Cecilia Bartoli,
Sacrificium
BY LYNN RENÉ BAYLEY
Cecilia Bartoli is one of those rare artists who, like Eleanor Steber, Janet Baker, and a very few others, is a Renaissance woman for her time, using her fame to promote unusual and offbeat repertoire that her predecessors wouldn’t have thought of or been permitted to do if they had. Knowing the strengths and limitations of her instrument better than her critics, Bartoli has generally chosen to work backwards in time rather than to tackle 20th-century music; yet even within this preset limitation she has had a remarkable string of successes, including the more florid, pre-“Reform” operas of Gluck, the operatic repertoire of Vivaldi, and the singing style of the elusive Maria Malibran.
Her latest excursion is a compendium—for such it must be called—of not only arias but a history of the castratos, those unloved but fascinating and popular singers who trod the stages (and sang in the Catholic churches) of the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. Recapturing their sound and style is virtually impossible today—virtually, but not entirely. We have had some remarkable artists in the past quarter century who, by dint of hard work and research, have been able to replicate their tonally pure, aurally light, yet “fascinating and intense” (to quote Pier Francesco Tosi) sound and style. Among the best have been Dr. Nella Anfuso, a soprano and musicologist who made a long and intense study of castrato singing style during the 1980s, and Aris Christofellis, a remarkable countertenor who has managed to focus his tone so as to sound penetrating rather than “hooty.” And, of course, we do have one castrato soprano on record, Professor Alessandro Moreschi, who sang in the Sistine Chapel Choir as lead
sopranist
(as they were called) and soloist for approximately 20 years.
Despite the dated sound, Moreschi’s recordings are valuable for proving beyond a doubt that the castratos did indeed have penetrating timbres but not great power. Though they had the developed lungs of a fully-grown man, their larynxes were frozen in their prepubescent state and, as you know, boy sopranos do not have powerful tones. The result was an enormous amount of air being pressurized through a small and undeveloped organ, which allowed them to sing very long phrases between breaths. Moreschi compromised the purity of the early castrato style by means of glotting, a trait later picked up, ironically, by tenor Beniamino Gigli (who sang in churches as a child), but some of those notes that sound like glots are actually grace notes sung an octave to a tenth below the written note to take advantage of the peculiar reverberance of the Sistine Chapel. It is one of several technical tricks of the castratos that have been ignored or lost in history. Others included clever breathing (particularly by Carlo Broschi, known professionally as Farinelli) to give the illusion of singing an entire aria in one breath; trills in thirds and fifths (these were actually preserved on record in the recordings of a remarkable American soprano, Ellen Beach Yaw); and “trills” on a single repeated note which became known as the “spotted flute” technique. Unfortunately, like many historically informed violinists who refuse to accept that early players used portamento and actually alternated non-vibrato playing with vibrato as an expressive device (Sigiswald Kuijken is one of the very few well-known practitioners who plays much of this correct old style), historically informed singers purge their singing of these devices because they sound affected to modern audiences.
Even in the booklet accompanying these CDs, Bartoli has quoted ear-witnesses of castrato singing with widely diverse reactions, ranging from praising the magnificence of their voices to the complaint of Giovanni Doni that “a female voice is far more beautiful than the best castrato voice.” If this seems like a wide gulf in reactions, that was the case then as now. To illustrate the completely different way a castrato voice strikes the ear, here are some first-hand accounts—I will tell you this in advance—of the exact same singer:
“Personally I found [him] fascinating and intoxicating.”
“He sounds appalling, and possesses all the charm of an unoiled door hinge.”
“I am stunned, amazed and humbled. To have reached such vocal purity is something the majority of present day singers can only dream about.”
“Try listening to him in the middle of the night all by myself, like I did . . . the creepy nature of an operatic song of unfathomable language (at least to me) conjured up images of this psychotic person singing in some sort of psychic ward or a murderer in his victim’s house just after he kills the victim.”
“It could not have been easy for him, but he sounds like someone who was determined to do his best despite his limited talents and that is as admirable as it gets.”
