Varieties of Masculinity: Trajectories of the Castrato from the Seventeenth Century

Who – or perhaps more properly – what was the castrato? This is perhaps one of the most fascinating questions in all of music history – and certainly the most perplexing in the history of opera. It is also an issue that has attracted considerable scholarly attention and a host of different ideological responses and methodological approaches that often reveal more about our discipline and contemporary notions about gender than they do about the castrato. This, of course, is not surprising. The fact that young boys were routinely adjusted by (seemingly) primitive surgical means ostensibly to preserve and create singing voices – and that this was regarded as a viable option in the early modern period – arouses fantasies and anxieties that are arguably more troubling today than they were in the seventeenth or even eighteenth centuries. Carolyn Abbate’s consideration of the castrato in relation to the female authorial voice in opera, for example, includes this elegant description of the discomfort created by the mere mention of a castrato: