The Castrato as History

Author(s): Katherine Bergeron

Source: Cambridge Opera Journal , Jul., 1996, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Jul., 1996), pp. 167-184
Published by: Cambridge University Press

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Cambridge Opera Journal 8, 2, 167-184

The castrato as history

KATHERINE BERGERON

One of the final scenes of Farinelli, I Castrato, dir. Gerard Cor

Classics, 1994), shows a solar eclipse witnessed, eighteenth
members of the court of Philip V of Spain around 1740. Restle
through pieces of tinted glass prepared in the smoke of a small
visual detail, a jot of history in this sumptuously though often
film that offsets the melodrama to follow. Without warning, a w
corny, time-lapse photography, ushers in a sea of Goya-like
passes through the entourage; eerie blackness falls on the court
The King is shrouded in another kind of darkness: his
melancholy (we would call it 'clinical depression'). He pronounce
a tomb, makes the sign of the cross, then calls for a dose of his p
- the voice of Carlo Broschi, known as Farinelli: 'Bring back th
Without hesitation the singer intones in a thin soprano the mo
opening phrase of 'Alto Giove', an aria from Nicola Porpora's Po
known to have performed the work at the Haymarket The
months after his London debut. An unseen orchestra enters as
distant theatre, pulling the castrato and his song into a brighter
region beyond the eclipse, an imaginary world of music.
The whole, lush scene serves not only as welcome interlude
reminder, in the midst of a self-consciously 'historical' film, o
history itself, of how frightfully dim it can be for those who w
sight of so many spectators straining to view one of nature's a
clouded lenses seems to comment on the very obscurity of t
narrative, not to mention our own peculiar status as viewers pe
it represents. Indeed, the image of the eclipse - according t
moment when something 'fails to appear' - stands as a sym
offered in this film, the 'true story of a world-famous castrato',
For the story of the castrato, that figure eclipsed almost tw
certainly a shadowy tale in the history of music, a story that m
something that 'failed to appear'. If the truth of history can r
spaces, those impossible gaps that separate present from past, the
castrato offers a kind of chilling embodiment of that truth, a po
things that can never be recovered.
One of those unrecoverable things is music. The very genre of
mention its composers, depended on the castrati as a kind of rais
Corbiau's Farinelli makes such an issue of the relationship b
performers and the men who wrote for them. The film pr
collaboration in two complementary case studies. We witness on
disgust of a self-assured Handel, who resents the attention paid
divas, and on the other the envy of the singer's insecure broth

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168 Katherine Bergeron

Riccardo Broschi. To be fair, Corbiau's invented scenario is plausible, at least from

a modern perspective. After all, who today (besides musicologists) has ever heard
of Riccardo Broschi, let alone the other early eighteenth-century authors of Italian
opera? Hasse, Leo, Vinci, Porpora were eclipsed as completely as the singers they
serviced. Just how much this was the case we can see by comparison with opera of
the early nineteenth century. It is now possible, for instance, to think of, say,
Rossini, or Meyerbeer without giving a thought to Giovanni Battista Velluti - one
of the last castrati trained in the eighteenth-century tradition, heard by a squeamish
Napoleon and by an admiring Stendhal - who performed in Rossini's Aureliano in
Palmira (1813) and appeared opposite the Spanish mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran
in Meyerbeer's I crociato in Egitto (1824).1 Yet it is simply unimaginable to mention
the name Riccardo Broschi without lavishing attention on his much more illustrious
brother, Farinelli.
Probably the most famous singer of his generation, Farinelli was a prominent
media figure, both satirised on the London stage and regularly lampooned and
caricatured in the press. Daniel Heartz has collected the bulk of portraits and
engravings that depict Farinelli in conventional powder and finery (in at least two
he modishly sports an earring), offering us a fairly detailed picture of how he might
have looked.2 As for his temperament, we can glean something from his long
correspondence with Metastasio, the salutations of which reveal an affectionate poet
referring to his fellow artist as gemello, 'twin'. The beloved singer was treated in one
full-length biography published as early as 1784, and even served as an informant
to Dr Burney, who interviewed him for his treatise On the Present State of Music in
France and Italy (1771). In the century after his death (long before Corbiau ever had
the idea) at least half a dozen playwrights and composers used his life as a source
of inspiration for operas, comedies and historic plays in French, English, Spanish
and German.3
In other words, the Corbiau film had a good number of precedents, and a good
deal of information from which to construct a plausible picture of this curious
historical figure. The plot does present, in a kind of deliberate jumble, a number of
the more important episodes. The last quarter of the film, for instance, offers a brief
glimpse of Farinelli's semi-retirement to Spain where - the story goes - David-like,
he cured King Philip of his depression, singing him to sleep nightly with the same
four songs (none of which, by the way, makes it onto the opulent soundtrack). This
familiar anecdote is not actually enacted in the film, but merely hinted at. So is
another odd fact of Farinelli's long stay in Madrid (1737 to 1759). It is reported that
the aging castrato became involved in the business of importing Hungarian stallions
for the improvement of the native breed. He oversaw, that is, a kind of stud farm

Angus Herriot, The Castrati in Opera (New York, 1974), 189-99.

2 Daniel Heartz, 'Farinelli Revisited', Early Music, 18 (1990), 430-43.
3 To name a few: John Barnett, Farinelli, a serio comic opera, in two acts (London, 1839); Tomas
Bret6n, Farinelli, opera en un prologoy tres actos (Madrid, 1902); Henri Dupin Farinelli, ou La
piece de circonstance (Paris, 1816); Henri Saint-Georges, Farinelli, ou Le bouffe du roi, comedie
historique en trois actes (Paris, 1835); Mariano Vazquez, Farinelli: gar uela historica en tres actos
(Malaga, 1855); Herman Zumpe, Farinelli: Operette in 3 Acten (Hamburg, 1888).