“It wasn’t close to the cat timbre that I was expecting . . . but closer to a [falsetto] sound that haunts.”
“Many of his seemingly imperfect vocal attacks are in fact grace notes, launched from as much as a tenth below the note up to the note itself.”
“Quite honestly, I don’t think it’s worth having your balls cut off for that.”
“It took me an hour or so to recover from the initial shock and to then force my brother to listen to him with me. As much as I’m appalled [as many were] that this man suffered through castration to reach a voice which nearly gave me nightmares—I had to stay up long past my bedtime and talk to friends to attempt and forget this haunting voice—singers and artists of today still do horrible things to their body.”
“The high register sounds rather unworldly but pretty. But, what on earth is he doing when he throws his voice into the lower registers as though he is going for a slam-dunk? What is that?”
“It really shocks and saddens me that people could hear this and not hear a delicate beauty that only something like this possesses.”
“I have carried a memory of this voice in my head for all these years. I think all the reviews here prove that whether you are repulsed by the voice or whether you find it beautiful, you cannot be neutral about it. It brings up strong emotions either way—and that is what art is all about, isn’t it?”
As you might have inferred from the contemporary tone and language of these remarks, they were not made in the 18th or 19th centuries, but by listeners online to Moreschi’s 1904 recording of the Bach-Gounod “Ave Maria.” You can read the entire, unedited comments at http://www.archive.org/details/AlessandroMoreschi. I laughed especially hard at the comments of handelsmydaddy—a quote not fit to print, but it will make you laugh like no other.
I was intrigued by the booklet accompanying Bartoli’s new recording, as well as to hear the results of her research and application of musical style. As the CD review below illustrates, I was enchanted by and approved of much but not all. Having spent three days going through the copious liner notes (cowritten by Bartoli herself) and the exhaustive “Castrato Compendium” which lists most of the various terms used (she left out
musico,
used by Pier Francesco Tosi, Ida Franca, and others because they were said to embody the soul of music itself), I wanted to ask her some questions regarding their style, her style, and other issues that seemed to me somewhat contradictory. Unfortunately, I was unable to interview her even by e-mail. I say this to be fair to Bartoli, because I am certain that if I’d been able to have some of her time and a good translator, she’d have been able to resolve some of the more conflicting issues.
SACRIFICIUM
•
Cecilia Bartoli (mez); Giovanni Antonini, cond; Il Giardino Armonio
•
DECCA 4781521 (2 CDs: 99:10
Text and Translation)
PORPORA
Siface:
Come nave in mezzo all’onde; Usignolo sventurato.
Germanico in Germania:
Parto, ti lascio, o cara.
Semiramide reconosciuto:
In braccio a mille furie.
Adelade:
Nobil onda.
CALDARA
Sedicia:
Profezie, di me diceste.
La morte d’Abel figura:
Quel buon pastor son io.
ARAIA
Berenice:
Cadrò, ma qual si mira.
GRAUN
Demofoonte:
Misero pargoletto.
Adriano in Siria:
Deh, tu bel Dio d’amore . . Ov’è il mio bene?
LEONARDO LEO
Zenobia in Palmira:
Qual farfalla.
L. VINCI
Farnace:
Chi temea Giove regnate.
BROSCHI
Artaserse:
Son qual nave.
HANDEL
Serse:
Ombra mai fu.
