Celestial sacrifice - The Economist

LONG before singers became superstars by surviving humiliating television contests, they did so by surrendering much more than their dignity. For almost 200 years Europe’s biggest singing celebrities were the castrati: surgically snipped “man-boys” whose high voices and incredible breathing powers captivated audiences and commanded football-star salaries.

Cecilia Bartoli, a mezzo-soprano—and one of the few classical artists today who can claim sports-star fees of her own—is trying to resurrect the art of the castrati with her new Decca album, “Sacrificium”. This collection of 15 opera arias from the early 18th century (11 of which have never been recorded before) is packaged with notes that illuminate the castrati’s glamorous and tragic world.

Gelded male sopranos began falling from favour as the baroque era gave way to the romantic age and the robust sound of male tenors caught on. The 1870s finished them off when laws passed by a newly unified Italy made castration for musical purposes illegal. Even more important, an edict by Pope Leo XIII banned the hiring of castrati by the church. This made the practice unprofitable.

Apart from a handful of wax phonograph recordings of Alessandro Moreschi, who died in 1922, there is no audible record of this rich tradition of European music. In the years since Moreschi last sang, recordings of arias composed for castrati, most of them written by Handel, have been transposed an octave for baritones or are sung by sopranos or countertenors.

Ms Bartoli focuses on the music and influence of Nicola Porpora, a largely forgotten 18th-century Neapolitan musician. Like Schoenberg in the 20th century, Porpora was well-known as a composer—in London in the 1730s he was second only to Handel in popularity as a writer of operas—but equally famous for his students. He taught two of history’s most famous castrati: Caffarelli and Farinelli.

Farinelli created the title role in Porpora’s opera “Adelaide”. Hearing Ms Bartoli sing one of his arias (“Nobil onda”) in “Sacrificium,” the listener gets a sense of why the castrato was in such demand: the five-minute, lung-busting number makes Mozart’s famously treacherous “Queen of the Night” aria seem like a walk in the park. As a mezzo, Ms Bartoli cannot match Farinelli’s reportedly celestial tone, nor is she in possession of his man-sized lungs. What she does exhibit in the album is precision coloratura singing with her dark-hued voice, not to mention a studied sensitivity to the contours and rhythms of these almost 300-year-old songs.

Few question Ms Bartoli’s voice or musicality, but her critics contend that the singer is less a scholar than a fetishist. The project before this one was devoted to bringing Maria Malibran, a fellow mezzo with a brief but illustrious career in the 1830s, out of obscurity. But the album, “Maria”, resembled swag from a million-dollar theme party, featuring lavish photos of Ms Bartoli dressed up in Malibran’s jewellery and period costumes. A mobile museum of the singer’s personal collection of Malibran artefacts followed her on tour.

This sideshow element is less evident with “Sacrificium”—though the album features extraordinary images of Ms Bartoli’s head atop crumbling male statuary—but the singer’s immersion in the past seems complete. She speaks of Porpora and Caffarelli as if they were contemporaries and, as an Italian, finds it hard to believe “that in my country 200 years ago, they castrated boys like animals.” The “sacrifice” in the album’s title is Ms Bartoli’s way of reminding opera lovers of the barbarism that gave voice to these fine baroque melodies.