
year-old applicant to one of the Naples conservatorii put it, "since he is a eunuch,
music... is the only profession to which he wishes to apply himself."60 So as to
concentrate on his training, the pupil generally boarded with a teacher or an
institution. This was a chief difference between the training of castrati and that of
women: under the social conventions of the time it was, not impossible, but difficult
for a girl to board with a teacher unless he was a relative; institutions that trained
girl musicians (the Venice ospedali much the best known) successfully prevented all

57 S. DURANTE, Cantanti e scuole di canto a Bologna (paper read to XIV Congress of the International Musicological
Society, Bologna 1987).
58 F. GRIMALDI, Cantori maestri organisti della Cappella musicale di Loreto nei secoli XVII-XIX (Loreto 1982).
9 The Diary of Samuel Pepys (ed. R. C. Latham and W. Matthews, London 1970-83), VIII, p. 155 (7 April 1667).
60 ,,...la musica... Il'unica professione, nella quale vuole applicarsi per ritrovarsi eunuco": application by Agostino Di
Secresca, orphan, for admission to Conservatorio di Santa Maria di Loreto, Feb. 1751, I-Nc, XIII.7.18 fol. 2713.

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i. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850 159

but a few from taking up professional careers in the world outside. The training of
professional women singers was therefore likely to be less intensive. Castrati also
had, in comparison with other male singers, an early start and a period of training
uninterrupted by puberty - though whether this really allowed them a longer career
as fully fledged professionals is unclear: an answer depends on criteria (such as
quality of voice) too subjective for measurement to be possible. Some well-known
castrati first sang in public in their late teens, but so did a number of other singers;
average life expectancy was short, flexible rather than heavy voices were in demand,
and if the unbroken period of training gave castrati an advantage it lay in the chance
of steadily developing musical knowledge and vocal agility.61
The distinction between training with a private teacher and training in an
institution was not as marked as we tend to assume. Both involved some kind of
apprenticeship contract under which the boy (or more precisely his elders on his
behalf) promised that he would serve for a term of years, in exchange for being
taught, fed, housed, and clothed; if, within that term, he began to earn money, all or
part of it would go to the teacher or the institution, with monetary penalties provided
for flight or default. There were many variations; the boy's family might on
occasion pay a premium or even a boarding fee; the details of the agreement might
be more or less favourable to one side or the other; but that was the basic model.
Since a private teacher was often maestro di cappella in an institution, he might well
find room there for a promising pupil, to begin with as an unpaid supernumerary;
he probably had more than one pupil living with him; and even within institutions
the relationship with the officially appointed teacher was a personal one.62
Three examples show how personal pupilage could slip into institutional position.
Young G. B. Casaccia from Ancona, a soprano and presumably a castrato, was
apprenticed in 1631 to Alessandro Costantini, for the time being maestro di cappella
to the great pilgrimage church at Loreto; under the contract (made by his father) he
was to sing for two years in the Loreto choir for nothing but his board, lodging, and
clothing. Two years was an unusually short term (six was the norm), so he had
most likely had some previous training. Within six months, however, Costantini
reverted to the lower post of organist; Casaccia seems then to have been taken onto
the establishment at a fixed salary, and he went on singing soprano in the Loreto
chapel for the following 27 years.63
Over a century later, in 1750, but only a short distance away in the small town of
Pergola, a 23-year-old contralto was coming to the end of his apprenticeship contract
with the Augustinian friar and maestro di cappella Fra Agostino Dianda; under its
terms he had been singing for no reward to himself, mostly in church but also on

61 DURANTE, II cantante, p. 375-83; HABOCK, Kastraten, p. 110-15. On the Venetian ospedali in relation to
professional singing careers: P. PANCINO, II problema dei rapporti tra insegnamento e vita musicale a Venezia...: i
quattro conservatorii, in: II Conservatorio 'Benedetto Marcello' di Venezia (ed. P. Verardo, Venice 1977), p.192-93, 195; G.
VIO, Precisazioni sui documenti della Pieta in relazione alle 'figlie del coro', in: Vivaldi veneziano europeo (ed. F.
Degrada, Florence 1980), p. 118-20; M. V. CONSTABLE, The Venetian 'Figlie del Coro': their Environment and
Achievement, in: ML 63 (1982), p. 192-93.
62 A separate study by the present writer will document this apprenticeship system (for all kinds of singers).
63 GRIMALDI, Cappella musicale di Loreto, p. 43.

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160 J. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850

occasion in nearby opera seasons at Camerino and Ancona. The problem, however,
was that Dianda was moving to the chapel at Rimini, where there was no opening
for his pupil; the young man had been promised a place in the Camerino choir, but
the cathedral just then was closed for restoration, and he could not afford to wait. A
decent but not outstanding singer, he eventually found a place in a church near
Perugia.64
A little later still, in 1767, a 14-year-old castrato at Faenza, in whom the bishop took
an interest, showed promise but had a weak patch in the middle of his voice,
"perhaps because he has nothing to eat or drink at home, being very poor as a result
of his father's misconduct." The bishop gave him a daily pittance and arranged for
him to be taught by a monk (he was still almost illiterate), but this, the only
teaching available, was not such as to qualify him for the Faenza Cathedral choir;
his protectors therefore thought of getting him into San Francesco at Assisi.65 This
was a school attached to the great basilica, where boys from a wide area of central
Italy - most of them castrati, a few prospective castrati, and a few more unaltered
males - were fed, lodged, and given a general as well as a musical education on
terms similar to those outlined above. Apprenticeship contracts (apoche) varied
from 3 to 12 years but 10 years was the norm; after the first three years, pupils
generally sang in the basilica; on days when they were not required they could get
leave to earn something by singing in nearby churches, but (until their final year)
not in theatres.66
In each of these examples we see a young castrato initially trained by a teacher or
teachers connected with an ecclesiastical institution; in two out of the three cases the
teachers were themselves clerics. Whether the pupil was directly dependent on an
institution was secondary - a matter, we may suspect, more important to the
officials of that institution (and to later students of its archives) than to the teacher
or the boy himself. We may also guess at the presence of a clerical teacher
(especially in the seventeenth and the early eighteenth century) even where it is not
documented. Thus Andrea Adami, the castrato son of a fishmonger at Bolsena, near
the end of the seventeenth century was sent by his father to Rome and entered the
service of the future Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni,67 but he must have had some previous
training to qualify him, and it is difficult to imagine who at or near Bolsena could
have provided it other than a cleric.
64 Fra Agostino Dianda to Padre Martini, 7 July 1750, correspondence between Padre Martini and Padre Girolamo Chiti,
1750, I-Bc 1.10.164, 1.12.125, 128-29. The singer's name is not given.
65 Fra Francesco Boschi to Padre Martini, 15 April 1767, I-Bc 1.7.178. The maestro di cappella at Faenza Cathedral, who
had the skills needed to train the boy, was stated to be too busy teaching volinists.
6 To Padre Martini from Fra Giampaolo Jacopini, 17, 20 July 1762, from Fra Bonaventura Maria Giovaninetti, 21 Dec. 1771,
I-Bc 1.14.132-33, 1.1.13; PAMPALONI, Giovani castrati. The Assisi school was active from some time in the seventeenth
century down to its suppression by the French in 1798; like other monastic institutions, it was already in difficulties
from about 1760-70. Pampaloni has traced some 45 castrati who went through it in the eighteenth century, of whom about
a third left early or were dismissed as unsuitable. The last entrant was to become the last famous castrato opera singer
under the name G. B. Velluti.
67 Pierleone Ghezzi, caption to caricature of Andrea Adami, I-Rvat Cod. Ottob. Lat. 3114 c. 120 ("il suo Padre facea il
Pescivendolo in Bolzena lo mandb a Roma il detto Andrea e cantava di soprano pigli6 servitii con il Sr Pietro Ottoboni
oggi Cardinale Cancelliere di S[anta] C[hiesa] lo prese al suo servizio, lo mise tra i musici di cappella e presentemente
? arbitro del detto Sr Cardinale, et e ricchissimo et omo fortunatissimo lo feci io Cavaliere Pietro Leone Ghezzi a di 20
7mbre 1723 [probably added later:], e presentemente sta tutto gonfio. Ha stampato, e avea buona libreria.")

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 i. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850 161

Set within this context, the famous Naples conservatorii can be seen to have been
only four among many roughly similar schools up and down the peninsula, most of
which were attached to religious institutions and only a few of which have so far
been studied; they were certainly among the more important, particularly in the
first two-thirds or so of the eighteenth century, but they were not unique. Founded
as orphanages but under lay oversight and subject to royal interference, they too
discriminated in favour of castrati, who were relatively protected and cosseted and
were sometimes admitted to free places even though not orphans, or else had their
admission fees reduced.68 The grounds for this favourable treatment were never
explicitly stated, perhaps because they were too obvious. Castrati were deemed
essential to the religious functions on which the conservatorii came increasingly to
rely as a source of income. But they were also valued for themselves: thus in the mid
seventeenth century two other famous schools, this time in Bologna, competed for
them, with the cathedral school trying to poach "putti soprani" from San Petronio
by offering them bribes.69
Whether formally pupils of an institution or not, these boys were being trained for
careers as, in the first place, church singers. Though the matter cannot be quantified
there can be little doubt that, up to about 1750, the great majority of castrati were
church singers some of whom sang in opera seasons, whether occasionally or more
regularly, as well as in secular cantatas and similar entertainments for the great.
Their church work was not just liturgical routine: in Florence between 1660 and 1750
"the most accessible and pervasive genre of dramatic music" was oratorio, and far
more oratorios were given than operas.70 The same was true of Rome, and may have
been true of other towns where oratorio has not been studied in detail. In the latter
half of the eighteenth century opera engagements multiplied and opera became more
feasible as a chief occupation, at any rate for some; but by then castrati were
themselves in decline. Burney's 1770 denunciation of church singers as "the refuse of
the opera houses" bears witness both to the change in priorities and to the decline.
How the change affected the outlook of young castrati on the threshold of a career
may be seen from the cases of Felice Altobelli and Bartolomeo Pierotti.
Altobelli in 1736 had been studying for two years with Padre Martini in Bologna;
he ran out of money, could find no local post because of the high concentration of
male sopranos in the city, and was sent by his teacher, with a strong recommenda-
tion, to the Franciscan school at Assisi; there he spent eight months, just enough to
learn to read music in several clefs, before the offer of a theatre engagement at