GIACOMELLI
Merope:
Sposa, non mi conosci
There are so many ways to view this album, it’s hard just to start. For one thing, there is the music, 15 arias written for the greatest and most celebrated castratos, 12 of them recorded for the first time, each centering on one emotional mood and a very short text reflecting that mood, repeated
ad infinitum
over many choruses and embellished to the point of mania. Then there’s the album concept discussed above, which many music lovers (particularly men) have found gruesome or abhorrent, but which forcefully reminds us that this was an art form created for a fortunate few on the backs and lives of hundreds of thousands of victims. There are the ambiguous and sometimes contradictory descriptions of castrato voices, ranging from the “divine” Farinelli and his greatest rivals, Senesino and Carestini, on one end to the “unpleasant sounds” and “shock and disgust” that greeted many others, including the last stage castrato, Giovanni Velluti. A comment on page 8 of the booklet states that because the castratos were genetic males in a now-hopeless situation with no option than to become singers, they were “subjected to far more rigorous pressure than a young woman whose character is already formed.” This seems to contradict Bartoli’s claim on page 14 that the castratos were not “heartless, brainless singing machines.” Indeed, there is so much that is contradictory in this booklet, like the very existence of the castratos themselves, that one is left perhaps more puzzled when finished than when one started.
As someone who studied this world for roughly a decade, perhaps I can shed some light. To begin with, the primary appeal of the castratos was not necessarily their singing, though that was to many a fascinating experience in itself, as much as the sexual androgyny that their bodies and voices represented. Time and again it was said that their odd, androgynous appearance, combined with their androgynous voices, stirred unusual “sympathetic feelings” in both men and women. Those sympathetic feelings weren’t the urge to buy them a teddy bear for Christmas. And strictly from an artistic point of view, this music, though sometimes interesting and moving in and of itself, embodied the greatest excesses of the Baroque era. Baroque, as a term,
means
highly ornamented, but there is a tremendous difference in musical structure and importance between Broschi’s “Son qual nave” and J. S. Bach’s “Jauchzet Gott in allen landen”—which, incidentally, was written for a boy soprano, thus for a nascent castrato voice.
I seriously doubt that even one of these operas would hold the stage today, no matter how good, bad, or indifferent the music. The plots were so threadbare as to make
H. M. S. Pinafore
look like
Otello.
Each of these arias, most of them five to 11 minutes long, says little or nothing textually. The music is often sensuous—indeed, its sensuality was its
raison d’être
—but even in the
agitato
arias, there is a mind-numbing sense of
déjà vu
. To some extent, this was intentional. Without recordings, TV, films, or radio to offer replays, 18th-century audiences wanted to hear the kind of music they liked over and over again. The more musically inventive Handel is represented here by only one aria, and the forward-looking Johann Hasse not at all. The castrato music that has lived, meaning the music that is sung and played most often today, are the pieces that were better written. To dazzle or seduce the ear for that sake alone only goes so far, generally the length of this recorded concert.
The performances, no question, are generally excellent but not always in the right style. The music of that era, like the castratos, was not particularly known for its strong dramatic temperament, but for a generic drama much gentler than we came to know from the late 18th century on. Though occasional arias could take, and were given, a full-blooded treatment at that time, the castratos, by the nature of their instruments, could not sing with the kind of spitfire vehemence that Bartoli does here. The five singers of the past 25 years whose voices, to me, most closely resemble the castratos are sopranos Emma Kirkby and Nella Anfuso, and countertenors Randall K. Wong, Dominique Visse, and Aris Christofellis. Each of them has a voice that is not sensuous but possesses an androgynous sound similar to the way Maureen Forrester or Gwendolyn Killebrew sang castrato music. And each of them, by means of hard practice and clever vocal manipulation, managed to produce the “fascinating and intense” bell-like sonority with its “piercing tone” in the upper range. If you listen to Christofellis sing, for instance, Vivaldi’s “Siam navi al onde algenti” from
Olimpiade
, or Kirkby sing “But who may abide?” from Handel’s
Messiah,
you hear a pure tone focused like a laser beam, not large but piercing with barely perceptible vibrato, swing through the music with superb accuracy. There is no difference between registers; their voices sound fully integrated. The same is true of Anfuso in her benchmark recording of Farinelli arias from 1987 (Auvidis 6125), where she gave us even more: flawless trills on repeated notes, breath control that sounds continuous,
messa di voce
and downward
portamento
, all of which was part of the castrato style.
