by Irini Kotroni

Created on: January 02, 2011   Last Updated: January 04, 2011

Castrati are the darker side of opera with particular reference to Baroque Italian opera. This was the period when opera moved from straight drama to fantastic dazzling spectacles of serious opera requiring male soprano voices.

The practise of using male actors to perform female roles also applied in the world of music; soprano voices were needed for sacred music yet this created a problem due to females not being allowed to perform in religious ceremonies and so the castrato came into being.

Becoming a castrato involved a small surgical operation which in the 21st Century will make most of the male population of the world squirm at the very thought of it.

The word ‘castrato’ or the derivatives ‘evitato’ or ‘musico’ may be translated as an ‘unmanned musician’ and this is an apt description of a castrato. He is a male soprano whose voice has been kept artificially unbroken by having surgery on his testicles before reaching puberty, thus giving the young male the voice of a boy with the lungs of a man that had power and an extended range.

The castrati were admitted into the Vatican Chapel in Rome; dates vary from around 1565 and this method of boys maintaining their falsetto voices became ‘normal’ spreading throughout Italy during the first half of the 17th century for religious purposes, however the rise of opera in Italy during the Baroque Period of c.1600-1759 gave the castrati another outlet for their talent. The high fees tempted them away from the religious music to take many of the leading and secondary roles in this new style of opera seria; comic opera rarely used castrati although Mozart had one mezzo-soprano castrato in La Finta Giardiniera

The castrati were often ridiculed about their condition; they were neither male nor female yet their singing was greatly admired. They had the advantage of having fewer distractions and for many to achieve the high notes, had become the only goal in their lives.

The composers of the day wrote arias for them which the castrati would then embellish using their unique ability to add higher notes than the composer had written, thus improving the quality and performance of the original scores.

The castrati of the 17th century may be likened to the film, rock and sports celebrities of the early 21st century, commanding high fees and becoming extremely wealthy. Unfortunately many of the successful castrati became notoriously temperamental prima donnas, dictating

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