68 DI GIACOMO, I quattro conservatorii, I, p. 88-90; ROBINSON, The Governors' Minutes, p. 56, 67-68; I-Nc
XXA/1.45 (candidate admitted to S. Maria di Loreto, 1755, at half the usual fee "per essere eunuco"). When under royal
pressure to admit a particular boy, the governors of the Pieta dei Turchini pointed out the dangers of overcrowding: "Ne
piit di 90 piazze il Conservatorio capace, sicch6 quando si offeriscono eunuchi, o quei che sono di voce bassa, li quali per
le Costituzioni debono essere ricevuti, ancorch6 il numero sia compito, devono li poveri ragazzi stare in qualche
strettezza...": to the Minister Bernardo Tanucci, 25 September 1763, ibid. XIII.7.18 fol. 2725. They thus tacitly equated
castrati as candidates for admission with the orphans their institution had been founded to receive.
69 S. DURANTE, Alcune considerazioni sui cantanti di teatro del primo Settecento e la loro formazione, in: Antonio
Vivaldi. Teatro musicale, cultura e societd, p. 442 (note).
70 HILL, Oratorio Music in Florence, II, p. 249-50.

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162 J. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850

Verona enticed him away.7' Here opera looks like an overmastering diversion from a
course presumably meant to lead to a church post.
Pierotti in 1755 had just finished seven years' apprenticeship in his native Pescia
with the well-known teacher Cavaliere Bartolomeo Nucci, was living in Rome in a
palace belonging to his noble patrons the Ferroni (large landowners near Pescia),
wished to go to Bologna "to seek his fortune," but also wished "first to be assured of
a place in a chapel" there.72 Since Bologna was by then the chief market for opera
engagements we may assume that opera was Pierotti's goal; for a singer described
as having a "middling" but "pleasing and flexible" voice, a post in a chapel had
become something to fall back on.
The changing balance between church and theatre in the careers of castrati can be
documented in two different ways: by looking at the patterns of some individual
careers - necessarily those of the best-known singers; and by examining the way
groups of more modest singers divided their time.
Two famous early castrati, based in Rome - Loreto Vittori (1600-1670) and Marc'
Antonio Pasqualini (1614-1691), - both served full 25-year terms as members of the
Papal Chapel; both were composers as well as singers; both sang from time to time
in opera, always given under monarchical or noble patronage and before an invited
audience; both generally worked in Rome in the service of the Barberini and other
papal families, occasionally abroad when one or the other was lent out to a foreign
magnate (Vittori in Florence and Parma, Pasqualini in Paris). The mainspring in
the career of each was Barberini patronage: if they absented themselves from the
chapel, as they often did, it was as a rule because a pope or papal favourite chose to
use them in an opera (or indeed to take one of them hunting, as Cardinal Antonio
Barberini took Pasqualini) rather than in church. Through the influence of opera-
minded popes, Urban VIII Barberini or Clement IX Rospigliosi - the latter's
influence exerted long before as well as during his brief reign, - other well-known
castrati from the Papal Chapel and St. Mary Major were given leave in the middle
decades of the century to appear in operas for some of which Rospigliosi or his
nephew had provided the text; one, Giuseppe Fedi, sang a woman's part.7 Now and
then the chapel services were suspended because of these and like absences.
Although such practices were shortly to be disapproved by more austere popes, it
would be a mistake to see the careers of Vittori, Pasqualini or Fedi as divided
between religious and secular. The operas they appeared in were often on sacred
subjects; their careers were integrated, on the one hand by allegiance to a patron, on
the other by the interpenetration of religion and spectacle characteristic of baroque
Rome.

' Padre Martini to unnamed correspondent at Assisi (minute, no date), Fra Francesco Maria Benedetti to Padre
Martini, 24 Nov. 1736, I-Bc Cod. 80 P.123.18a, 1.9.102. Martini had described Altobelli as "d'ottimi costumi di buona voce
e di ferma volonta di studiare... sara per farle onore."
72 Fra Paolo Serafino Facconi to Padre Martini, 22 Aug. 1755, I-Bc 1.7.62.
73 ADEMOLLO, Teatri di Roma, p. 99, 106, 149; M. MURATA, Operas for the Papal Court (1631-1668) (Ann Arbor
1981), p. 7-9; EAD., Further Remarks on Pasqualini and the Music of MAP, in: Analecta Musicologica 19 (1979), p.
126-28; B. M. ANTOLINI, La carriera di cantante e di compositore di Loreto Vittori, in: Studi musicali 7 (1978); E.
CELANI, I cantori della Cappella Pontificia, 2, in: RMI 14 (1907), p. 779; G. ROSE, Pasqualini, in: The New GroveD,
XIV, p. 263.

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i. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850 163

Some other castrati based or trained in Rome at this time followed a similar career
pattern, mainly abroad. Giovanni Andrea Angelini Bontempi (1624-1705) sang first
in St Mark's, Venice, and then for some thirty years in the chapel of the Elector of
Saxony, where he became for a time deputy to Schiitz as Kapellmeister and
composed three operas. Out of seven castrati who entered the chapel of the
Collegium Germanicum in Rome between 1617 and 1645 (all but one of them as
pupils), five spent some time as members of the Imperial Court Chapel in Vienna -
an obvious destination for Italian products of a German Jesuit seminary; three at
other times served in the Papal Chapel; three sang in Barberini-patronised operas of
the 1640s in Rome and Paris; three, in the following decade, served Queen Christina
of Sweden in Rome, two of them singing in the dramatic oratorio La vita humana
(1656). Once again opera appears as an incident, though an important one, in careers
taken up largely with church music and the service of princes.74
These decades, the 1640s and 1650s, saw the consolidation in Venice of the first public
opera houses and the spread of Venetian opera to other parts of Italy through the
activities of itinerant companies of singers known as Febiarmonici.75 Venetian opera
meant works on non-Christian themes, often treated so as to bring out their erotic
aspects, with women singers in some of the leading parts and performed in
"mercenary" conditions, that is, before a paying audience. Castrati took part in
them, though they were not as yet systematically cast in the male leads. But there
are signs that the most highly regarded castrati objected at first to doing so,
especially those who served the leading chapels and magnates of Rome and Naples.
"Every castrato singer was held to be infamous" - so a well-informed gossip
explained the reluctance of three singers from the Naples royal chapel to take part in
Cesti's La Dori, an opera of Venetian type - "if he mixed in those companies in the
public mercenary theatre." What the three objected to seems to have been not a
"mercenary" performance (it was in fact being given in the Viceroy of Naples's
palace) but "mixing in those companies," particularly having to deal with women
singers some of whom were still very close to courtesan status: the prima donna in
this 1675 La Dori being a notorious example.76 A few years later, in Rome (where
women on stage were banned but in practice tolerated now and again in the semi-
privacy of noble palaces), papal officials objected to the loan of a contralto from the
Sistine Chapel to the Duke of Bracciano, not because he was to sing in opera but
because he would appear alongside two women.77
This may help to explain the careers of Naples-trained castrati such as G. B.
Merolla (died ?1696), one of the city's most famous singers in the latter half of the
century, a member of the Tesoro di San Gennaro chapel who never sang in a theatre;

74 See note 52 (on Angelini Bontempi); CULLEY, Influence of the German College, 2.
7 L. BIANCONI and TH. WALKER, Dalla 'Finta Pazza' alla 'Veremonda': storie di Febiarmonici, in RIDM 10 (1975).
76 "Ogni virtuoso Eunuco era tenuto per infame, se nel pubblico teatro mercenario, in quelle compagnie si mischiasse":
diary of Innocenzo Fuidoro (Vincenzo D'Onofrio), quoted in U. PROTA-GIURLEO, I teatri di Napoli nel Seicento
(Naples 1962), p. 298. (The three did sing in spite of their reluctance.)
7 M. MURATA, Il carnevale a Roma sotto Clemente IX, in: RIDM 12 (1977), p. 9394. The opera-minded Clement IX,
who was applied to, allowed the contralto Vulpio leave none the less, on the grounds that it would be a minor, private
occasion, but said it should not happen again.

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164 J. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850

and Matteo Sassani (1667-1737), who was a leading singer in the chapel of the ruler
or would-be ruler of Naples (at Naples itself, Madrid, and Vienna) from 1684 until
his retirement in 1711, but who did not appear in opera until 1697 and then only for
scattered seasons, all but one of them away from Naples.78
By that date, however, opera was turning from an entertainment regularly
performed only in a few places to an art form and a social focus common to many
towns all over Northern and Central Italy, with extensions into Central Europe,
Naples, and Spain. A network of theatres was developing in the last third or so of
the seventeenth century; it was in place, together with a regular market for singers,
by about 1710-1720. In these conditions the high fees available to leading castrati
from opera performances began to have their effect on career patterns.
In the 1660s G. B. Cavagna ("Cavagnino") had had to deploy uncommon skill at
diplomacy and intrigue, playing off rival noble owners of Venetian theatres as well
as his own employer, the Duke of Savoy, to secure the prize of remunerative carnival
seasons of opera in Venice.79 By the 1680s Giovanni Francesco Grossi ("Siface")
(1653-1697) seems to have had less trouble in balancing the claims of his ducal
employer at Modena against offers from other places, mainly to sing in opera, in
part because the multiplication of theatres meant a greater possibility of exchanges
among monarchical and noble patrons.80
With the spread of the opera habit leading singers among Grossi's immediate
successors experienced a further shift in the balance of their activities, though
church and chamber (private) performances still claimed part of their time.
Francesco Pistocchi (1659-1726) apologised in 1702 for having to miss Holy Week at
San Petronio, Bologna, where he was due to sing, because he was obliged to stay on
in Milan and sing in opera during the coming visit of Philip V of Spain, at that time
ruler of the state: "believe me, though staying on is extremely profitable to me, it
hurts me to the very soul, but one must be patient...""' We need not doubt
Pistocchi's sincerity; but priorities were changing.
The leading singers of the next two generations, such as Nicola Grimaldi
("Nicolino") (1673-1732), Carlo Broschi ("Farinelli") (1705-1782) and Gaetano
Majorano ("Caffarelli") (1710-1783), established the fame of the castrati as
virtuosos astounding above all for their performances in opera; this reflected
increasing vocal specialisation in the theatre, which established not only the castrato

7 DI GIACOMO, I quattro conservatorii, I, p. 52-53; U. PROTA-GIURLEO, Matteo Sassani detto Matteuccio, in:
RIDM 1 (1966). Sassani sang in opera at Bologna, Piacenza, and Naples in 1697, in Venice in 1706 and 1708, and again in
Bologna in 1708, always in the most aristocratic public theatres (the San Giovanni Grisostomo in Venice, and the
Malvezzi in Bologna).
79 Documented in Cavagna's and Vincenzo Dini's letters to Marc 'Antonio Faustini, I-Vas, Scuola Grande di San Marco
b. 188 c. 52, 85, 98, 125, 208, 218, b. 194 c. 137; and in Cavagna's letters to the Duke of Savoy, in M.-TH.
BOUQUET, Musique et musiciens a' Turin de 1648 a' 1775 (Turin 1968), p. 176-79.
80 Grossi's correspondence with the Duke of Modena and the Duke's secretary, 1684-90, I-MOs, Archivio per Materie,
Musici b. 2. For exchanges along the Florence-Modena-Mantua "circuit" at this period, see DURANTE, Il cantante, p.
364-67.

81 Pistocchi to G. A. Perti, Milan 8 March 1702, I-Bc, P.143.71 ("... credetemi, tutto che il star qui mi sij
avantaggio, me ne duole all'anima, ma vi vuol pacienza, e se viveremo, questo sara un altr'anno, se co
piacera"). Pistocchi was a priest, and later became a member of the Oratorian community.

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 i. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850 165

as leading man (primo uomo) but also the female soprano specialising in high-lying
parts.82
These and other leading castrati still sang other kinds of music; Caffarelli went to
some trouble to avoid losing his salary as a member of the Naples royal chapel on
the many occasions when he was granted leave to sing in foreign courts and
theatres, and he remained on the chapel payroll from 1739 until at least 1782,
possibly till his death in the following year.83 The relation of leading castrati to
church choirs was by this time highly variable. Like Caffarelli, Giuseppe Aprile
(1732-1813) had a long period of actual service in the Naples royal chapel (over at
least 46 years, from 1752 to 1798), punctuated by leaves, whereas Giacomo Manzuoli
(1725-c.1780) and Pasquale Potenza scarcely turned up at all after their appoint-
ment; both resigned within one or two years, presumably because it had become
clear that their engagements were unlikely to make room for periods of residence in
Naples.84 These were the extremes; in between, an international star such as Filippo
Elisi could spend fairly substantial periods (1738-44,1746-49) as a member of the San
Petronio chapel at Bologna, while the more locally based soprano Antonio Pasi -
though in demand for engagements away from the city - had an unbroken period of
membership from 1729 to 1758.85
Even in the period of decline some castrato opera stars (like some non-castrato
male singers down to the late nineteenth century) regarded a church appointment as
worthwhile insurance against old age, probably on artistic as well as on financial
grounds. Gaetano Guadagni (1730-1792), a pupil of Padre Vallotti at the Cappella del
Santo in Padua, was dismissed from the choir soon after his appointment in 1746
because of his unauthorised absences on theatre engagements. He tried for a year to
get himself reinstated, still kept up with his old teacher, and won his place back after
18 years (during which time he had created Gluck's Orfeo); he accepted a
moderate salary, and it was understood that he would still from time to time sing in
opera outside Padua. After another eight years he retired to Padua for good and
from then on was continuously active both in the chapel and in the musical life of the
town, not just as a singer but as a composer and an artistic innovator inspired by
Enlightened, perhaps masonic ideals.86 Somewhat later, Domenico Bruni achieved
the same end while avoiding conflict with the cathedral choir of Perugia: appointed
to it in 1792, when he was already famous, he did not for some years sing there but -
by agreement - made over half or more of his salary to a substitute; this amounted

82 STROHM, Aspetti sociali, p. 136-38. For Nicolino (whose career began like Sassani's with several years as leading
singer of an important Naples chapel but then concentrated a good deal more on opera), see FAUSTINI-FASSINI, Gli
astri maggiori, p. 299-310.
83 I-Na, Scrivania di Ragione reg. 38 (payments to musicians of the royal chapel), Casa Reale Amministrativa
categorie diverse 343/III (returns of the chapel establishment). In 1748 Caffarelli indirectly conveyed to the Landgrave of
Hesse-Darmstadt, the effective ruler of Mantua, that a request for leave for him to sing at Mantua should come from the
Landgrave, not from himself, as he would then be more likely to keep his chapel fees during his absence: Nicola
Donnamaria to [?], 21 April 1748, I-MOe, MSS Campori App. 2447.
84 See preceding note.
85 GAMBASSI, La cappella di San Petronio, part 2.
86 P. CATTELAN, La musica della <<omnigena religion, in: AMI 59 (1987), p. 152-186.

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166 J. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850

to a trade-off of a small profit for Bruni against reflected glory for the choir. He
eventually sang with the choir during his comfortable retirement.87
The chapels themselves seem to have come under increasing pressure of
competition from theatres, at different times according to the spread of opera in their
recruitment area. Castrati were not the only singers competed for, but, as we have
seen - though the evidence is spotty and hard to interpret,88 - they were probably
better paid as members of church choirs than the run of normal male singers; this
suggests that competition for them was particularly keen.
Venice with its six or seven public opera houses was the front line of competition:
it is not surprising that already in the latter half of the seventeenth century the
chapel of St Mark's should have been losing some of its importance as a creative
musical centre. Between 1660 and 1725, nearly 40 regular members of its choir (of all
voice types) sang in Venice opera seasons as well; of these, at least six had sung in
opera before their appointment. They seem by and large to have been singers of less
than the first rank, for whom a post in the choir, combined with the chance of local
theatre engagements in secondary parts, held out the prospect of a reasonable living.
When first-rate singers were appointed they tended to go off elsewhere on an
extended series of leaves or else, like the castrati Pistocchi and Stefano Romano ("il
Pignattino"), shortly to depart altogether. Absence without leave brought dismissal
(as for the contralto Antonio Scappi, who between his appointment in 1685 and his
dismissal in 1689 was away for at least six seasons) though even this could be
rescinded if the singer was good enough. First-rate soloists were indeed required: as
in many other churches, visiting stars were hired for special occasions such as
Christmas; thus Pistocchi and Romano came back at fees, for a single appearance,
equivalent to between an eighth and a quarter of a choir member's annual salary.89
In Rome, public opera houses were held back by the rearguard action of two
Popes (Innocent XI and Innocent XII) and were even for a time suppressed. But by
1728-29 the Papal Chapel was recruiting three castrati all of whom had spent the
previous few years singing in opera, in Rome and elsewhere, at least some of the
time in women's parts or in comic opera. Two of the three, with the encouragement
of Cardinal Ottoboni (protector of the chapel), went on appearing in Rome opera
houses at various times in the 1730s, but always in serious opera and in men's parts.90

87 LUCARELLI, Domenico Bruni (unpublished), p. 55-56, 74.

** The evidence, where it exists (see notes 25, 83), is hard to interpret mainly because of the rule of seniority that
ensured that some singers were paid more after long service (when they were perhaps past their best) than younger, up-
and-coming singers; as in civil service jobs, people were paid partly in the hope of security. The accounts show relatively
higher payment to sopranos and contraltos and some tenors, while with very occasional exceptions basses were paid less.
In the Naples royal chapel between 1752 and 1768 three singers of international reputation (the castrati Caffarelli and
Giovanni Tedeschi ("Amadori") and the tenor Gregorio Babbi) were paid 30 ducats a month, as much as the maestro di
cappella (Giuseppe De Maio), and from 1759 Caffarelli was paid an extra 5 ducats a month. At S. Maria Maggiore,
Bergamo, in 1695 and 1715 a castrato was paid more than the maestro di cappella.
89 0. TERMINI, Singers at San Marco in Venice: the competition between Church and Theatre (c. 1675-c. 1725), in:
RMA Research Chronicle 17 (1981), p. 69-74; L. BIANCONI and TH. WALKER, Production, Consumption and
Political Function of Seventeenth-Century Opera, in: Early Music History 4 (1984), p. 288-89.
9o F. PIPERNO, Francesco Gasparini, le sue abitazioni romane, i suoi allievi coabitanti (1717-1727), in: Esercizi
(Universita di Perugia, Facolth di Lettere e Filosofia) 4 (1981), p. 104-15. The three castrati were Antonio Angelini,
Giacomo Raggi, and - the best known and most often employed in opera - Domenico Ricci.

