The Legacy of the Castrato: Gender and Prejudice from the 18th Century to Today
It is the 20th of February in the year 1724, and George Frideric Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto is about to premier at the King’s Theater in the Haymarket district of London. Backstage, operatic superstar Franceso Bernardi (better known by his stage name “Senesino”) is warming up his voice to portray the leading role of Julius Caesar. For both Senesino and his eager English audience, this scenario is ordinary; but to a modern audience, it would be anything but. Senesino was a castrato: a male singer castrated before puberty to preserve a high soprano or alto voice. Originally introduced to opera theaters in Rome to circumvent a ban on women singing in public, such singers have not graced the operatic stages of the world since the mid-19th century. Julius Caesar was a role that encompassed everything that made castrati popular. The music Handel wrote for the character required incredible skill, but was still simple enough to allow the quality of the singer’s voice to shine through. Perhaps while he is warming up, Senesino will practice singing Caesar’s first aria, “Empio diro tu sei”: in English, “ungodly, I will say you are.” The turbulent music of the song, alongside its anguished lyrics that beg for clemency and discretion, verily reflect what it meant to be a castrato. It echoes the anticipation of the audience waiting beyond the curtain, their fickle affection for the castrati, and the limelight they bestowed upon them that allowed them, if only briefly, to be considered men.
Viewed through modern eyes, the castrati seem a grotesque spectacle –relics of a practice we are all too happy to leave in the past. From a modern perspective, it can be exceptionally difficult to understand why Europeans in the 18th century ever accepted the existence of the castrati at all. The castrati were not well understood in the 18th century either. The western world has been deliberating its ideas of gender for hundreds of years, and the castrati were at the forefront of such debates for as long as they existed.
A Night at the Theatre, 1724
Perhaps it is blithe to presume that castrati were a mundane sight at the Kings Theater in 1724. They were indeed ordinary, but treated with apprehension the moment they ceased to be characters in a drama. The castrato was, in most circumstances beyond the theatre, an othered being: both an Italian in England (only Italy actively castrated young men for musical gain), and a man who was not fully considered a man. The plots of many operas played into this otherness through spectacles of the long-forgotten past or, more problematically, through the exaggeration of non-Western cultures. In Giulio Cesare, Senesino acted out the past–particularly the annals of Republican Rome. But in an opera like Poro, in which he also starred, he acted out both the history and culture of ancient India. Two stories foreign to the British found their literal voice in the equally foreign Italian eunuch known as Senesino. The key word is “foreign”: the castrato was to be kept separate from man. But stardom perversely made this divide difficult to maintain.
While the castrati have long since died out, many of the prejudices that followed them have not. They closely parallel arguments against legislating equal rights for transgender individuals, and even accepting them into society in general. The history of castrati proves that uncertainties about gender are not as new as we think.
The Castrato as Idol
“Vanne sorella ingrata” from George Frideric Handel’s Radamisto
In “vanne sorella ingrata,” the eponymous Radamisto rebukes his sister for her inability to sacrifice her husband’s life for the betterment of her people. The aria is an example of what presentation of wrath was considered befitting to a castrato: a mimetic presentation, first and foremost, but also one with stronger moral conviction. The role of Radamisto was initially performed by a woman, Margherita Duristanti, but Senesino’s performance alongside two rival sopranos is better known precisely because of the behavioral expectations placed upon castrati that it defied.
At the heart of every drama is a certain artificiality. No matter how real the subject matter of an opera may be, the awareness that it is a fictitious reproduction in the moment it is performed is inescapable. This, above all, allowed Europeans in the 18th century to take castrati seriously as they assumed prototypically masculine and virile roles like Julius Caesar. An opera like Gulio Cesare in Egitto did not imply that Caesar was a eunuch–quite the opposite, in fact. The difficulty of the music and the skill of the castrato performer depicted Caesar as competent, and therefore virile. The respect of audiences had to be earned by castrati regardless of the position narratives placed them in, however, and Senesino had done exactly that; first in Italy, and then all over again in Great Britain. Becoming an idol–a musical one, but oft-times a sexual one as well–was hard work, and relatively few castrati succeeded in such an endeavor. Most only sung in church choirs, and their names are lost to history.