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 The castrato as history 169

- a detail the screenwriters were so delighted with (and so anxious to impart with
deep psychological significance) that horses run wild throughout the film.
Other stories receive fuller exposition. An early scene offers a version of the
famous singing contest between Farinelli and a trumpet player. In Burney's version,
the seventeen-year-old singer, recently arrived in Rome, finds himself in nightly
battle with a German trumpeter who happened to be featured in one of his arias.
Their competition seems to have centred on the cadenza. Burney tells of a certain
triumphant evening on which Farinelli, appearing to be spent, faked out his
opponent, leaving him defenceless as he pulled off a display of even greater
virtuosity. The excess of notes and divisions not only thrilled the audience but,
Burney concludes, won him 'the superiority which he ever maintained over all his
contemporaries'.4 Corbiau's slightly altered version transposes the scene to an
outdoor street fair, and makes the moment of leaving the trumpet player in the dust
the occasion of an original myth: the singer pulverises player and instrument into
flour, farina. Voila, the birth of his never-explained stage name.
Almost all history comes packaged in a similar way. Corbiau spins the historical
'facts', necessarily limited, into densely woven, fantastic fictions meant to be the
source of the film's pleasure. A case in point is Farinelli's collaboration with
Riccardo, who did indeed provide material his sibling would make famous on the
operatic stage. The screenplay cannot resist turning what was at the very least a
practical artistic relationship into a complex (and, to my mind, unnecessarily kinky)
sibling rivalry. The struggle among brother musicians repeats, too predictably, the
supposed jealousy between Mozart and Salieri that fuelled Peter Shaffer's Amadeus.
In music as in life, there just aren't that many new stories to tell.
In a similar way, the film psychologises the well-documented story of the
competition between two opera companies, one directed by Handel at Covent
Garden, the other - the so-called Opera of the Nobility at the Haymarket Theatre
- led by Farinelli's former teacher Porpora. When Farinelli came to London in
October 1734 to sing in Porpora's troupe, it is said that he caused a sensation with
his debut as Arbace in Artaserse, an operatic pastiche with music by Hasse, Porpora,
as well as brother Riccardo, who, according to Burney, had composed the opera's
celebrated aria 'Son qual nave'.5
Farinelli's performance of that aria featured an opening note sustained so long
that the crowd became ecstatic, inciting a certain Lady Rich to shout the
blasphemous 'One God, One Farinelli!' The scene was later parodied by Hogarth
in his drawings for The Rake's Progress. The presence of Farinelli at the Haymarket
Theatre (together with the equally famous Senesino, who had recently deserted
Handel's company) thus gave the Nobles a distinct advantage, and poor Handel a
run for his money. The whole competitive business continued for about three years,

4 Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy (London, 1771), 206.
5 From a look at the sources of Artaserse, Robert Freeman concludes that 'the attribution of
this aria by Burney and others to Riccardo Broschi is probably in error'. See 'Farinello and
his Repertory', in Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Music in Honor of Arthur Mendel, ed. Robert
Marshall (London, 1974), 327, note 69.

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170 Katherine Bergeron

at the end of which Handel apparently suffered a stroke, both companies folded for
lack of funds, and Farinelli shipped off to Spain.
Corbiau's laborious reading of this episode, which includes a bizarre cast of
behind-the-scenes characters, delivers the facts with a blatant Oedipal twist. The
handsome Italian, cast in a tense love-hate relationship with the older Handel,
exhibits the requisite guilt and envy of a confused and rebellious adolescent. Handel,
for his part, is presented as an imposing, Teutonic father figure - not to mention
a relentless castratophobe. He also happens to be the only character to speak
three languages: French, English and, of course, a few intimidating words of
(un-subtitled) German. According to this film the great composer doesn't lower
himself to speak Italian. Corbiau's apparent goal is to transform the conventional
link between composer and singer into a drearily complicated, co-dependent
relationship (constructed as father-son, master-slave, abuser-enabler: take your
pick) whose ultimate crisis will serve as the explanation for Handel's demise and
Farinelli's eventual escape from the London opera scene.
Indeed, the narrative strategy of the entire film exhibits the same, obsessive
tendency again and again. This is, to put it simply, the need to shift attention from
what is recoverable to what is necessarily unrecoverable - from the innocent, even
cheerful surface of history's anecdotes to its darker, guilty secrets. This relentless
search for the unknown, for the missing parts of familiar tales, seems to emerge as
a profound consequence of the very history on which the film is based, a history
that undeniably revolves around two 'missing things' whose story could never be
told. It is this original, repressed narrative of castration - a ghoulish testimony of
missing testicles - that the film ultimately seeks to put before the ears and eyes of
its twentieth-century witnesses. The resulting 'true story' puts music history on trial,
transforming a musical drama about musical drama into an eighteenth-century
mystery story, a kind of whodunnit about an original, unsolved theft.

So, how was it done, anyway? The question reflects a long history of enquiry
reaching back at least to the beginning of the eighteenth century. The issue of
surgery, for instance, was addressed as early as 1707 by Charles d'Ancillon in his
Traite des eunuques,6 which offered a description of one of the standard procedures -
the severing of the spermatic duct leading to the testis. In order to reduce the pain
of cutting, the child was usually drugged and then soaked for a time in a scalding
bath. The whole procedure, sometimes referred to as a 'partial' castration, caused
the withering and eventual disappearance of the testicles. (There is a strangely
affecting account of the operation - told in graphic detail from a child's point of
view - in the opening chapter of Anne Rice's historical fantasy on the castrati, Cry
to Heaven.)7

6 Translated by Robert Samber as Eunuchism Display'd, Describing All the Different Sorts of Eunuchs
(London, 1718).
7 Anne Rice, Cy to Heaven (New York, 1982).

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 The castrato as history 171

Yet the surgery itself tells only part of the story, inevitably raising other, more
vexing questions - where, for instance, the deeds were done and under whose
authorisation. Such mysteries certainly distracted the intrepid Dr Burney when later
in the eighteenth century he travelled through Europe to chronicle the musical
habits of his exotic French and Italian neighbours. In Italy, repeated enquiries about
exactly where castration was practised always elicited the same response: not here.
The report of Burney's frustrated quest reads a bit like a Gilbert and Sullivan patter
song:

I was told at Milan that it was at Venice; at Venice that it was Bologna; but at Bologna the
fact was denied, and I was referred to Florence; from Florence to Rome, and from Rome
I was sent to Naples ... At Naples, Mr. Gemineau, the British consul ... assured me ...
that this practice is absolutely forbidden in the Conservatorios.8