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 i. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850 167

This was an extension to a paying audience - part clerical, part aristocratic, part
tourist - of the indulgence the Barberini had assumed for themselves and had
granted certain other noble patrons by allowing chapel singers to appear in non-
"mercenary" opera performances. On one occasion the Pope himself overrode
Cardinal Ottoboni and granted the best known of these castrati leave to appear at
the Teatro Argentina "so that the city should not lack for respectable entertainment,
of a kind that generally fends off others more perilous.""9
Pressure of competition must have been great when the authorities of the
Cappella Giulia (the choir of St Peter's) had to threaten, probably sometime in the
early eighteenth century, dismissal for any singer who absented himself without
leave to sing in opera; the notice was directed particularly at sopranos and the
critical time was Carnival, which by then had established itself as the busiest and
most fashionable season for opera in most Italian towns.92 At mid-century, Pope
Benedict XIV forbade all church singers who were clerics (including all members of
the Sistine choir) to appear on stage.93 This was to acknowledge that, in the new
conditions brought about by the spread of public theatres and secular opera
subjects, a career straddling church music and opera could no longer be integrated -
anyhow for those formally committed to a religious life. The old baroque synthesis -
under which all manner of activities could be held religious, because religion entered
into everything - had broken down.
The Pope's action did not deter church singers outside Rome from putting further
pressure on their employers. In the 1740s and 1750s the chapel at Loreto had to grant
repeated leaves to 15 of its singers (seven of them castrati) to sing in opera. Most of
these sang in minor seasons in nearby towns such as Camerino or Fermo, with an
occasional foray to Perugia or Rome (still within the Papal States); two sopranos
went further afield and eventually departed, Antonio Donnini in 1752 to the court of
Berlin and Silvio Giorgetti after 1767 to that of Diisseldorf, where he had already
spent two seasons. The singers who entered the Loreto chapel from about 1760 had,
most of them, locally circumscribed theatre careers, though the soprano Gerolamo
Bravura won but, because of the Napoleonic wars, could not take up an engagement
in London; he eventually disappeared into Moravia (perhaps into Russia) in 1809.
The practice of granting leave to sing in opera went on through the whole of the
nineteenth century; the last castrato to take advantage of it, Eugenio Boccanera,
sang at La Scala and Florence in 1813 and 1817 and then left for the Perugia
Cathedral choir.94

91 Governor of Rome to Cardinal Ottoboni, 24 Dec. 1736, quoted in E. CELANI, Musica e musicisti in Roma 1750-1850, 1,
in: RMI 18 (1911), p. 16-17.
92 G. ROSTIROLLA, Gli 'ordinari' della cappella musicale di San Pietro in Vaticano, in: Note d'Archivio n. s. 4 (1986),
p. 229. The undated notice is a manuscript one entered in printed regulations of 1600. To judge from the handwriting, it
could date from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century - the latter perhaps more probable. It warns "soprani di
qualsivoglia sorte quanto cantori... non ardischino pigliar parti per recitare, o sia commedie, o sia intermedie, o in
Roma, o fuori di Roma, o di Carnevale, o fuor di Carnevale..."
93 CELANI, I cantori della Cappella Pontificia, 2, p. 779.
94 GRIMALDI, La Cappella musicale di Loreto. There were also two basses who made a considerable career. Giovanni
Francesco Delicati stayed at Loreto for 36 years (1738-74) but was given leave to sing in opera in Turin, Milan, Venice and
elsewhere over 17 seasons of varying lengths. Michele Benedetti (served from 1803) appeared in Venice and

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168 J. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850

The chapel of Santa Maria Maggiore, Bergamo, at some point in the late
seventeenth or early eighteenth century began to allow its singers leave once a year,
during a part of the autumn that was anyhow a local holiday, so that they could
perform elsewhere, whether in opera or in church functions. By 1779 it was reduced
to offering any good young soprano the whole of Carnival off "and even much of
Lent if he wants to work in the theatre"; the traditional autumn holiday was still
available as well, up to All Saints' Day, and the soprano could have All Saints off
too if he had an opera engagement "so long as he provides the church with some
weak tenor [sic] as a substitute." Moreover, his salary would be continued through
all his leaves.9' Nothing could illustrate more clearly the dearth of good castrati, the
spread of opera, and the decline of church music in the later half of the eighteenth
century. By 1782-83 the basilica of San Francesco at Assisi could offer a soprano or
contralto no more than a "wretched" salary, so that its chances of getting one were
slight; even the Sistine choir, at a date unspecified but somewhere about 1770-80,
lost its only young soprano, so that if the two sopranos left were to catch cold in
Holy Week, either the choir would have to give up singing the famous Miserere or
lay outsiders would have to be brought in.96
Gifted castrati now found their career pattern leading them most of the time
round the opera houses - but there were very few gifted castrati left. Of the
dwindling numbers that still entered church choirs, many must have been singers of
- at best - modest competence: not all of them "the refuse of the opera houses"
(since, as we have seen, some still appeared in local theatres of equally modest
pretensions), though others presumably fell below the standards even of seasons at
Mirandola or Camerino. And all this happened before the coming of the French in
1796, the temporary banning of castrati from the opera stage, and the Napoleonic
dissolution of many monastic orders (and choirs) on top of those already dissolved
by Enlightened sovereigns. The withdrawal of the ban, and Napoleon's cultivation
of the great Girolamo Crescentini, could make no difference. G. B. Velluti went on

Amsterdam and then, in 1810, went off to Naples, where he made a notable career in Rossinian opera; he was the
original Moses in Mose in Egitto. He retired formally from Loreto in 1813.
95 BOWMAN, Musical Information, p. 342-43; Carlo Lenzi to Padre Martini, 22 Feb. 1779, I-Bc 1.9.66 ("liberta di tutto il
Carnevale fino gran parte anche di Quaresima volendo far teatri... trovandosi impiego in una qualche opera pu6 prender
la licenza per il giorno di tutti li santi facendo suplire alla chiesa con qualche debole tenore per cambio"). The salary
offered was 190 Venetian ducats "da 7 paoli" (1 ducat = L. ven. 6-4-0), about as much as a castrato singer in this choir had
been paid early in the century, but (because of intervening inflation) somewhat less in real terms; it could be increased
by about half through local incidental earnings. The total income a soprano could hope for (presumably including opera
earnings outside Bergamo) was stated to be 700 ducats a year. This may have been optimistic; cf. fees for one season
paid to Pacchierotti at Lucca in 1777, and to the prima donna Anna De Amicis at the Teatro Comunale, Bologna, in 1778 -
i. e. to singers of the very first rank - roughly equivalent to 400 and 450 Venetian ducats: F. PIPERNO, Il sistema
produttivo, fino al 1780, in: Storia dell'opera italiana, IV, p. 44; C. RICCI, I teatri di Bologna (Bologna 1888), p.
645-62. Cf. also initial salary of 300 Venetian ducats a year paid to leading singers of St Mark's, Venice, in 1765: Gaetano
Latilla to Padre Martini, 2, 9 Nov. 1765, I-Bc, 11.22.178-79.
96 Fra Clemente Maria Mattei to Padre Martini, Assisi 10 Sept. 1782, I-Bc, 1.2.16 (he had refrained from telling a
potential contralto recruit the salary on offer: "mi son vergognato perchi veramente 6 una miseria"); letter from Rome
to the maestro di casa at San Francesco, 1783, quoted in PAMPALONI, Giovani castrati, p. 139 (prospective recruits
"rispondono che in Roma colle sole musiche guadagnano il doppio senza poi il Teatro"; life at Assisi was boring,
whereas in Rome they were "soliti a divertimenti continui... vuol dirsi dunque che sia un miracolo del S[anto] Padre
che se ne trovi qualcuno sufficiente che vi si adatti"); Giuseppe Santarelli to Padre Martini, 21 September [17??], I-Bc,
1.10.90 (where Santarelli's letters run from 1759 to 1779).

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i. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850 169

until 1830 as virtually the only castrato still before the opera public. The few castrati
operated on after 1796 could have as their destination only a small group of Rome
choirs.
Castrati who, a century or two earlier, would have been deemed failures were
perhaps now able to enter the remaining choirs. Some had always risked having in
the end nothing to show for the sacrifice of sexuality and potential fatherhood. Luca
Salvadori, from Pistoia, for a time served the Bentivoglio family at Ferrara; in 1623,
thanks to a measured but on the whole positive reference from Monteverdi, he was
taken on by the Duke of Modena. At an unspecified date he asked to be released:
"finding himself unable, through the lack of opportunities, the awkwardness he
experiences in exercising his profession, and his daily worsening loss of voice, to see
how he can improve himself in any way... and wishing to try his luck by other
means, for better or worse," he begged to be allowed "to live in that free state into
which he was born." The Duke was ungracious: he let Salvadori go but (against
custom) would not give him a reference; nor would he help him to pay his debts or
to collect from those who owed him money. Probably after an interval for
recuperation, Salvadori found a post in the Imperial Chapel at Vienna, where he
died in 1639.97
Even successful castrati - like all singers - had to reckon with the time when they
would no longer be able to perform satisfactorily. The advantage of posts in church
or monarchical chapels was that they were long-term appointments and offered as a
rule the prospect of some kind of pension - though even here wars could suspend
payment for years; in peacetime too the difficulty Monteverdi found in getting his
pension paid by the Mantua treasurer was not unique. Castrati who worked for
rulers could become in effect civil servants, like Angelini Bontempi, who in his 30
years at Dresden became a sort of official historian; even Farinelli's position at the
Spanish court (1737-1759), shorn of its legendary accretions, was that of a master of
the revels who also sang for the King in private.98 For a few, diplomacy was another
resource: Atto Melani (1626-1714) acted in various courts for his employer Cardinal
Mazarin and, later, for Louis XIV; Domenico Cecchi ("Il Cortona") (c.1650-1718)
is said to have carried out more shadowy missions for the Emperors Leopold I and
Joseph I, and was eventually allowed a sinecure as pension.99 These diplomatic tasks
concerned, as much as anything, the personal relations and intrigues of sovereigns,

