The Castrato

The Castrato
Author: Martha Feldman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2016-08-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520292448

The Castrato is a nuanced exploration of why innumerable boys were castrated for singing between the mid-sixteenth and late-nineteenth centuries. It shows that the entire foundation of Western classical singing, culminating in bel canto, was birthed from an unlikely and historically unique set of desires, public and private, aesthetic, economic, and political. In Italy, castration for singing was understood through the lens of Catholic blood sacrifice as expressed in idioms of offering and renunciation and, paradoxically, in satire, verbal abuse, and even the symbolism of the castrato’s comic cousin Pulcinella. Sacrifice in turn was inseparable from the system of patriarchy—involving teachers, patrons, colleagues, and relatives—whereby castrated males were produced not as nonmen, as often thought nowadays, but as idealized males. Yet what captivated audiences and composers—from Cavalli and Pergolesi to Handel, Mozart, and Rossini—were the extraordinary capacities of castrato voices, a phenomenon ultimately unsettled by Enlightenment morality. Although the castrati failed to survive, their musicality and vocality have persisted long past their literal demise.

Cry to Heaven

Cry to Heaven
Author: Anne Rice
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 578
Release: 1995-04-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0345396936

In a sweeping saga of music and vengeance, the acclaimed author of The Vampire Chronicles draws readers into eighteenth-century Italy, bringing to life the decadence beneath the shimmering surface of Venice, the wild frivolity of Naples, and the magnetic terror of its shadow, Vesuvius. This is the story of the castrati, the exquisite and otherworldly sopranos whose graceful bodies and glorious voices win the adulation of royal courts and grand opera houses throughout Europe. These men are revered as idols—and, at the same time, scorned for all they are not. Praise for Anne Rice and Cry to Heaven “Daring and imaginative . . . [Anne] Rice seems like nothing less than a magician: It is a pure and uncanny talent that can give a voice to monsters and angels both.”—The New York Times Book Review “To read Anne Rice is to become giddy as if spinnning through the mind of time.”—San Francisco Chronicle “If you surrender and go with her . . . you have surrendered to enchantment, as in a voluptuous dream.”—The Boston Globe “Rice is eerily good at making the impossible seem self-evident.”—Time

Observations on the Castrati in Britain

Observations on the Castrati in Britain
Author: Paul F. Rice
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2022-12-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1527590828

This book highlights the experiences of castrato singers in Britain during the long eighteenth-century. These singers stood apart from traditional cultural and sexual norms of the period by nature of their altered bodies. The work investigates the fears surrounding the possibility of Catholic influence in the nation, and the ability of sensual Italian operatic music to feminize the male population and weaken the country’s leaders. The castrato as a possible romantic rival to “normal” men is also discussed, while the contributions of the castrati to cultural leadership in the areas of teaching, concert direction and social influence are examined. This book will appeal to music historians and those interested in cultural and gender studies.

Musical America

Musical America
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 434
Release: 1988
Genre: Music
ISBN:

The journal of classical music.

The Marqu?s, the Divas, and the Castrati

The Marqu?s, the Divas, and the Castrati
Author: Louise K. Stein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 793
Release: 2024-06-14
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0197681859