The list suggests - apart from whatever fun the Italian officials might have been
having with their English inquisitor - the structure of what we would today call an
'open secret', a narrative practice concealing an unsavoury act in the folds of a great,
culturally sanctioned alibi.
The most common of these cover-ups, as Burney himself noted, tended to link
castration to the circumstance of some extraordinary accident. Surgery then became
(if it figured in the story at all) a necessity - a secondary, emergency measure taken
to benefit a child who had already sustained serious injury. John Rosselli reports the
frequently cited 'bite of a wild boar' as among the more unlikely tragedies suffered
by hapless boys in the middle of the eighteenth century.9 The very image of an
uncastrated male pig running wild through an urban conservatory is, of course, so
heavily metaphorical that the excuse begins to seem like a code word for the
operation itself.
The standard explanation for Farinelli's castration, as we learn from his
eighteenth-century biographer, Giovenale Sacchi, relied on the slightly more
plausible - though still naggingly incomplete - story of a 'riding accident'. In the
Corbiau film the subtext of this chute de cheval gains considerable narrative
significance. It seems that the potential connection of the incident to Farinelli's later
Hungarian stallion business was just too suggestive. And so we find the singer
haunted by horses all through the film. Indeed, the recurring nightmarish image of
bolting steeds - a fragment, I suppose, of the castrato's disturbed unconscious -
interrupts the story to such an extent that we begin to see poor Carlo as the
prototypical victim of some kind of repressed memory syndrome.
Early in the film, it is a grown-up Farinelli, struck by fever and hallucinating on
opium, who begs his brother to tell the oft-told tale. Riccardo's version is credible
though formulaic: little Carlo, gravely ill after their father's death, climbed from his
bed one night, went out to the stable and, delirious with fever, attempted to ride his
horse - the wild one called Helios, remember? There the story ends. The horrifying
ride and tragic fall (like the proverbial tree in the woods) had no witnesses. 'I got

8 Burney (see n. 4), 301-2.

9 John Rosselli, 'The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850',
Acta Musicologica, 60 (1988), 143-79.

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172 Katherine Bergeron

there too late', is all Riccardo can say. The alibi is narrated, incidentally, in Italian,
a linguistic touch that lends a quality of authenticity to the Broschi brothers'
off-stage relationship in the context of this predominantly French-language film. But
the shift also makes us hear the narrative itself as something undeniably 'other',
as if to suggest that castration was, well, an Italian thing; we really wouldn't
understand.

This incomprehensibility emerges as perhaps the truest dimension of the

so-called true story the film presents. In scene on historical scene, what Corbiau
ultimately manages to show is just how much we - like audiences and critics who
came before us - can fail to understand about the whole, shady business. In the face
of historical scrutiny the castrato will always remain somehow inscrutable, a figure
enshrouded in mystery. Such mystery, which tints the historical process, certainly
extends to the single most colourful aspects of the castrato's story. I refer, of course,
to the mythic sexual prowess of the eunuch, a fable that has assumed many
elaborate forms through history (the Corbiau film proving no exception).
An unusually level-headed version of this mythology comes to us, interestingly,
by way of the nineteenth-century surgeon Benedetto Mojon, in a little French
treatise on the 'physiological effects' of castration published in 1804 - just a few
years, that is, after the French invasion of Italy initiated political changes that were
said to have brought about the end of the castrato tradition.10 The enlightened
French of the previous century had, in fact, always looked down on the strange
practice their Italian neighbours enjoyed, and Napoleon was no exception. Mojon
turns this French prejudice into an occasion for research. His highly rational
account resists moralising in order to get to the facts, presenting the sexy gossip
with all the cool detachment of a scientist. As he explains, a eunuch castrated at
around six years of age will retain, at eighteen, the penis of a six-year-old. But when
the operation has been performed closer to the age of puberty, his equipment - or
what's left of it - will more nearly resemble that of a normal man, with one notable
exception: 'erection takes place much more frequently than in the case of
non-castrated men'.11

This piece of so-called data (which, however scientific, seems to betray just a
teensy bit of envy) is meant to serve as partial explanation for tales of sexual
promiscuity, which Mojon goes on to provide: from Juvenal, who critiqued the
excesses of the Roman eunuchs in his sixth satire; to an account related by the
forensic doctor Johann Peter Frank in 1779, in which four castrati managed to
'know' all the women in a single small town, causing a scandal of such proportion
that police intervention was required. Of course, the real privilege enjoyed by such
altered men was that they left behind no lasting trace of sexual misconduct.
It was presumably this libidinous advantage that posed such a threat to a fully
endowed man, who knew that with a castrato a woman might enjoy sexual
pleasures - as Mojon and others put it - 'without risk'. In the age of AIDS, the
sentiment may strike us as somehow intensely nostalgic, something that Corbiau

10 Benedetto Mojon, Memoire sur les effets de la castration dans le corps humain (Montpellier, 1804).
1 Mojon, 16.

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 The castrato as history 173

makes us feel powerfully by imaging Carlo and Riccardo in an impossibly Baroque

sexual liaison, a mnage trois that wilfully reinstates the risk. Sex with Farinelli is, as
the singer explains to one potentially interested party, 'never without danger'.
Riccardo's somewhat incomprehensible role ensures that the woman in question
will always be fully inseminated. (By the end of the film, when the assiduously
planted seed finally bears fruit, one cannot help but feel a certain sympathy for the
cynical seventeenth-century Pope Alexander VII, who, on hearing that a lady of his
court had become pregnant by one of the castrati of the Sistine Chapel choir, wryly
responded: 'Che si castra meglio' - Let them be better castrated.)
But there was a flip side to all these vicarious tales of sexual excess. The same
physiological condition that accounted for the castrato's supposedly enviable
position behind closed doors also made him the object of public ridicule. The
operation, after all, caused physical deformities that could not help but make the
castrated man appear like a kind of monster. The principal defect - the castrato's
unnaturally high voice - was of course not visible at all, resulting from a larynx that
failed to grow to adult size. Other parts of the body, however, more than made up
the difference. The arms and legs, and sometimes even the breasts, of the adult male
castrato tended to develop to larger-than-normal proportions, making singers tall
and ungainly. As they grew older some of them (like the latter-day 'fat ladies' of
opera) grew obese. An eighteenth-century caricature of a Handel opera shows two
unidentified castrati pictured as giants, towering ridiculously over the prima donna.
A sketch of Farinelli by Antonio Zanetti depicts the tall singer freakishly stretched
as if in a fun-house mirror.12

If in the eighteenth century such physical distortions invited public scorn, in the
nineteenth they were more likely to provoke a kind of dreadful sympathy. With the
waning and eventual disappearance of the castrato tradition, these mutilated
creatures slowly and perhaps inevitably came to be viewed through another sort of
distorting lens, as beings whose very disfigurement recalled that other, more typical
Romantic figure, the diseased and suffering artist. Seen from this angle, the
castrati were, so to speak, turned inside out; no longer simply monstrous, they
became pathetic, endowed with feelings. To speak of their condition was, then, to
imagine - in the anterior mode - the pain they 'must have endured'. Who has not
been touched by the portrait painted by Balzac in his tragic tale Sarrasine (1830),
which recounted the supposedly true story of a French sculptor who sexually
pursued the Italian castrato Zambinella? Into the singer's mouth Balzac puts the
following bleak confession: 'For me the world is a desert. I am an accursed creature,
condemned to understand happiness, to feel it, to desire it, and, like many others,
forced to see it flee from me continually.'
Something like this Romantic voice whispers, to be sure, in the background of
Corbiau's Farinelli. One can easily imagine similar words issuing from the dark and
brooding Stefano Dionisi who plays the title character (at one point Farinelli makes
a little speech so much like Zambinella's that we can be sure the screenwriters have
studied their Balzac). But Corbiau pushes this ethos of the sad social outcast even