97 Salvadori's petition (no date but 1624 or later; in that year he was given leave to go to Pistoia), I-MOs, Archivio per
Materie, Musici b. 2 ("... trovandosi per la scarsezza de occasioni e per la poca comodita chegli a desercitarsi nella sua
professione e mancandogli ogni giorno pifi la voce senza sapere il modo de avanzarsi in cosa alcuna... e desiderando di
tentare in altre maniere la sua fortuna o peggiore o megliore... [supplica licenza di poter] viversi in quella liberta nella
quale 6 nato"). Monteverdi's reference in P. FABBRI, Inediti monteverdiani, in: RIDM 15 (1980), p. 76. Monteverdi had
reservations about Salvadori's intonation, timbre, treatment of words, and trill, but praised his command of agility,
ornamentation, messa di voce, and affetto. KOCHEL, Hofmusikkapelle in Wien, p. 57, 60, records payments in 1638-39 to
the soprano Luca Salvadori (or Salvatore), and his death in 1639, but a statement of his term of service as 1619-39 must be
erroneous; it probably means only that Salvadori joined the chapel sometime during the reign of Ferdinand II (1619-37).
98 TIMMS, Bontempi; SACCHI, Vita del cay. Don Carlo Broschi, p. 17-27, - the earliest life, - did not exaggerate
Farinelli's position, though it did start the canard that the arias Farinelli sang to the depressive Philip V were always the
same four.

9 PRUNIERES, L'opera italien en France, p. 187-90; WEAVER, Materiali per le biografie dei fratelli Melani, p. 271-74;
F. RAVAGLI, II Cortona (per nozze Furiosi-Fabbri, Citti di Castello 1896).

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170 J. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850

and are not easily disentangled from the rest of the singer's obligations as a ruler's
dependent or favourite. Leading castrati were probably thought suited to them in
part because they got about and mingled with the great, in part because, like monks,
they had no children to advance.
Serving a ruler over a long period did not necessarily bring exalted position. For
Farinelli in Spain it did mean the Order of Calatrava, wealth, portraits that showed
him as a near-regal figure, and - at a new reign - honourable discharge followed by
luxurious retirement to a villa outside Bologna (where he went to a good deal of
trouble to secure privileges reserved for nobles, in particular that of having Mass
said in his house).'00 For the little groups of castrati who served Louis XIV and his
successors it meant something more modest. They were regarded as essential to the
performance of the "grand motet" at Versailles; some performed at the Concert
Spirituel in Paris (as on occasion did more celebrated castrati who were passing
through); none ever appeared at the Paris Opera. In the late seventeenth century
five of these Italian castrati lodged together at Versailles, along with three French
musicians, one of them a lutenist. About 1704 one of the castrati, Antonio Bagniera,
built a comfortable house nearby on a mortgage raised from the lutenist, and went to
live there with three of the original Italian group; the lutenist reserved the right to
come and enjoy the garden at any time, and, at his death, left Bagniera his interest in
the property. There were still castrati living there in 1748. Both among this group
and, about 1780, among a later group of Versailles castrati, several left each other
their modest property in their wills, after providing a small income for their one
servant.10' They had traded castration and exile for a steady income; we cannot tell
how much they may have sent back to their families in small Apulian and Sicilian
towns, but it was not a fortune.
This kind of quiet routine, ending in tidy testamentary dispositions, was perhaps
more typical of castrati in retirement than the eccentricity and display attributed to
them by legend. True, even some famous singers ran through the vast sums they had
earned and, like "Pasqualino" in 1752, stunned everyone by dying penniless.'02 A

100 Cardinal Lorenzo Ganganelli (later Pope Clement XIV) to Padre Martini, 1 Nov. 1760, 7 Nov. 1761, Martini's minute of
reply, I-Bc 1.15.110, 115-15a. Farinelli seems to have begun by pleading his sister's noble status through marriage;
Ganganelli thought this might not be accepted by the Pope, even if it could be established, and suggested pleading ill
health. For the iconography of Farinelli, see D. HEARTZ, Farinelli and Metastasio: Rival Twins of Public Favour, in:
Early Music 12 (1984), p. 358-66, and, for Farinelli's own portrait gallery (two emperors, one empress, five kings, two
queens, two crown princes, one crown princess, one royal prince, and one pope, most of them his former patrons and all
hung in his billiard room), BURNEY, Men, Manners and Music, p. 92-93. - Similar near-regal iconographic treatment
of an earlier castrato is discerned by T. FORD, Andrea Sacchi's 'Apollo crowning the singer Marc 'Antonio Pasqualini',
in: Early Music 12 (1984), p. 79-84. In this picture (of about 1634) Pasqualini is indeed shown apparently on equal terms
with Apollo. There remain however certain puzzling features, not brought out by Ford; the leopard-skin worn plaid-like
by Pasqualini is surely that of Dionysus - somewhat disquieting in a picture that alludes to the flaying of Dionysus's
follower Marsyas; the compositional focus of the picture is on Apollo's genitals (with very visible testicles), a curious
emphasis in a picture glorifying a castrato. A little later (1641-42) Pasqualini was certainly treated by Cardinal Antonio
Barberini on a footing of equality with nobles - to the disquiet of some of them: PRUNIERES, L'opera italien en France,
p. 25, 89-90. There still seems a possibility that the 1634 picture is an elaborate and unkind joke, attributable to divisions
within the Barberini family (patrons of both Sacchi and Pasqualini).
'01 BENOIT, Versailles et les musiciens du Roi, p. 269-70,324-29, 348-50,362; L. SAWKINS, For and against the order of
Nature: Who sang the soprano?, in: Early Music 15 (1987), p. 315-24.
102 Chiti to Padre Martini, 9 Sept. 1752, I-Bc, 1.6.31 ("...li 31 mori Pasqualino nostro famoso che doveva avere almeno da
60 mila scudi, trovato con un solo quatrino, e debiti, senza saper nulla, e solo lui diceva che non poteva parlare, e che Dio

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i. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850 171

commoner fate was that of the Cavaliere Valeriani, from Verona (?1662-1746), who
sang in the Papal Chapel, travelled Europe in the service of various rulers, lost his
voice, became a priest, and died destitute at 83 after having for some years lived on
charity.103 The teacher Pier Francesco Tosi (1647-1732) had had a successful career in
London and Germany, but by the time of his death that was long past; his most
valuable possessions were a bed, a shotgun, and a silver watch, and his net estate
amounted to little.l04
A number of successful singers, on the other hand, lived well on estates or in large
town houses which they had bought with their savings: Sassani, Nicolino, Francesco
Bernardi ("Senesino"), Pistocchi, Manzuoli, as well as Farinelli and, later,
Domenico Bruni and Velluti; some (Sassani, Caffarelli) acquired titles; Bruni, after
some initial resistance by the nobility of his native Fratta, not only was admitted to
patrician rank in the town council but was eventually made gonfaloniere (a post
akin to mayor); his contemporary Cristoforo Arnaboldi bought former noble lands
from the revolutionary government of the Cisalpine Republic, and thus enabled his
nephew later to marry into the restored Piedmontese aristocracy.'0? Nephews and
nieces were indeed the usual beneficiaries, though Pistocchi, in a fussy will, left his
considerable estate to his servant of 24 years, Angelo Maria Sarti, on condition that
he added the name Pistocchi to his - a practice found here and there when a castrato
had no nephews to carry on the family name; in the mid nineteenth century some
Sarti Pistocchi were eminent lawyers in Bologna, where the family still exists.106
Because castrati underwent long training, sometimes including a fair literary as
well as musical education, some of them developed bookish interests which they
could pursue into retirement. In the early eighteenth century the celebrated Antonio
Maria Bernacchi, as well as the less prominent Gaetano Berenstadt and Andrea
Adami, were all bibliophiles and dealers in books. This was still a luxury trade,
addressed to a tiny public and manageable as a sideline; Berenstadt stood in a
relation to his patrons not markedly different according to whether he provided
singing, books, or (another line of his) antiques.'07 The leading singers Francesco

solo lo sapeva [,] cosa, che ha fatto stordire tutta la professione, e Roma intiera..."). This was probably Pasqualino
Betti.

103 GHEZZI, cartoon caption, I-Rvat Cod. Ottob. Lat. 3116 c. 162 ("Cavaliere Valeriani musico castrato per molti anni fu
musico della Chiesa Nova e poi musico di Cappella [Pontificia] e poi la lasso per viaggiare il mondo servi diversi sovrani
poi resto ciavarro [= voiceless] si fece Prete, il quale dimora in Roma in quest'anno 1728, et 6 Veronese. [added later:] e
morto alli 18 di gennaro 1746 in eta di Anni 83 e fu sepolto a S. Maria in via Lata et 6 morto miserabbile, che viveva di
elemosine.")
104 I-Bas, Ufficio del Registro, vol. 29 fol. 151r-153v (notaio Roffeni Gioacchino, dimissione dated 2 August 1732, and
inventory at death). The estate was valued by a public official at L. bol. 892-2-0, to be set against some minor debts and
funeral expenses. The heir, the castrato Geminiano Raimondini, made a legal declaration that he would not meet debts in
excess of the estate.
105 HERIOT, Castrati in Opera, p. 153-54, 156, 198-99; LUCARELLI, Domenico Bruni (unpublished), p. 71-74, 77-78;
VIANELLO, Teatri, spettacoli, musiche, p. 283-84. Chiti described his old friend Senesino as living "da gran signore":
to Padre Martini, 17 March 1751, I-Bc, 1.6.2.
106 I-Bas, Ufficio del Registro, vol. 200 fol. 176r-183v (Pistocchi's will, notaio Pedretti Agostino Ignazio, opened 13 May
1726). The list of Pistocchi's property is more impressive than appears from BUSI, G. B. Martini, p. 140-86. Domenico
Bruni, in the marriage settlement of his niece and heiress, arranged that not only would her husband add the surname
Bruni to his, but their children's first names would begin with D: LUCARELLI, Domenico Bruni (unpublished), p.
77-78.