Popularity does not preclude animosity. Senesino in particular would have marked this fact well. Subject to the constant scrutiny of early 18th century Britain’s vicious culture of verse epistles and broadsides, Senesino was perceived by audiences as vain, difficult to work with, and palpably jealous of his female counterparts. He may very well have been all three of those things, but the injustice of such a reputation lies in the fact that it was ascribed to him with a vitriol particular to his status as a eunuch. Indeed, two female singers, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni, were paid extra because their dramatic rivalry attracted audiences. All three singers were immensely popular, but only Senesino came under fire for prima donna behavior.
It is not hard to comprehend why. The behaviors that the public chastised Senesino for displaying were behaviors considered imasculine, which explains why Cuzzoni and Bordoni (both sopranos, and definitively women) got away with it. The masculinity conferred upon castrati by their roles in opera also likely made Senesino’s behavior harder to swallow, as it crossed the barrier between the castrato as singer and the castrato as eunuch that dramatic scenarios created. The trifold rivalry between Senesino and two female singers represents a common stereotype applied to castrati that depicted them as hormonal on account of their sexual deficiencies.
Hormones are also at the center of many debates surrounding transgender women and their participation in sports. Many claim that typically male hormonal output gives trans women an unfair advantage in sports, but such opinions lose sight of the fact that individuals assigned female at birth will have variations in hormone output to begin with. Caricatures of different castrati readily enough prove this point, with some resembling the boyish voices they boasted far more than others. The idea that certain behaviors befit certain genders persists beyond Senesino and the mid-18th century. Its current form reduces identity to biology, particularly in the prevention of trans women from partaking in sporting events; sporting events, it should be added, that trans women have no definitive advantage in.
The Castrato as Man
“Che faro senza Euridice” from Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice.
The part of Orpheus (Orfeo) was performed by numerous castrati in the operas of numerous composers. Gluck’s off-puttingly major key lament sung by Orpheus after the death of Eurydice (Euridice) reflects the equally topsy-turvy romantic situation castrati found themselves in off-stage. It almost feels a joyous occasion that Orpheus has lost his lady-love in Gluck’s conception of the tale. It feels like a complete resolution, a prophecy fulfilled, and a natural order restored. Today, the part of Orpheus is played by a mezzo-soprano in Gluck’s opera; or a tenor, singing the part considerably lower than it was originally written. This is atypical, as countertenors usually take the place of castrati in modern productions of most similar operas.
On the 19th of August, 1766, the renowned castrato Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci married the daughter of a prominent Irish attorney, Dorothea Mansuell, in a scandalous Catholic ceremony. The event raised numerous eyebrows among both religious and legal officials because of a 1753 law known as Hardwick’s Marriage Act, which was a law that sought to broadly control what unions were acceptable in English society. The marriages of castrati were never the preeminent target of Hardwick’s Marriage Act. This was partially because they were uncommon, but also because they could be disregarded as Catholic unions, genitalia notwithstanding. The marriage laws of Great Britain were, in fact, liberal for their time. Castrati who married in Italy did so at the risk of the death penalty. For this reason, Tenducci never presented Mansuell as his wife while he was in Italy. Some have attributed this choice to the known turbulence of their relationship, which ended almost as soon as it started. It was a reckless affair between two up-and-coming opera stars, both far too concerned with their careers to focus on their relationship. If history has portrayed their annulment trial as the result of a sexually dissatisfactory and inconsummate marriage, it has done so erroneously.