12 Illustration reproduced in Heartz (see n. 2), p. 431.

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174 Katherine Bergeron

further, by supplying the plot with a secondary character - a little boy named
Benedicte ('blessed'), whose obvious vulnerability is meant to form a counterpart
to Farinelli's own pain. For Benedicte is also wounded (blesse), a victim of some
childhood trauma that has prevented his body - like Farinelli's precious, hidden
larynx - from growing to normal size.
In one too touching scene the boy appears without his leather brace, his tiny
deformed body exposed to the harsh world. 'Are you in pain, my child?', the
castrato asks in predictable empathy. The boy, who has presumably known nothing
but pain, describes his condition as that of an escargot sans coquille. In the next scene
we find this quaint and otherwise forgettable metaphor developed to grotesque
effect. At a banquet, servants are shucking oysters as fast as they can be consumed.
A long, almost pornographic close-up offers one of the still-living creatures for our
scrutiny - sans coquille. Quivering from a perfect silver fork, the shelled mollusc is
either a fragile vocal chord or a horrible, missing genital.
The sick-making spectacle of oyster and knife hardly puts too fine a point on the
mystery of the 'missing thing' this film seeks to resolve. The director, like an
overzealous social worker, forces the spectator to confront, once and for all, the
very thing that the castrati apparently never let their audiences forget. In the late
eighteenth century, we are told, Italian spectators were heard to cry 'Ewiva il
coltello!' (Long live the knife!) in appreciation of the primo uomo. It is another of
those queer stories that makes us realise how unimaginably distant the people who
populate the past really are - indeed, how much we tend to reject them when their
history seems too strange to stomach. Corbiau, preferring the gut-level, wants to put
the whole image right in front of our eyes, so we have no choice but to look.

Listening can have an even stronger effect. I admit to a distinctly squeamish reaction
the first time I heard the voice of Alessandro Moreschi, the singer billed as 'the last
castrato' from the Vatican choir, who was recorded on two occasions by the
Gramophone company just after the turn of this century. The recordings were
essentially a novelty item cooked up by the company's London representative, Fred
Gaisberg, who had travelled to Rome in 1902 with the intent of capturing the voice
of the ninety-two-year-old Pope Leo XIII. When the plan fell through, Gaisberg
apparently settled for the next best thing: the song of the 'angel of Rome', as
Moreschi was sometimes called.13 Between this and a second excursion in 1904 the
company made more than a dozen records that preserved, in a few faded melodies,
the castrato's profoundly moving swansong, the last gasps of a vanishing breed.
This fact alone imbues the recording with that unique affect we sometimes find
hidden in old photographs, the feeling that we are spying or eavesdropping on the
dead. But the reaction provoked by Moreschi's voice is more intense. It is not
so much the style of performance that disturbs (a near yodel - strange enough
in its own right) as the timbre, the way the sound is produced. In Moreschi's

13 The story is related in Jerrold N. Moore, A Voice in Time: The Gramophone of Fred Gaisberg
(London, 1976), 66-70.

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 The castrato as history 175

performance of the Bach-Gounod 'Ave Maria', for instance, notes just above
middle C sound, as with a boy soprano, like the very bottom of his vocal range, but
they are belted with the force of a fully grown man. As the melodic line lifts,
remarkably, to take a soprano's high B the voice seems to come more from his head,
but again - recording quality aside - the sound is different: clearer and purer than
the colour of either a female soprano or a male falsettist, it seems to possess an odd,
penetrating sweetness, the sharp taste of an unknown fruit.
Voices, like flavours, are notoriously difficult to describe, but reacting to
Moreschi goes beyond this sort of difficulty. For a singing voice also produces a
kind of empathetic reaction in a listener, who will hear in a particular vocal quality
the resonance of a body that is, in one way or another, familiar. If, as Barthes has
suggested, the poignance of listening to Schubert Lieder (or other popular songs,
for that matter) relates to a perception that, in some fundamental sense, we too are
singing along, then the shattering emotion of an operatic scream must belong to an
opposite phenomenon - a sense of identifying with, and losing oneself in, a sound
and body that is not our own.14 Yet neither of these conditions accurately locates the
feeling produced by Moreschi's singing. The uncanny (yes, hair-raising) effect of
listening to his voice lies in something still more extreme - an utter lack of
identification: I simply cannot fathom the body that produces those sounds. The
voice, in its utter strangeness, cuts off the possibility of my forming any real or
imagined connection with the singing body. And in that breach, I cannot help but
be reminded of the uncomfortable lack that defines the castrato himself.

It should go without saying that the schlocky music and yodelling vocals preserved
on the Moreschi recordings would bear little resemblance to the sounds that would
have issued from a singer of the eighteenth century. Yet while it is relatively easy to
evaluate stylistic differences in the music Moreschi sings - the aesthetic divergence
between Gounod and, say, Hasse - it is next to impossible to judge how that same
difference in aesthetic preference might have manifested itself in a vocal noise.
However we might try to project the image of this rare recorded voice backward in
time, to conjure up the sound of a castrato from an earlier age, we will always fall
far short. And if the faded, scratched patina of Moreschi's twentieth-century voice
gives us chills, who knows what effect Farinelli's might have had?
Before the age of the phonograph, of course, the only recorded traces of the
castrati were those left in writing, not just in biographical anecdotes but in passages
of music we know to have been composed for specific stars on specific occasions.
In a few cases, we even have evidence of the same aria written twice over -
conceived by the composer in one instance for a castrato, and, in another, for a fully
endowed singer. It may be useful to examine one case in some detail in order to see
what we can make of this evidence, to get a feel for this phantom presence (what
Barthes might have called the 'grain') of the castrato. Let's take, for popularity's

14 Roland Barthes, 'The Romantic Song', in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard
(New York, 1985), 286-92.

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176 Katherine Bergeron

sake, one of the best-known pieces of dramatic music from the early eighteenth
century, Handel's Messiah. It is well known that the work was revived - which is to
say, recomposed - half a dozen times during the composer's life, each time for a
completely different cast of performers. The oratorio was, of course, not exactly an
opera; but since in part it relied on the same type of generic operatic music that
Handel would have employed for his opere serie, if offers us, I think, an oblique
window through which we might make out the shadowy presence of the castrato on
the eighteenth-century musical stage.
It was not until Handel's 1750 revival of the work for a performance at Covent
Garden that this figure comes reliably into view. For this occasion, Handel engaged
the services of the popular castrato Gaetano Guadagni, the singer who a decade or
so later would make the role of Orfeo in Gluck's 0rfeo edEuridice a sensation.l5 Since
the earlier performances of Messiah had done without a castrato soloist, Handel set
about rescoring some of Charles Jennens's libretto to music that would best display
his new singer's skills. One of the arias thus transformed was 'But who may abide
the day of his coming', from the first part of the oratorio, a heavy and somewhat
brooding song originally conceived for the opposite end of the vocal colour
spectrum, a solo bass.
In Handels's early version of the song, written for the first Dublin performance
of Messiah in 1742, the grave affect is produced in part by the relentless iambic thrust
of the music's siciliano rhythm. A persistent, limping declamation permeates the two
sentences from the Book of Malachi that together make up the aria's two parts -
the first part based on the long question, 'But who may abide the day of his coming,
and who shall stand when he appeareth?', and the second on the inconclusive
answer, 'For he is like a refiner's fire'. Handel underlines the difference between the
two parts by contrasting the simple declamation of the opening questions - sung to
a halting melody interrupted by frequent orchestral 'punctuation marks' - with a
more lavish melodic setting of the next sentence. Most significantly, he makes the
line more continuous, radically extending the image of the 'refiner's fire', as if to
extrude the striking metaphor through the heat of melody itself into a long, melting
melisma that fully consumes the word 'fire'. Sung by the bass voice and
accompanied by cello, the extended passage, flowing thick and smokey like lava,
slowly drags the section to an uncertain close, before the final return of a now
ornamented da capo.
In Handel's 1750 revision for Guadagni, we find the aria's overall affect
completely transformed. Where the 'grain' of the castrato appears most clearly is
both in the song's level of technical difficulty and in its sheer scope. The aria
conceived for the castrato is, in a word, a show-stopper. Its form, more than
doubled in size, involves a dazzling mutilation of the standard da capo design, which,
if nothing else, seems to increase the level of excitement. While it begins with an
iambic tune vaguely similar in sound to the first version, it quickly diverges from the
simple-minded bass melody to include more elaborate melismatic passages as well

15 A full performance history is presented by Donald Burrows in Handel, Messiah (Cambridge,

1991).

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 The castrato as history 177

as a few long, sustained tones (fittingly, on the word 'stand') to show off the
castrato's breath control. Then, without warning, the orchestra gets white hot,
leaping recklessly into a refiner's fire of surging, tremolo strings that start the second
part of the aria several beats ahead of schedule. If the melody Handel first conceived
for bass rolled along like molten rock, this version is definitely more than a few
degrees hotter. The long melisma on 'refiner's fire' is this time not just twice as long
but at least twice as fast, bubbling with a fierce, hysterical intensity that seems to
burn right through the words to release the essence of the Old Testament prophecy.
After this barely controlled screaming, which ends as abruptly as it began, the aria
returns suddenly, almost schizophrenically, to the calmer questions of the first part.
But this too quickly breaks off, as if unable to withstand the force of the heat, and
the aria - again breaking convention - erupts prophetically into an unexpected final
refrain of the enflamed music, now completed by a cadenza, to send up the whole
orchestra together with its possessed singer in a blaze of glory. By exploiting the
superhuman capacities of his singer Handel finally enacts the complete, messianic
drama of the aria's prophetic text.16
Interestingly, it was the later, more flamboyant castrato version of 'But who may
abide', and not the earlier, more decorous aria, that eventually came, by erroneous
'tradition' (after the eunuchs were long gone), to be sung once again by solo
bass - often to ridiculous effect. To hear these searing alto riffs lumbering along an
octave lower than they were meant to sound creates an effect of sheer struggle, more
sub- than superhuman. The considerably-less-than-spectacular effect of most
modern performances of the aria serves to underscore a problem so frequently
argued in debates about so-called historical performance that I need not belabour
it here. Suffice it to say that even when trying our best, we moderns will never quite
get it right. Yet this very problem - which visits even the most discerning
performances of old music - acquires a peculiar resonance in the face of the
castrato. For once we have recognised the 'grain' of Guadagni in the purposely
extravagant, even queer, turns of an aria designed to celebrate the magnificent
strangeness of its singer, we cannot help but become more aware of the inevitable
problem of that singer's absence. Without the castrato this aria is, like so much of
the music created for these lost singers, essentially unrevivable. This in the end is the
stumbling block of history itself. Perhaps all precious things from the past take after
the castrato in some sense: their best parts appear to us as if severed by the sharp
blade of time. But it is that lost castrato himself who, stuck in a mise en abime of

16 One can hear performances of both versions of the aria on an extremely innovative
recording, produced in 1991 by Harmonia Mundi and featuring the Philharmonia Baroque
Orchestra, together with the Chamber Chorus of the University of California at Berkeley,
under the joint direction of Nicolas McGegan and Philip Brett (Harmonia Mundi: HMU
907050-907052). The ambitious plan was to record, on to a single set of discs, all the
extant versions of Messiah known in Handel's lifetime. With some skilful programming of a
CD player, a listener can now compare the settings from different years and thus make
judgements, purely by ear, about Handel's compositional choices. On this recording William
Parker sings the 1742 version for solo bass; the countertenor Drew Minter does a more
than respectable job playing the role of Guadagni.

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178 Katherine Bergeron

history, reminds us even more poignantly, even appallingly, of that separation - by

never allowing us to forget the cut that originally created him.