107 Bernacchi's letters to Padre Martini, I-Bc, 1.18.152-67, and in G. B. MARTINI, Carteggio inedito (e

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172 J. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850

Bernardi and Filippo Elisi (described as a "galantuomo" or well-bred person)

corresponded with the musicologists Chiti and Martini; Elisi helped Padre Martini
with his researches in libraries.108
For men of this stamp, teaching was an obvious resource, both during and
especially after a singing career. It could be carried on at all levels, from the
authoritative position of Bernacchi at Bologna (in 1736-56) or of Crescentini at the
Naples Conservatorio (from 1817 until shortly before his death in 1846) to the most
modest small-town instruction in keyboard playing as well as singing - for many
castrati could double as instrumentalists. Bernacchi in retirement stood at the centre
of Bologna musical life: head in effect of a small singing school who lived in each
other's pockets (he liked to refer to his pupils as his "brigata"), taken up with the
internal politics of the Accademia Filarmonica, friend of Padre Martini, correspon-
dent of Metastasio, general busybody and go-between.109 Crescentini's position and
salary at Naples were so exceptional as to make for undying hatred between him
and the director of the Conservatorio, the composer Nicola Zingarelli.110
A more representative career combining singing, teaching and a position at the
heart of urban musical life was that of Antonio Maria Giuliani (1739-1831). He was
based throughout at Modena, where he arrived from his native Ravenna at the age
of 13 to study with the director of the Cappella del Duomo, a body he was to serve in
later life, from 1773 as singer and then (1808-26) as himself maestro di cappella. He
had previously combined a post as first soprano of the ducal chapel with playing the
harpsichord for the Accademia Filarmonica (equivalent at Modena to the ducal
orchestra) and occasional opera engagements at Venice, Copenhagen and else-
where: on the opera market he was a minor but no doubt reliable artist, who sang as
primo uomo in small towns and secondo uomo in bigger ones. Before directing the
Cathedral music he spent a quarter-century (1782-1807) as maestro concertatore
of the leading Modena opera house, and composed one opera for it. He also taught
the harpsichord in several noble households. Through his long life he accumulated a
large library of books and prints; he is said to have been highly cultivated,
particularly in French literature, and much loved and respected in the town."'

Bologna 1888), p. 321-23; LINDGREN, La carriera di Gaetano Berenstadt; GHEZZI, cartoon of Andrea Adami (see
note 67; this shows Adami against a table loaded with books and sheet music).
'08 To Padre Martini from Chiti, 18 Feb. 1751, 8 Feb. 1752, from Ignazio Balbi, 27 Dec. 1758, from Elisi, 23 Jan. 1760, I-
Bc, 1.6.1, 13, 1.9.50, 1.1.173. Vincenzo Dal Prato - the original Idamante in Mozart's Idomeneo - was described by the
original Idomeneo as "giovane erudito, applicato, di un onestissimo carattere e di ottimi costumi": Anton Raaff to Padre
Martini, 26 Jan. 1784, in P. PETROBELLI, The Italian Years of Anton Raaff, in: Mozart-Jb. 1973-74 (Salzburg 1975), p.
270. The "erudition" may however have been purely musical.
109 Bernacchi's letters to Padre Martini (see note 107); L. FRATI, Antonio Bernacchi e la sua scuola di canto, in: RMI 29
(1922).
110 C. S[ARTORI], Crescentini, in: Enciclopedia dello Spettacolo, III, cols. 1705-07; N. LUCARELLI, Girolamo
Crescentini: la vita, la tecnica vocale analizzata attraverso alcune sue arie tipiche (tesi di laurea, Perugia University
1983-84), corrects many of the dates in Crescentini's brief autobiography of 1837 (see note 52).
ill RONCAGLIA, La Cappella del Duomo di Modena, p. 197-204; A. GANDINI, Cronistoria dei teatri di Modena dal
1539 al 1871 (Modena 1873), I, p. 134-35. Giuliani, according to contracts in I-MOe, MSS Campori App. 2447, sang at
Padua in the Fiera season of June-July 1767, at Mantua in Carnival 1768, had probably sung at Pisa in Carnival 1767, and
had an offer from Cadiz for later in 1768; he seems to have gone to Copenhagen instead. He appeared as secondo uomo
in an opera seria at an unnamed Venetian theatre, for an undated (and failed) season in which Giacomo Veroli sang as
primo uomo: accounts of sums owed to the company, I-Vas, Inquisitori di Stato b. 914. (Season unrecorded by WIEL,
Teatri musicali di Venezia.)

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 J. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850 173

Many castrati became priests - not in itself very significant (of other than
education) in the Italy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which was full of
unbeneficed clerics. To become a monk was a more decisive step, a withdrawal from
the world that, as they grew older, attracted a few of these childless men. Nicolino
did not become a monk but, at the end of a blameless life, had himself buried in a
Franciscan habit in a specially austere service. Balatri did enter a monastery in
Bavaria after learning of his brother's death. He stuck to it, but Giovanni Antonio
Predieri (1679-1746) and Pistocchi flitted in and out of the Franciscan and Oratorian
orders: Predieri, a distinguished composer, singer, and teacher, was a restless,
difficult person, while Pistocchi (who was said to have brought ,,gaiety" into the
community) may have been no more than lonely; as an Oratorian he did not take
vows, and was entitled to leave.112 A touch of melancholy recurred among some
castrati: thus the celebrated Gasparo Pacchierotti (1740-1821) regretted near the end
of his long life not having realised earlier "that all that once moved my weak senses
was mere vanity and illusion."113

5. Ambiguities
What then remains of the stereotype of the castrato as opera star, colossally vain,
extravagant and temperamental? It had some basis, though a slender one. The
tension of singing in public - of bringing off an extraordinary performance wholly
dependent on one's own powers - makes artists susceptible: in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries castrati were the most prominent singers, and had their share of
susceptibility. A few castrati really were "impertinent and haughty," as was alleged
of Siface (murdered for having boasted of an "affair" with a widowed noblewom-
an),114 and as was certainly true of Caffarelli - the original badly behaved castrato on
and off stage, vulgar, quarrelsome, and exhibitionistic.115 Most, however, seem to
have been of average conscientiousness or better. Even the physical stereotype of the
gigantic, clumsy castrato with overdeveloped thorax and breasts was clearly not
universal or perhaps even common; all we can now say is that some corresponded to
it, some did not.
The contradictions between the stereotype and what we know of the real thing are
best explained by a deep ambiguity in contemporary attitudes, not unlike the
ambiguity with which the dominant groups in European society have at various
times looked upon alleged inferiors who seemed in some way potent or attractive -
Jews, say, or women. As with Jews and women, a good many castrati played into

112 FAUSTINI-FASSINI, Gli astri maggiori, p. 310-16; BALATRI, Frutti del mondo; BUSI, Padre G. B. Martini, p. 31-62,
140-86.

113 To Giuseppe Micali, 19 Feb. 1819, I-Nn, MSS [Link].27 (161) ("... colla poca mia conoscenza dell'uman g
quel che attuava i miei debboli sensi un giorno, altro non era che vanith, ed illusioni, ed 6 un peccato che s
della mia corsa, conosca si fatta verita.")
114 According to the diary of G. B. Fagiuoli, "quanto perito nella sua arte, altrettanto impertinente e supe
musicorum, baronfottutorum": quoted in RICCI, Siface e la sua tragica fine, in his Figure e figuri del mond
73-87.

115 HERIOT, Castrati in Opera, p. 143-51; M. F. ROBINSON, Naples and Neapolitan Opera (Oxford 19

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174 J. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850

these ambiguous attitudes, no doubt to propitiate hostile neighbours but with the
effect of confirming them in their hostile stance.
Two startling seventeenth-century examples show how far ambiguity could go.
Angelini Bontempi's theoretical work on music, based on Cartesian and Neo-
Platonic formulas, likened the power of song to that of semen - this from a singer
whose own generative power had been destroyed before it could appear."116 Bontempi
may conceivably have been parroting clich6s and blinding himself to their
significance, but this cannot have been true of our next witness. A monody entitled Il
castrato set a text in the first person, a cascade of indecent double-entendres based
on the common notion that castrati could perform sexually all the better for the loss
of testicles, and deploying the usual imagery of tree trunks, cannonballs, keys etc.;
the person who sang it was a castrato, well aware of how unfounded it was."7
Those who wished to insult castrati had means ready to hand. "Castrone" was the
pejorative term; Salvator Rosa used it in a satire in the mid seventeenth century,
Giuseppe Parini in another in the late eighteenth."18 "Cappone" ("capon") was a
variant. "Coglione" meant both "testicle" and "fool": Zingarelli, reminded by
Crescentini that their salaries in the Naples Conservatorio were equal, snapped
back: "You're right, Maestro, you've found in Naples those you left outside.""119 Yet
even satirists could be ambiguous. Another satire of Parini's begins by declaring his
abhorrence of "a singing elephant" who on stage emits "a thread of tone"; it then
attacks the castrato's corrupt parents, warning them (inaccurately) that their son
will turn against them, so that they will go begging while he sits, singing and
belaurelled, by the side of kings - his defects apparently now forgotten.120 Parini
himself wrote the libretto of Ascanio in Alba (set by Mozart for castrati among

