The Backstory: Creepy but True: The Gruesome Story of the Castrati

The angelic sounds of choirs from 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries often featured the angelic voices of boy sopranos. But sometimes those angelic voices came from full grown male bodies. They were the castrati, little boys castrated so they’d grow up with powerful soprano voices. Where did they come from and why was this done? Just one castrati left a voice recording

Feel free to DM me if you have a story you’d like me to cover . . on Facebook it’s Patty Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right. If you're like me, you love history. But

(00:02):
just when we find ourselves feeling like a connection to
folks who lived hundreds of years ago, along comes a
story like this one. Can you imagine appreciating the angelic
soprano voice of a little choir boy so much you
were willing to castrate him so he could keep those
exquisite tones right into manhood. I'm Patty Steele. For almost

(00:22):
four hundred years, as many as four thousand little boys
a year were castrated so they could continue to sing
soprano roles in church choirs and at the opera for
the rest of their lives. Creepy but true. You'll hear
one of them a castrato. Next on the backstory. We're

(00:44):
back with the backstory. When you hear the classic sound
of a church choir, you are often hearing in your
mind small boys with their incredibly angelic soprano singing voices,
like the Sistine Chapel Choir or the Vienna Boys Choir,
even some of the famous European operas. But there's a
bizarre backstory to some of these performers. In past centuries,

(01:07):
these voices were often castrati, first of all, to understand
where this insane idea originated. You got to start with
a single line from the New Testament, First Corinthians, chapter fourteen,
let your women keep silence in the churches. Well, there
you go. In Renaissance Italy, the church took that literally.

(01:27):
Women could not sing in church choirs. We're talking full stop,
So no female sopranos, and went further. Women were totally
banned from public stages in Rome and other devoutly Catholic cities.
No female singers in church, no female singers in opera.
But that was a problem because the sacred music of
the era needed high voices, sopranos, altos. Somebody had to

(01:52):
sing those lines. Well, for a while, they needed little
boys voices. Problem is, they were beautiful but unreliable. Just
as the kid finished a decade of training, puberty arrived
and his exquisite instrument disappeared. Adult men could sing in
a falsetto voice, but it sounded weak and thin. So
they came up with a third option, and it was

(02:14):
a dark one. If a small boy with a beautiful
voice was castrated before puberty, before his voice cracked and deepened,
his voice never dropped in register. Better yet, They thought
that while his larynx stayed small and his vocal cords
stayed short and high, the rest of his body would
keep growing. In fact, without the hormones that end bone growth,

(02:36):
a lot of castradi grew unusually tall, with huge rib cages,
so they had enormous lungs and enormous power behind a
child size voice box. The result was like nothing that
existed before or since, a voice with the pitch and
purity of a boy soprano driven by the lung power
and musical intelligence of a grown man. Listeners in that

(02:59):
era didn't describe it as feminine or childlike. They described
it as angelic, a voice from outside nature completely, I'll say.
In fifteen eighty nine, Pope Sixtus the Fifth reorganized the
choir of Saint Peter's to include castrati, and the Sistine
Chapel Choir followed. But here's the hypocrisy of the whole thing.

(03:21):
Castration was officially forbidden by Church law. Performing it could
get you excommunicated, But the Church employed castrati for well
over three hundred years without asking where they came from.
A supply of angels, no question asked, So where did
they come from well, mostly from poverty. The overwhelming majority

(03:42):
of castrated boys came from poor families in southern Italy, Naples, Pulia, Calabria.
For a struggling family with six, seven or eight children
and no prospects, a musically gifted son gave them a
sort of terrible lottery ticket. A successful castrato could be
become the most famous man in Europe. The superstar Castrato

(04:03):
Farinelli sang privately for the King of Spain every night
for a decade and died incredibly rich at the age
of seventy seven. A boy like that could lift his
entire family out of poverty forever, so parents took the chance.
By the peak of the craze in the eighteenth century,
as many as four thousand boys a year were castrated

(04:25):
in Italy alone. Yeah, four thousand a year, and it
was brutal. In those days before anesthesia, the boys are
around eight to ten years old. The operation was performed
by barber surgeons. The child was drugged with opium or
pressed into a hot bath until he was semi conscious.
The surgeon then severed the depths to the testicles or