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. During a crucial period in opera's development as a genre and as a business, the flamboyantly libertine Spanish aristocrat Gaspar de Haro y Guzm?n (1629-87), Marqu?s de Heliche and del Carpio, influenced operatic practices and productions for both Italian and Hispanic operas. A voracious collector of books and antiquities and famed connoisseur of visual art, the marqu?s financed operas in both Spain and Italy and further shaped them through his ideas, energy, and politics. His legacy also brought forth the first operas of the Americas, as posthumous revivals of the operatic genres he nurtured appeared in the Americas less than fifteen years after his death. In this book, author Louise K. Stein follows the trajectory of this first operatic producer to have shaped opera in two different worlds--Europe and the Americas--and in doing so, advances our musical and historical understanding of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century opera and cultural encounter. Each chapter focuses on different productions spearheaded by the Marqu?s in Madrid, Rome, and Naples during his lifetime, with the final chapter considering how his influence continued in operatic productions in Lima, Mexico City, and other regions of New Spain after his death. Alongside this portrait of the distinguish patron of the arts, Stein shows how conventions of musical dramaturgy for both private and commercial opera were developed within a consistent politics of production across the far-flung administrative centers of the Spanish empire in the years 1650-1730. She reveals the place of opera within the siglo de oro (Golden Age) of Hispanic theatre and delves deeply into how the Marqu?s became the principal patron of Alessandro Scarlatti in Italy after his time in Rome, sparking a reliable production system for Italian opera in Naples. Stein also addresses gendered performance--how beliefs about female fertility conditioned listeners and shaped the operatic genre--and advances the concept of the "womanly voice" in the first extant Hispanic operas, the Italian operas produced in Naples between 1683 and 1687, and the first operas of the Americas from 1701 to 1730.

Sartre

Sartre
Author: David Drake
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2005
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781904341857

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) dominated the cultural and literary life of post-war France. He believed from an early age that he had a mission to be a writer and proceeded to realize this as a novelist, philosopher, screenwriter, playwright, literary and art critic, biographer, essayist, polemicist and journalist. Although before the Second World War, Sartre showed little inclination to become involved in politics, from 1945 he established himself as the very personification of intellectual commitment, taking public positions on national and international political issues from the Liberation until very shortly before his death. In this new biography, David Drake considers the works of Franceâs most famous twentieth-century intellectual, his relations with his contemporaries, and the political causes he espoused, all of which the author firmly locates in the turbulent times through which Sartre lived.

The NPR Listener's Encyclopedia of Classical Music

The NPR Listener's Encyclopedia of Classical Music
Author: Theodore Libbey
Publisher: Workman Publishing
Total Pages: 1000
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780761136422

A resource on classical music provides coverage of composers, works, musical terminology, and performers, along with recommended recordings and access to an interactive Web site that allows readers to listen to sample works, techniques, and performers discussed in the reference.

Red Hands

Red Hands
Author: Colin W. Sargent
Publisher:
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2020-07-02
Genre: Biographical fiction
ISBN: 9781909954397

Red Hands is a deeply compelling tale of a woman caught inside the destruction of a regime. Iordana is a normal girl, brought up with all the perks of Romania's corrupt communist regime. Then she falls in love and marries the eldest son of her parents' arch-rival, Romania's monstrous dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. They become the in-laws from hell, but she brings them their only grandson. And then there's the 1989 revolution, when crowds will kill anyone with the Ceausescu name. In all the blood and chaos, can Iordana keep her little son alive? Drawn from eighty hours of unique interviews and told in Iordana's own voice; a true-life tale that spins readers into the pleasures, excesses and horrors of late twentieth-century Europe.

Voice Machines

Voice Machines
Author: Bonnie Gordon
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2023-05-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226825140

"The castrato phenomenon stretched from the late sixteenth century, when castrati first appeared in Italian courts and churches, through the eighteenth century, when they occupied a celebrity status on the operatic stage. Throughout this time, the voice of the castrato--hailed as uniquely strong, flexible and expressive--contributed to a dramatic expansion of the musical vocabulary and to finding new ways to embody the poetic text. For us today, the castrato also highlights the porous relationship of voices and instruments/machines and the inherent materiality of sound. In her revealing study, Bonnie Gordon asks what it meant that the early-modern period produced a caste of technologically altered male singers and she uses the castrato as a critical provocation for asking questions about the interrelated histories of music, technology, sound, the limits of the human body, and what counts as human"--

Vocal Virtuosity

Vocal Virtuosity
Author: Sean M. Parr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2021
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0197542646

Introduction. Coloratura and Female Vocality -- The New Franco-Italian School of Singing -- Verdi and the End of Italian Coloratura -- Melismatic Madness and Technology -- Caroline Carvalho and Her World -- Carvalho, Gounod, and the Waltz -- Vestiges of Virtuosity : The French Coloratura Soprano -- Epilogue. Unending Coloratura.