Marriage seemed to many castrati a way to rectify their perceived masculinity, but those who took measures to actually marry were met with steep legal battles and suffocating waves of negative public opinion. Never mind the fact that castrati regularly mimed virility and romance on operatic stages all across Europe. There are numerous marked differences between early modern Europe’s perception of sexuality and gender, but it was true then as it is now that many of the prevailing notions of when marriage is appropriate lie in ideas of what a family should look like. Castrati were often discriminated against in marriage because they could not produce offspring or even consummate a union. This latter point was, in some cases, an erroneous assumption. Most castrati retained their phallus after castration, and depending on when they were castrated, some were capable of maintaining an erection. Opponents to marriage rights for members of the LGBTQ+ community also present traditional family values as their preeminant objection to same-sex unions. Marriage is between man and wife because it is man and wife who will produce a child. What defines a man, to their assessment, is their genitals; nothing more, nothing less.
This is, in some ways, considerably more rigid than ideas of gender in the 18th century. A castrato was still deemed a man, even in spite of being denied the rights typically conferred upon such a sex. Documents that deal with the everyday lives of castrati–reports of legal spars, paystubs, theatrical programs, and even the infamously cutthroat verse epistles–refer to the singers with titles like “signor,” and with the pronouns “he” and “him.” With heed to the fact that pronouns and titles do not comprehensively describe an individual, they do recommend that the perception of castrati was more masculine than feminine. The vitriol doled out to transgender people today is often stronger than this, with identities of individuals being outright denied to them for no sounder reason than prejudice. It does not matter, in many cases, how well a transgender person passes: if an unsupportive person catches wind of the fact that they were assigned a different gender at birth, they will take every pain to refer to them using the terms germane to that label, not the one they have chosen for themselves.
A Night at the Theatre, 1994
“Ombra fedele anch’io” from Riccardo Broschi’s Idaspe.
Riccardo Broschi and his brother, Carlo (better known as Farinelli) were a strong musical duo in the mid-18th century. This piece, which was used in the film Farinelli, is a strong example of both Riccardo’s musical style and the particular skill set Farinelli likely boasted. Though both brothers were undoubtedly talented, Farinelli’s singing was what brought audiences to Riccardo’s operas.
In the 1994 film Farinelli, we follow the life of perhaps the most famous castrato to ever grace Europe’s operatic stage: the eponymous Farinelli. The film is by no accounts an accurate representation of the sort of life Farinelli in particular would have lived, but it speaks to numerous realities that followed most every castrato wherever he went. It seems that no matter what situation Farinelli is put in, the word “castrato” haunts him. It is the first word uttered by every woman who gives in to his sexual appeal; it is the word his brother howls at him in a vain attempt to assert control over a being he believes to be nothing without him and his music. The film’s depiction of the life of a castrato is not all that different from how music historians view castrati today. Sympathetic account that it may be, it still depends upon stereotypes: stereotypes that paint castrati as hormonal, impotent, and easily manipulated by their verifiably masculine counterparts. Before he is an artist, a man, or even a human being, Farinelli is a castrato. The castrati may be gone, but the central idea of the film Farinelli is not. Today, many members of the LGBTQ+ community find themselves reduced to labels, and the stereotypes that go with them.
The castrati and the prejudices they experienced hundreds of years ago demonstrate that the western world has long tried to regulate gender identity: what identities are valid, what rights different identities can access, and how perception of gender identity affects the perception of an individual. There are, of course, numerous marked differences between the castrati and transgender people today; not the least of which is consent to a medical procedure, which by definition, no castrato ever could have given. Legislation preventing transgender individuals from easily obtaining gender-affirming care proves that we still try to regulate identity down to what we presently understand rather than trying to expand our definitions thereof. A castrato in the year 2022 would likely find himself subject to many of the same prejudices he experienced in 1722—they are present in our laws, our public infrastructure, and our minds. The curious history of the castrati calls us to question how much progress we have really made in terms of accepting others and ensuring equality for all walks of life.