The film Farinelli manages to keep in view something of the castrato's problematic
grain not so much through the message as through the medium - the exploitation
of surgical techniques proper to film itself. Indeed, cutting occurs so prominently,
and so violently, in certain moments that the splice seems to form a subtext all of
its own, the radical use of montage functioning to create a subliminal narrative
whose form, like the chopped-up da capo Handel fashioned for Guadagni, puts the
idea of the castrato directly before our eyes. In the film's opening sequence, for
example, we meet a dissipated Farinelli doing opium alone in his bedroom. After
one too many flashbacks, he reclines on his fur-lined cape, closes his eyes to the
sweet memory of boys singing Scarlatti, and - bam! - wild horses thunder across the
screen, cutting off the scene, and the music, so loudly that (especially in certain
theatres) the unexpected noise makes the heart race. The next time horses happen,
Farinelli is again lying down, now in the naked embrace of an aristocratic groupie.
When the sexually curious countess reaches between the sheets to find his missing
bits, the scene once again - joltingly - cuts to the stampede as she whispers the
charged word that says what she has touched: 'castrato'.
The severing of the film at these points seems easy enough to interpret - a bit too
easy, perhaps, to hold all that much interest for the viewer. Stampeding horses, like
exposed oysters, have all the crudeness of a music video: more or less empty
'symbols', they stand for interpretation without actually stimulating thought. What
is compelling, in fact, issues not from visual imagery but from aural effect. The
violence of the cut is conveyed through the soundtrack, sheer noise that suddenly
damages the expected flow of events. We are caught unawares, surprised by sound,
which may be the one remaining sensory dimension in our hypervisual culture that
still has the power to shock.
The film's most virtuosic bit of editing, a further taste of such power, presents a
moment whose utter strangeness begins to capture the true flavour of the castrato
phenomenon. It is, appropriately, a scene of music - no more than a soundbyte,
really - about halfway through the film. We begin with an unprepared and
unplaceable face shot of Farinelli, in full stage makeup, fiendishly executing the
beginning of what turns out to be 'Generoso risvegliati o core', a bravura aria from
Hasse's Cleofide.17 The aria's breathless opening phrases yield quickly to the
conventional display of vocal excess - a long melisma on an open syllable ('ah')
heavy with trills and arpeggios. But almost as soon as it begins, the melody is
sliced off - mid-arpeggio - replaced suddenly by another piece, in a distant key,
on an entirely different instrument. The camera has cut to Handel, seated in an
empty theatre playing (in fact, composing) the beginning of his F-major organ
concerto.

17 According to Robert Freeman's statistics, this seems to be one work Farinelli

performed. See Freeman (n. 5), 324-30.

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 The castrato as history 179

Now you hear it; now you don't. The cut reveals an uncanny connection between
the two instruments, a comparison that explores the castrato's special status in the
world of music. Heard alongside Handel's organ, the virtuosic passagework in
Farinelli's aria sounds as if it too were rendered on a precision instrument,
fashioning him, in this swift and symbolic move, as an unmistakable 'singing
machine'. But the musical result of the splice also unsettles. The vertiginous shift
from Farinelli's 'organ' to Handel's organ scores a near miss, creating a critical
moment of instability on the soundtrack: it literally takes the wind out of the aria.
And the effect gives the listener, if only for a moment, a tiny shock of pleasure.

It is, I would argue, through this kind of special effect - and not through the
overwrought plot - that the film comes closest to capturing its arcane subject
matter. For what the splice ultimately produces is a bit of deformed music, a
wonderfully artificial fusion of sounds that gives pleasure precisely because it is so
unrealistic. The fleeting moment on the soundtrack begins to suggest, at least by
extension, an idea of what it might have been like to experience the artificial delights
of Baroque opera, especially the allure of the castrato singer. Indeed, of all 'special
effects' enjoyed by opera audiences of the early eighteenth century, the castrato was
undoubtedly the most special, the most unreal. Corbiau wants to put this artificial
wonder on the couch, to probe his pain, but, just like Madonna in Truth or Dare, the
confessional scenes come across as empty decoration, Baroque filigree: the off-stage
persona falls hopelessly flat in comparison with technicolour performance. What
counts most, in the end, is the spectacle of singing itself.
The film narrative is therefore most interesting (perhaps even most authentic)
when it seeks to represent something of the thrill of the castrato on stage. For
among the countless tales about these unnatural creatures, it is surely the stories
of singing that still ring truest. Burney's account of Farinelli's sound-off with
the German trumpeter, even with its eighteenth-century Anglicisms, conveys the
enthusiasms of modern sportswriting, the sheer enjoyment of physical spectacle.
Such stories naturally modulate into others of bodily pleasure - that ecstatic
listening which forms so important a part of the castrato's sexual mythology.
Farinelli on the London stage, like Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show, had the power,
they say, to make women swoon. Listening was another of those special pleasures
- like sex with a eunuch - that could be enjoyed 'without risk'.
I do not know whether Balzac ever had occasion to hear Velluti, who was in his
prime just after the turn of the nineteenth century. Yet his story of Sarrasine, one of
the most elaborate of all legendary tales of listening, suggests that he knew
something about the power of the castrato's song. The prose becomes so steamy in
places that it begins to read like a classic piece of nineteenth-century erotica. Here
is the protagonist's first, blissful trip to the opera:
When La Zambinella sang, the effect was delirium. The artist felt cold; then he felt a heat
which suddenly began to prickle in the innermost depth of his being, in what we call the
heart, for lack of any other word! He did not applaud, he said nothing, he experienced an

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180 Katherine Bergeron

impulse of madness, a kind of frenzy which overcomes us only when we are at the age when
desire has something frightening and infernal about it ... This agile voice, fresh and silvery
in timbre, supple as a thread shaped by the slightest breath of air, rolling and unrolling,
cascading and scattering, this voice attacked his soul so vividly that several times he gave
vent to involuntary cries torn from him by convulsive feelings of pleasure which are all too
rarely vouchsafed by human passions. Presently he was obliged to leave the theatre.18