Bartoli, to her credit, worked like a demon on this album. In the slow arias, she lessens her vibrato with varying degrees of success and produces many of the same wonderful effects that you hear from Kirkby and Anfuso. Her singing in the slow arias is simply breathtaking, and will melt your heart. The most successful of the “fiery” arias is Araia’s “Cadrò, ma qual si mira,” sheer technical perfection of a kind that you will never hear replicated in your lifetime, because this particular aria, and its emotional expression, are absolutely perfect for Bartoli’s voice. In the other fast arias, headlong abandon leads to edge-of-your-seat excitement, but is stylistically wrong. In her 2002 live performance of “Son qual nave” with the Age of Enlightenment Orchestra, she made a much better and more consistent impression, even though that performance was also too fast. And, of course, she has no choice but to let her natural vibrato come to the fore in these arias, which I certainly don’t fault her for, but for which one must make allowances.
You can see where this music had a strong influence not necessarily on future operas, which fortunately became more structured and dramatically coherent in the era of Paisiello, Haydn, Salieri, Mozart, and Gluck, so much as on the dramatic cantata. Indeed, it is no accident that dramatic cantatas from this era, and 30 years beyond, have survived as great music and are often performed. Even with the Vivaldi opera revival that Bartoli helped trigger several years ago, it is that composer’s cantatas that have the greatest dramatic and structural validity.
I have some quibbles with the sometimes edgy, over-the-top playing of Il Giardino Armonico. This kind of style was introduced during the 1760s by the Mannheim Orchestra. If their fiery
Sturm und Drang
was considered radical at that time, how could previous orchestras have also played that style? Common sense tells you this approach is wrong, but that doesn’t stop them from overblowing their brass and overbowing their strings to the point of edginess. Malgoire’s
Chambre du Roy
orchestra is the outer limit of Baroque orchestral playing. Anything beyond that, like it or not, did not exist c. 1730.
The “Castrato Compendium” in the voluminous booklet is extraordinarily interesting and detailed, though it leaves out one important fact about the last castrato Moreschi and two important players in the “end game” of the era. One name left out is Domenico Mustafà (1829–1912), the last “star” castrato trained in the old school and thus able to sing the difficult florid music of his predecessors. There are four interesting facts about Mustafà. First, his voice was consistently described as sweet timbred though not very large, which probably made him more similar in sound to Wong than Moreschi’s “Christofellis.” Second, his singing was greatly admired by Richard Wagner, who initially wanted him to create Klingsor in
Parsifal
—until Mustafà disencumbered him of the notion that a mature adult who is turned into a eunuch would have a man’s voice, not a boy’s. Third, he was a major singing teacher who taught soprano Emma Calvé the secret of his “fourth voice” or “whistle tone,” a vocal trick accomplished with the mouth closed which can be heard on two of her recordings. And fourth, when he retired in 1902 due to his advanced age, he turned the Sistine Chapel directorship over to Don Lorenzo Perosi, the very man who ensured that the castrato lineage died when his friend Pius X became Pope in 1903. The interesting fact left out about Moreschi was that when he met the famed Viennese musicologist Franz Haböck (author of the important
Die Kastraten und ihre Gesangskunst
) in 1914, Haböck tried to organize a concert of Moreschi singing Farinelli arias, but Moreschi couldn’t handle the extremely difficult florid passages, and by then his range had become considerably shorter.
Taken on its own merits, however, separated from the castrato legend and correct style, everything on Bartoli’s album will impress. It’s great in that respect, and neither Bartoli nor the orchestra “cheats” with innumerable inserts to make them sound as if they can do something they can’t do in person. But there’s a lesson to be learned here, a yin-yang effect with both a positive and a negative connotation. Be careful what you wish for in music, because if the music industry gets wind of it, they’ll overdo it to the point where you’ll be suffocated and screaming “uncle” in a few years. The Era of the Castrati, condensed here to 30 of its 200 years, is a perfect example of why the style had to die out and the castratos with it. It was fun while it lasted, but a bit too much and not worth repeating. This CD is very much worth getting for the slow arias, the booklet, and “Cadrò, ma qual si mira.”