116 G. A. ANGELINI BONTEMPI, Historia musica (Perugia 1695), p. 239-40 ("Ampissima 6 l'efficacia del canto
regolato dalle vere norme dell'uno e dell'altro modo moderno; poich6, sicome la virtih o lo spirito naturale dove egli 6
potentissimo subito ammollisce, e liquefa gli alimenti durissimi, e di austeri gli rende dolci, e genera fuori di s6 col
producimento dello spirito seminale la propagine: cosi la virtiu vitale et animale dove ella e col proprio spirito
efficacissima, agita per via del canto col movimento di se stessa il proprio corpo, e con l'effusione muove il corpo vicino; e
con una certa proprieta stellata, la quale concepisce e dalla forma di se stessa, e dalla eletta opportunith del tempo,
dispone tanto il suo, quanto l'alieno." The passage adds (referring the reader, in a marginal note, to Ficino) that this
"agitation" is born from the "forza e virtih del numero harmonico, diffuso nella diversita degl'intervalli dei modi," these
last being so powerful that if we knew fully their dominant stars we could achieve some other celestial virtue; but as
such knowledge is virtually unattainable on earth, we had better fall back on the doctrine of affects to understand how
harmonic arrangements work.
17 Words anonymous (perhaps by Francesco Melosio), music by Fabrizio Fontana; performed by the Ensemble Sergio
Vartolo at the XIV Congress of the International Musicological Society, Bologna 28 August 1987.
118 "Chi vide mai piii la modestia offesa? I Far da Filli un castron la sera in palco, I E la mattina il sacerdote in chiesa":
S. ROSA, Satira I: la musica, quoted in CELANI, Musica e musicisti in Roma, 1, p. 13. Rosa's was a general attack on
theatres as a symptom of Italian degradation, and, in the mid seventeenth century, a somewhat isolated one. Parini's I1
teatro was an attack, inspired by neo-classical moralising, on the theatre as a sink of iniquity: theatres seemed built for
Cicero and Virgil, but "qui sol, Musa, s'aspetta I Un fracido castron che a' suoi belati I Il folto stuol de' baccelloni
alletta": G. PARINI, Poesie e prose (ed. L. Caretti, Milan-Rome n. d.), p. 331-37, lines 70-72.
19 "Avete ragione, Maestro, voi avete trovato in Napoli quelli che avete lasciato fuori": quoted in speech by a late
nineteenth-century director of the Conservatorio [?Pietro Platania], MS in I-Nc, 5.5.631. This was clearly an anecdote
handed down within the Conservatorio; it sounds authentic.
120 La musica (original title La evirazione): "Aborro in su la scena I Un canoro elefante I Che si trascina a pena I Su le
adipose piante, I E manda per gran foce I Di bocca un fil di voce." Later: "Misero! a lato a i regi I Ei sedera cantando I
Fastoso di aurei fregi; I Mentre tu mendicando I Andrai canuto e solo I Per l'Italico suolo": PARINI, Poesie e prose, p.
202-05, lines 1-6, 85-90.

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i. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850 175

others) and left uncompleted the libretto of an opera seria that would likewise have
required castrati.
To a minor composer of the 1740s the castrato G. B. Mancini was "that castrone"
(because he was supposed to have slandered the composer and owned him money),
but the same letters sent polite greetings to "il signor Antonio [Bernacchi] and his
pupils."121 "Some of my best friends are castrati" sums up this attitude. Not even
Padre Martini or his fellow-musicologist and friend Girolamo Chiti were free of it. A
castrato copyist who did a poor job was only showing the ignorance typical of his
kind, he had "left his humanity behind in his castration"; when a young singer
showed himself lacking in courtesy "one must," Martini wrote, "feel sorry for him
because he is a castrato, but much more because he has sung women's parts on
stage." Yet both Martini and Chiti were close friends of castrati.122
Castrati themselves joined in the fun. Balatri in his burlesque autobiography
referred to himself as a "cappone" - rhyming with "castr...." [sic]. Senesino
(Francesco Bernardi) when in England exchanged suggestive doggerel with the
poet-librettist Paolo Rolli: the burden of it was that other castrati were capons but
Senesino was a "cock" pursued by English "hens"; he pretended to have been worn
out by all the girls who "hanker after my tree that gives no fruit," so that he could no
longer "hoist a sail," etc.123 Rolli began it; Senesino may have felt obliged to respond
in kind, like a heroine of Shakespearian comedy joking about maidenhead before an
audience for whom loss of maidenhead was, in their own families, far from a joking
matter.

The most surprising instance of this kind of humour occurs in Metastasio's lette
to Farinelli. Metastasio was a man of delicate feeling, a precise user of language
a great friend of Farinelli, whom he called his ,,twin." Yet his letters now and
included sexual jokes mild enough in themselves but scabrous when addressed
castrato. If he was pestered by his "twin" to write an opera libretto, he suspe
Farinelli of being pregnant, "for that is never a masculine longing"; if he was aske
to cut one of his earlier librettos, he described the task as "circumcision" and then
"castrating oneself with one's own hand"; if he used the expression "the fle
weak" he hinted that this must not be taken to mean that he was impotent
Farinelli's letters are lost: we do not know what he made of the jokes. They were n
inadvertent.
As he continually voiced tender affection for his "twin" Metastasio now and the
pretended to fear that their love for one another might be thought sinful.125 Thi
121 Baldasare Angelini to Padre Martini, 1741-43, I-Bc, 1.4.135, 146, 154.
122 Letters of 1746 and 1749, in MARTINI, Carteggio inedito, p. 194, 208, and G. ROSTIROLLA, La corrispondenza
Martini e Chiti, in: Padre Martini: Musica e cultura nel Settecento europeo (Florence 1987), p. 232-33. Cf. PETROB
Italian Years of Raaff, App. II, p. xxi, xxxiii, for an example of Padre Martini's friendly relations with Bernacchi
pupils (the castrati Amadori and Tomaso Guarducci and the tenor Carlo Carlani): he wrote a comic cantata to cele
a hare-shooting expedition of theirs (one of those occasions everyone found vastly hilarious for reasons not now ev
and was quite prepared to be told ribald stories by them.
123 BALATRI, Frutti del mondo; A. G. BRAGAGLIA, Degli evirati cantori, part 8, in: Amor di Libro 7 (1959), p. 7
(prints in full Rolli's and Senesino's letters in I-Sc, Autografi Porri, fasc. XXXVI n. 4).
124 P. METASTASIO, Tutte le opere (ed. B. Brunelli, Milan 1953), III, p. 313-14,565,878 (letters of 26 Aug. 1747,15
1750, 15 Dec. 1753). Cf. more joking about Farinelli's "pregnancy" (in old age), 1 May 1769, ibid. IV, p. 725-2
125 Ibid. III, p. 314-14, IV, p. 315 (letters of 26 Aug. 1747, 10 Oct. 1763).

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176 J. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850

mere teasing. But the sexual lives of castrati were matter for gossip right through the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many were said to have affairs, homosexual
or heterosexual. We need not now rehearse most of these stories: their truth cannot
be determined. They are however of interest as symptoms. We may also be able once
or twice to understand something of the emotional lives of castrati.
Many castrati, especially famous ones, were said to have had affairs with women;
Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci married an Anglo-Irish girl of good family who later
gave birth to two children (the marriage was eventually annulled at her family's
instance); more interestingly, two less well known castrati were allowed to marry in
Germany, Bartolomeo Sorlisi in 1668 and Filippo Finazzi in 1762, after much official
and theological deliberation; they stayed married.126 We are used to the sexual
feelings that popular singers can arouse; those least suitable as sexual objects may
arouse the strongest feelings. Baroque Europe no doubt had its groupies. But the
position of women in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries suggests a more
complex answer.
Of Matteo Sassani, a Neapolitan diarist wrote that he was "loved by all,
particularly by the ladies, as much for his being a handsome young man and a
eunuch as for his sweet and sonorous voice."127 The diarist may have meant
something boring about eunuchs being thought safe and hence available for sexual
intrigue. But when we recall the assumption under which Pepys operated, let alone a
late seventeenth-century Neapolitan - the notion that almost any woman was
available for fumbling at the first opportunity, - we may well imagine that some
women found a castrato's company restful, and some fell in love with him.
In the theatre a woman performer - of all women a target for sexual advances -
might fall in love with a castrato because he could give her musical guidance as well
as affection. Caterina Gabrielli, a prima donna who later showed great sexual and
personal independence, is said to have fallen in love with Guadagni during
rehearsals for her debut at 17, and to have been physically transformed from a thin,
fretful girl into a beauty.128 A similar teacher-pupil relation probably explains the
menage a trois which Giuseppe Jozzi (1720-?) formed with a young German woman
singer and her sponging husband, a violinist.129 Stendhal, who knew a great deal
about the opera world at the end of our period, explained this kind of relationship by
the superior musical attainments of the castrati: "Out of despair, those poor devils
became learned musicians; in concerted pieces they kept the whole company going;
they lent talent to the prima donna, who was their mistress. We owe two or three
great women singers to Velluti."'a3 What "mistress" meant we cannot tell; it
probably stood for real feeling.

126 HERIOT, Castrati in Opera, p. 27, 51-57; HABOCK, Kastraten, p.302-11. Sorlisi (?1632-1672) was a court official and
was enabled to marry by the Elector of Saxony in spite of Church opposition. Finazzi (1710-1776) obtained the Hamburg
Senate's permission to marry the German woman he was living with only after he had broken both legs in an accident.
127 CROCE, Teatri di Napoli (1st version), p. 205.
12" A. ADEMOLLO, La pizu famosa delle cantanti italiane della seconda meta del secolo XVIII (Caterina Gabrielli)
(Milan 1890), p. 10, 27. She is said later to have fallen in love with Giacomo Veroli as well.
129 HABOCK, Kastraten, p. 435-36.
130 STENDHAL, Rome, Naples et Florence (1826 version; ed. V. Del Litto, Lausanne 1960), p. 294. Farinelli, discreet as

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 i. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850 177

For the castrati, the chief hazard in life was probably loneliness. A family of
brothers, sisters, nephews and nieces was not always enough, and anyhow might be
far away. Balatri's autobiography records a bittersweet return to Pisa: father,
mother, elder brother, and nurse fall on his neck, but the brother asks if there is a
present for him, the servants expect large tips, the town, after Vienna, seems empty
and poor.131
A castrato sometimes formed a close relationship with a young man - often a
favourite pupil - whom he treated as an adoptive son. What we hear about such ties
generally amounts to malign (and unverifiable) gossip. One case is well
documented, anyhow on the surface. Pistocchi seems to have had no close relations
who could inherit the family name, something that evidently mattered to him. In
1701-02, shortly after he had got back to Bologna from a long engagement in
Germany, he formed ties with no fewer than three potential adoptive heirs. He was
then in his early forties, at or just past the peak of a career that had made him one of
the most famous singers in Europe. He had brought with him from Germany a
young pupil, the violinist "Rinaldo" [Reinhold?] Bulmein, whom he referred to as
"my Rinaldo," "my son Rinaldo;" when he had to be away from Bologna he would
write back to make sure that "Rinaldo" was getting all he needed by way of money,
schooling, and (if need be) shoes and socks.132
About the same time, however, Pistocchi started sharing a house (largely built
and furnished by himself) with a slightly younger man, Francesco Antonio Oretti, a
doctor of philosophy and medicine and a lecturer at Bologna University. He lent
Oretti's father - another doctor, of noble status - and Oretti himself "considerable
sums of money", without charging interest, so that they could deal with unspecified
but urgent family needs; in 1702, the year when Oretti senior seems to have died,
Pistocchi was also making the younger man an allowance. In 1704 Oretti junior
entered into a contract establishing total community of property between him and
Pistocchi. In it he acknowledged Pistocchi as his "brother" and residuary legatee. If
Oretti died first, leaving legitimate children, Pistocchi was to stand to them in the
relation of father; he was to provide them with dowries or with shares in the estate
(determined by the Oretti family entail); he was to look after Oretti's widowed
mother or provide her with a fixed allowance. For the rest, he was free to do as he
wished with the estate, and to pass on the joint surnames; if he chose to bequeath
both estate and surnames to a descendant of the Oretti family in the female line this
would be much appreciated, but he was not obliged to do so.133

always, is said to have admitted that he habitually "courted" the prima donna he sang opposite, but only to keep peace in
the company: SACCHI, Vita del cay. Carlo Broschi, p. 16.
131 BALATRI, Frutti del mondo, p. 156-65.
132 Pistocchi to G. A. Perti, 21 Dec. 1701, 8 March, 7 June 1702, I-Bc, P.143.2, 23, 71. Pistocchi used the word "figlio," not
"figliolo" (sometimes applied to pupils). "Rinaldo" came from Anspach, where Pistocchi had served as maestro di
cappella: BUSI, G. B. Martini, p. 140-86. It is not clear whether he was the pupil Pistocchi had acquired in Vienna on his
way back to Italy, for preparing whom for the Imperial service he was to be paid 20 thalers a month: to Perti, 5 May 1700,
I-Bc, P.143.1. He could have brought the boy with him from Anspach and then persuaded the Imperial court to pay for his
training.
133 Contract, 21 Jan. 1704, I-Bas, Archivio Notarile 5-1-1 (Notaio Benazzi Filippo, no. 7); Pistocchi to Perti, 8 March, 3

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178 J. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850

The third person who entered Pistocchi's life about 1701-02 was the servant
Angelo Sarti. After 1704 the story shows gaps. "Rinaldo" went back to Germany.
Oretti went on teaching at Bologna University; he was to outlive Pistocchi by 20
years, but meanwhile he and his declared "brother" may well have fallen out. We
have no direct knowledge of their relations; we do, however, know that in 1715
Pistocchi became (for a time) a member of the Oratory at Forli. Pistocchi's will,
drawn up in 1725 and revised shortly before his death in the following year, makes
no mention of "Rinaldo" or Oretti. As we know, the residuary legatee was Sarti.
One of his qualifications, perhaps the most important, was that he had a wife and
children: Pistocchi's "descendants" might at one time have been patrician Oretti
Pistocchi; they were now to be bourgeois Sarti Pistocchi.
Besides pledging Sarti to have masses said for him (24 a year for 24 years - as
many years as Sarti had been in his service) Pistocchi bequeathed some valuable
objects, about the precise disposition of which he was a good deal exercised, to three
well-known castrati. A few years on, Tosi was to leave such estate as he had to a
younger castrato, whose proxy for legal purposes was a relative of Bernacchi.134 The
closest ties of some castrati may well have been with other castrati. It was, after all,
natural for birds of such uncommon feather to flock together.

6. Disappearance
By the time of Pistocchi's death it appears from Benedetto Marcello's satire that
younger castrati were beginning to make excuses for their condition. Shortly
afterwards, Voltaire began (in Candide and elsewhere) his recurrent satires on
castration as an institution, part of his attack on the Catholic Church. By Burney's
visit to Italy in 1770 the sense of incongruity and shame appears to have been general
among the educated. But the immediate reason why castrati numbers were already
in full decline was a series of decisions by Italian parents not to have their sons
operated upon even though they had fine treble voices; these decisions were taken
while Voltaire wrote, about 1730-40 (and some may have been taken earlier), by
people few of whom had ever heard of Voltaire or of any other satirist or Enlightened
thinker, but whose equivalents in 1630-40 had opted for castration without seeing it
as problematic.
It is always difficult to explain why people do not do something, particularly as
they may not even be aware of having made a choice. One general cause of parents'

May 1702, I-Bc, P.143.57, 71. Sicinio Oretti (the father) graduated from Bologna University in 1661 as doctor of medicine
and philosophy, Francesco Antonio in 1694 as doctor of the same two subjects (according to the 1704 contract and to S.
MAZZETTI, Repertorio di tutti i professori antichi, e moderni della famosa Universita' e del celebre Istituto delle Scienze
di Bologna (Bologna 1847), p. 227, of medicine only according to Notitia doctorum [Universitatis Bononiensis
Monumenta, IV, ed. G. Bronzino, Milan 1962], p. 168, 212). When Sicinio graduated, Pistocchi was 2 years old, so we
may take him to have been closer in age to Francesco Antonio - probably a little older. Francesco Antonio died in 1746; his
father had probably died in 1702, the year in which his name disappeared from the University records.
'4 See notes 104, 106. Pistocchi's legacies (rearranged in a codicil) were to the composer Giuseppe Orlandini and the
singers G. B. Minelli (a pupil) and Antonio Pasi. Tosi's residuary legatee was Geminiano Raimondini, whose proxy was
Giuseppe Bernacchi.

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 J. Rosselli: The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850 179

behaviour was probably the economic revival that began about 1730, following on the
prolonged depression of 1680-1730 (itself preceded by recurrent crises from about
1620 on); even though in a limited way, prospects for their sons were improving,
more opportunities were opening up. In some parts of Italy important demographic
changes took place about the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that
are just beginning to be studied - in particular a loosening of kinship ties that for a
time broke up large endogamous lineage groups into virtual nuclear families.135
Smaller family units conceivably allowed greater care for the individual destiny of
sons - no longer subordinated to the fortunes of the lineage as a whole.
Probably the most important cause was the gradual decline of Christian
asceticism, manifested through the eighteenth century in the falling membership of
the religious orders, and itself intertwined with the economic and demographic
changes just mentioned.'36 If, as I have argued, a decision to make one's son a
castrato meant for most people a decision to make him a church singer - a more
drastic, greedier or riskier version of enrolling him in a monastic order, - such a
choice became less attractive as church choirs reduced their numbers or closed. This,
rather than the disapproval of the enlightened and educated, helps to explain why
the number of castrati fell just as employment in opera was expanding. To gamble a
son's virility on success as an opera singer was immensely risky; to stake it on his
finding a tenured post as a church singer was reasonably likely to bring him and his
family a lifelong return, both in financial security and (while the ideal of Christian
asceticism still held) in status. It is thus fitting that the handful of castrati who
survived into the early twentieth century should have been concentrated in a few
ancient church choirs at the heart of Catholic Christendom.

.3s DELILLE, Famille et propridtd, p. 355-60.

136 Percentages of monks in relation to population (worked out from BELOCH, Bevdlkerungsgeschichte Italiens, I, p.
79-86) fell in Naples from 1.5 to 1 between 1743 and 1796, in Florence from 1.4 to 0.9 between 1738 and 1806, in Rome from
2.6 to 2.4 between 1702 and 1760, in Siena from 1.7to 1.4 between 1717 and 1766, in Turinfrom 2.2 to just under I between 1702
and 1790; in each city figures for years between the terminal dates show the decline to have been steady. In Venice,
monks made up about 1 % of the population between 1642 and 1766, but after the latter date a policy of control of all (and
dissolution of some) monastic orders, common to most of the Italian states in the last third of the century, led to a
decline: F. VENTURI, Settecento riformatore (Turin 1969ff.), II, p. 148-50.

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