The passage leaves us in no doubt - despite what is unsaid - of the connection

between listening and sexual enjoyment. Later in Balzac's story, we even witness the
seedy transformation of opera house into porn house as the protagonist returns
night after night to repeat that unexpected (and presumably messy) moment of
jouissance that first required him to leave his seat; in subsequent visits Sarrasine rents
a private box so that he can listen - and 'enjoy' - without danger of exposure.
Unfortunately for us, Corbiau's narrative, however indebted to Balzac, cannot
claim any of the felicities of this nineteenth-century style. The authors of the
screenplay (the director and his wife) are so afraid we will miss the point that they
rush to fill the blanks Balzac invitingly leaves. So we must watch a scene between
Farinelli and a sex-starved noblewoman who delivers the utterly pedestrian line:
'Last night I believe I experienced my first musical orgasm'. (Oh, I get it.) The
sentence sounds a little better in French, but the film seems to fare best when it
leaves music to speak for itself.
Three scenes attempt to represent the pleasures of listening directly, putting
Farinelli on stage to sing for an audience of eighteenth-century admirers. Two of
these extended musical sequences come more or less out of Farinelli's documented
performance history; the third is pure fiction. All but one feature appropriately
truncated versions of the da capo arias he performs - the middle sections excised not
for any symbolic purpose, I would guess, but for fear that a longer song might
diminish the effect on film. How, indeed, was the director to get across the joys of
singing in the eighteenth century to a musically uneducated movie-going public in
the twentieth? There are two ways, I think: one that has to do with the soundtrack
of the film itself, the other with what we might call the hype surrounding it.
The first performance scene makes liberal use of the topoi of twentieth-century
popular music. Farinelli, a star being born, walks into a chaotic theatre, beats off a
frenzied crowd. Later we see him being lowered on stage from a chariot, like some
heavy-metal artist (I was reminded of Robert Reiner's This Is Spinal Tap), with more
cheers from his delighted audience. He sings the aria 'Ombra fedele', from his
brother's Idapse, a Venetian opera he was supposed to have performed around 1730,
just as his career was beginning to take off. To make sure we get a sense of the guy's
popularity, he throws his scarf, like an Elvis impersonator, at the moment of the
dominant cadence that ends the first musical period. But the best is yet to come, in
the cadenza of the da capo: Farinelli's improvised line leads to a completely other-
worldly, and unnaturally long, soprano high A.
The sound is artificial, a technological manipulation that allows the note to be
extended indefinitely in time, without variation in pitch or timbre (the aural

18 Cited in Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1974), 239.

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 The castrato as history 181

equivalent of a freeze frame). The tone is suspended for just long enough, in fact,
to create the delightful impression of time having stopped. At the same time, it
conveys a clear idea of the superhuman quality attributed to the castrato, the
very quality that accounted for the singer's much discussed charisma, his sexual
magnetism. Penetrated by the sound, women in the opera house faint in their
chairs. A countess seated alone in her private box - like the surreptitious Sarrasine,
perhaps - ejaculates a single tear.
The musical feat seems to relate to that anecdote of Farinelli's 1734 debut on the
London stage - the legendary performance of 'Son qual nave' from Artaserse during
which it was said he held a note for longer than one minute. When a few scenes later
the film presents its own version of this legend, the famous note is produced, like
the top A in 'Ombra fedele', as a special effect of the soundtrack (though the
duration is considerably shorter than the mythic minute). The result, however,
seems a little less dramatic than before, probably because the note (a middle G) lies
much lower in the singer's vocal register. Corbiau himself seems dubious about it;
his direction brings forth only a modest frisson from the on-screen crowd. No one
cries 'One God, One Farinelli'.
In both scenes the actual evidence of the joys of the castrato comes in the form
of a sound effect that we, as twentieth-century listeners, experience as purely
synthetic, a feat of technology. Not surprisingly, the most spectacular of all these
moments is reserved for the final staged performance. Yet, unlike the two previous
instances of singing, this one has no basis in history. It presents Farinelli performing
from Handel's Rinaldo, at the Theatre of the Nobility under Porpora's direction -
this occasion of poetic license serving as a convenient resolution of the long-
suspended story of castration that has driven the film's plot.
In the scene, Corbiau has Farinelli sing two of the most famous arias from
Rinaldo. The climactic final scene offers, in other words, 'real' music, as opposed to
that other, gourmet variety known as 'early' music, consisting of the hard-to-find
Baroque specialities the film has been serving so far. Farinelli's first number is
Rinaldo's slow and plaintive 'Cara sposa', a lament full of shady, sighing strings. The
title character sings the song in Act I to his absent lover Almirena, who has just
disappeared into a cloud of sorcery ('My dear beloved, where are you? / Return to
see my tears'). The relentlessly crying melody squeezes a tear from his own eye, if
not from ours; after which Farinelli, having left the stage, returns to sing the film's
last number, another song of sighs, this time from the second act of Rinaldo.
But something has happened. The same voice that sang the virile Rinaldo now
sings a very different tune, for a completely different character: it is 'Lascia ch'io
pianga', a sad and noble saraband written not for the boy lover but for his girl -
Almirena. This aria, moreover, is the only one in the film that we hear uncut, a fact
that serves only to underscore the final, fabulous sound effect. A grief-stricken cry
in the cadenza marks the most extreme instance of technological manipulation in
the film: Farinelli sings an excruciatingly long high C, a note that penetrates - cuts
like a knife - right through the listeners portrayed on the screen in order to prick
us, the ones in the darkened film theatre. It is a kind of chilling sci-fi effect:
stunningly, colossally artificial. I not only feel it, but the action on screen, like a

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182 Katherine Bergeron

music video, makes sure I get the point. Handel suffers a stroke on the spot. Then,
to the nobly loping accompaniment of the closing ritornello, a final, horrible picture
flashes before us - the very image that has haunted the whole film. We see a little,
pre-pubescent Carlo Broschi lying unconscious in a bloody bath.
The words of the aria ('Let me lament my cruel destiny / and sigh for my
freedom') ring heavy with irony, as if commenting on the cruda sorte of castration
itself - a fate that has made this singer 'neither male nor female' in order that he
might be both. The scene's bizarre (and, I might add, completely ahistorical)
enactament of bended gender is apparently designed to drive home this cruel truth.
Yet, for most of us, the irony is probably lost, and for a simple reason: the film
represses subtitles in all the scenes of staged music. The arias, it seems, are not
meant to 'translate' anything. The sophisticated fantasy sequence from Rinaldo has
to be understood, then, as some sort of private musical joke, made more for
Corbiau's amusement than for that of his audience. The filmgoer, given only sound
effects, is purposely left in the dark.

This condition of ignorance seems to form an oddly striking parallel with that of
Farinelli's eighteenth-century London fans - a group so universally dim that, as
Heartz reports, Henry Fielding took the opportunity to satirise them in his 1737
play Euridice or The Devil Henpecked. It is the author himself who proclaims from
the stage: 'for an English people to support an extravagant Italian opera, of which
they understand nor relish neither the sense nor the sound, is certainly ridiculous,
and much of a piece with an eunuch's keeping a mistress'.19 The historic
film approaches its greatest authenticity, it would seem, where it is most
incomprehensible - in these very scenes of musical performance.
The operatic excerpts are hardly more comprehensible on the compact disc
soundtrack, which was released simultaneously with the film by the French
company Auvidis, the same firm that earlier produced the soundtracks of the
historical films Tous les Matins du monde and Louis, Enfant Roi. The disc, which
features the immediately recognisable publicity still of a costumed Stefano Dionisi
with his mouth open ('singing'), offers 'uncut' tracks of the film's music and has
already enjoyed considerable success: an announcement in the American trade
journal Billboard reported sales surpassing 230,000 units in just four months, making
it 'one of the best-selling soundtracks in France'. The profits inspired the president
of Auvidis, Louis Bricard: 'There is a possibility through movies', he concluded, 'to
reach a public who has little knowledge of this sort of music'.20
Despite the benevolent sentiment, the record does very little in the way of
educating consumers about its obscure Baroque performances. Aside from some
informative liner notes about castrati and their composers, the disc tells us almost
nothing about the numbers featured in the film, even less about the obscure operas

19 See Heartz (n. 2), 441.

20 Emmanuel Legrand, 'Soundtrack for "Farinelli" Film Becomes Hit in France', Billboard,
107, No. 17 (29 April 1995), 50.