(04:47):
removed them. Ten percent or more of the boys didn't
even survive the operation. It had to be done in secret,
but suffice it to say Italy had an unusual number
of reported groin injuries in those years, blamed on horseback riding,
being attacked by a wild pig, stuff like that. So anyway,
the boys who did survive the ordeal were sent to

(05:09):
conservatories where they trained non stop every single day for years.
The ones who made it became the leading men of opera,
commanding fees that dwarfed every other performer on the bill.
They were hugely popular, women were known to faint at
their concerts, and weirdly, the phrase shouted from the audience
was Viva il Coltello, long live the knife. Yikes. Problem is,

(05:35):
for every Farinelli, there were hundreds of boys whose voices
turned out to be just ordinary. They were mutilated for nothing,
banned from marriage by the church, and a lot of
times they were unable to find any place in society
at all. So how and when did it stop? Slowly
and later than you'd think, tastes changed. By the late

(05:56):
seventeen hundreds, people became kind of disgusted by the practice.
Plus opera fans started to prefer the new tenor heroes
and actually women's singers as well. Then in eighteen sixty one,
the newly unified Kingdom of Italy made castration fully illegal,
but there was one place the castradi sort of lingered

(06:17):
where it had begun, the Sistine Chapel Choir inside the
Vatican walls. The choir still had castradi into the twentieth century.
Can you believe that it took until nineteen o three
nineteen oh three for Pope Pious the tenth to issue
a decree ruling that high parts in church music should
be sung by young boys, closing the choir to new

(06:40):
kestradi forever. But by nineteen oh three the technology to
make some primitive recordings existed and there were a few
remain in Castradi. One of them, and the only one
to make solo recordings, was Alessandro Murecci. He was born
in eighteen fifty eight in Hilltown outside Rome, with as
many as eight brothers and sisters. He was castrated as

(07:04):
a young boy, his family claiming it was for medical reasons,
but likely it was for music and money. He was
one of the last boys to be castrated in Italy.
He was good and in eighteen eighty three at the
age of twenty five, he was admitted to the Sistine
Chapel Choir as its lead soprano. They called him the
Angel of Rome, and listeners wrote about being moved to tears.

(07:27):
He sang at the funeral rights of two Italian kings.
He was a star, the last of his kind. Then,
in nineteen oh two, the Gramophone Company made primitive recordings
of him on wax cylinders. Morecci recorded around seventeen tracks
between nineteen oh two and nineteen oh four. They are
the only solo recordings of the castrado voice ever made.

(07:50):
Keep in mind it was a different time, with a
different style, and it's on very early recording equipment. This
is what he sounded like, Honestly, Listeners have argued about

(08:25):
these recordings ever since. Was he more an oddity than
an artist? Was he passed his prime? Well? To our ears,
the recordings can sound a little weird. He sang with
a half sob and sometimes purposely a bit off key,
but that was because audiences loved that style in those days. Now,
the thing is Morecci is the only window we have

(08:47):
into the castrati, much like fossils or the only window
we have into the world of dinosaurs. When the Castrati
era ended in nineteen oh three, he was allowed to
stay on singing in the choir until around nineteen thirteen.
After that he lived quietly in Rome, a relic of
a vanished world. Friends say he was a gentle but

(09:07):
melancholy man. Alessandro Morecci died in April of nineteen twenty
two at the age of sixty three. Obituaries called him
the last Castrato, but think about it. For three centuries
Europe's most sublime music, music written for operas, cathedrals, for popes,
for the glory of heaven, was built on the mutilation

(09:29):
of poor little boys, cruelty hidden behind beauty. And all
we have is a scratchy nineteen o two recording of
a middle aged man in a room at the Vatican
singing into a horn, the Angel of Rome, singing for
every child ever touched by that knife. I hope you're
enjoying the backstory with Patty Steele. Please leave a review

(09:51):
and follow or subscribe for free to get new episodes
delivered automatically, and feel free to DM me if you
have a story you'd like me to cover. On Facebook,
It's Patty Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm
Patty Steele. The Backstory is a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks,

(10:13):
the Elvis Durant Group, and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer
is Mike Paeseglia. Our writer is Jake Kushner. New episodes
are out every Tuesday and Friday, and feel free to
reach out to me with comments and story suggestions on
Instagram at reel Patty Steele and on Facebook at Patty Steele.
Thanks for listening to the Backstory with Patty Steele. The

(10:34):
pieces of history you didn't know you needed to know.