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 The castrato as history 183

from which they were drawn. And not a text or translation in sight. It is sound, not
sense, that Auvidis offers. It would appear that the record producers also wanted
to ensure that the music remain nothing more than a fascinating spectacle
that listeners - again, like Fielding's Londoners - would attend without
understanding.
In this case, the spectacle that is supposed to fascinate, I would guess, involves
the surprises brought not by a live singer but by technology. Just as the film
narrative directs our attention to those moments that are most obviously artificial,
so the soundtrack seeks to make an issue of its feats of technological wizardry. The
most significant, of course, was advertised long before the film's release - the
strange and wonderful 'voice' fashioned for Farinelli at IRCAM. The film's singer,
as everyone knows by now, was endowed with not one but two voices - voices that
originally belonged to the American countertenor Derek Lee Ragin and the Polish
soprano Ewa Mallas-Godlewska. These were then combined through digital
interpolation (or 'morphing') to yield a single, unified timbre. The news item
produced an effect analogous to the publicity that surrounded Neil Jordan's The
Cying Game, in which rumours about a highly unusual twist of plot circulated in
advance of the film's release like some kind of dark secret. The purpose, of course,
was to stimulate interest among viewers, eventually compelling them to stand in line
and buy a ticket, like voyeurs at a freak show.21
Yet even with all the hype (or perhaps because of it) the 'new' voice
manufactured in the IRCAM lab ends up sounding, well, rather normal. For one
thing, the originals display less difference than the we might expect (the IRCAM
designers reported that Ragin and Mallas-Godlewska were in fact chosen for their
similarity). The sound of a male countertenor is, in a sense, already 'bent' towards
the female register. Moreover, when the two voices were eventually morphed - an
operation that, as I understand it, involved the manipulation of every single vowel
- Ragin's was ultimately given preference: in technical terms, the spectral envelope
of the soprano was modified to match the timbre of the countertenor.22 The result
has all the balance and subtlety of traditional French cuisine. If one is looking for
freaks, in other words, Farinelli's voice is sure to disappoint. The makers of the film
apparently had something else in mind. Indeed, they wanted it both ways. So they

21 The CQying Game may not be such a bad analogy, in fact, given that the 'secret' that
circulated about its plot had something to do with the mistaking of one character's gender
identity. In Farinelli, of course, the mistaken thing is an unnaturally high male voice. That
this unusual feature could inspire a similar curiosity is clear from the recent rise in
popularity of countertenors - those rarified products of the decades-old early music
movement. Such singers today attract a following beyond the typical early music audience, a
fact that may have at least something to do with the delicious compromise they reflect - as
vocal cross-dressers. For evidence we need look no further than a recent issue of a popular
American fashion magazine, which featured an ultracampy photo essay on six newsworthy
countertenors decked out, a la Wilde, in silk smoking jackets and feather boas. Ragin
himself, sporting a cane, was pictured with three dalmatians in tow.
22 A summary of the procedure can be found in a recent issue of IRCAM's house journal
Resonance. See Phillipe Depalle, Guillermo Garcia and Xavier Rodet, 'A la recherche d'une
voix perdue', Resonance, 15 (1995), 14-15.

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184 Katherine Bergeron

managed to create an extraordinary singer that sounds, in the end, completely

ordinary - a fake voice that 'passes' for real singing.23
But of course the very idea of the castrato depends on having it 'both ways'. If
the IRCAM laboratory had produced what I was hoping for - a freak voice that
really did sound like science fiction - Farinelli would have failed. The film would
have been too easily dismissable as mere novelty, a cheap thrill. While the screen
version can include a few special effects without damaging its credibility (it is a
movie after all), the true impact of Farinelli, the manufactured castrato, lies in the
absence of such razzle-dazzle. It is the imperceptibility of the morphing that counts.
For this condition creates an important confusion, a sort of acoustic illusion that
stimulates the same question raised by the castrato in his own time: is that a woman
or a man that I hear?

Our foreknowledge that this illusion is the result of a technical operation - a prior
surgery, so to speak - only serves to strengthen the total effect. It was a digital
operation that, as the promotional materials tell us (without apparent irony),
'endowed Farinelli with a voice that was his very own'. But the same surgical procedure
was also responsible for destroying voices, removing the distinctive traces through
which we might identify the presence of an individual singer. IRCAM giveth and
IRCAM taketh away. Farinelli's voice is neither that of Ragin nor Mallas-Godlewska
- nor, indeed, of Dionisi himself.
This may be the most important point of all. I have heard many complaints about
the quality of Dionisi's lip-syncing, his poorly simulated 'singing'. But it strikes me
that, far from undermining the idea of the castrato's performance, the obviousness
of the lip-sync may in fact be responsible for bringing the problematic grain of the
castrato most clearly into focus. The film presents us with a performer who has, in
some sense, knowingly lost his voice. However shadowy the historical facts that
make up the Farinelli story, one thing we know with certainty is this: when Carlo
Broschi reached puberty, his 'real' voice never developed. Our perception of the
modern, re-created Farinelli thus relies on the very same phenomenon that shaped
that other, historical Farinelli - the queer phenomenon of his missing adult voice,
the other thing that 'failed to appear'. The historical castrato dimly returns to us
through this very deficiency, the eclipsed voice we cannot re-create - which in the
end may be just the thing we miss most.

23 On the subject of 'passing', it is worth noting that one of the tracks from the Farinelli CD
actually makes it onto a legitimate early music disc also distributed by Auvidis. It is a 1994
anthology called La Musique au temps des Castrats (Astree E 8552) that features performances
by the countertenors James Bowman and Gerard Lesne, among others. On the disc's final
track, slipped in without any indication of foul play, we find the morphed
Ragin-Mallas-Godlewska performance of the aria 'Son qual nave', offered as just one more
early music voice.

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