Church choir masters and choral composers in Baroque Italy were faced with a problem: there was a lack of strong, pure high voices. Women were barred from singing in church choirs, likely due to the bible verses 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, which state: “As in all congregations of God’s people, women should keep silent at the meeting. They have no permission to talk, but should keep their place as the law directs… It is a shocking thing for women to talk at the meeting” (The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha, 1984). Young boys with unbroken voices were used; but no matter how well they were trained, they lacked the vocal strength to be heard over the adult male tenors and basses. Adult men who specialized in falsetto singing, called falsettists,…show more content… These performers, called castrati, were noticed as boys for their exceptional singing capabilities and thus selected to be castrated. A young castrato would then undergo eight to ten years of rigorous musical and vocal training with the best singing teachers available until he was around sixteen, when he would be deemed ready to make his debut in a choir, or as a soloist in an opera (Melicow, 1983). Castrati seemed to be the ideal solution to the high voice problem: they had pure, natural-sounding treble voices, as well as the vocal power and breath support of an adult man. However, how exactly the procedure came to be is unknown. Perhaps it was noticed that a boy who had a condition or injury affecting his testes did not lose his high voice after puberty, and this was replicated in other boys by castrating…show more content… In a anonymously published 1778 British comedy, The Remarkable Trial of the Queen of Quavers, a protagonist states the following: “It is in consequence of this amazing depravity of taste that seven exotic animals [called] castrati were lately imported from [Italy], at such a most enormous expense.—Such filthy lumps of mortality as the wilds of Africa never produced!—They have the look of a crocodile, the grin of an ape, the legs of a peacock, the paunch of a cow, the shape of an elephant, the brains of a goose, the throat of a pig, and the tail of a mouse: to crown the whole, if you sit but a few moments in their company, you will be sure of having your nostrils perfumed in a strange manner; for they have continually about them the odoriferous effluvia of onion and garlick. … Indeed it is not possible to conceive a more nauseous and odious creature than a Castrato” (as cited by Feldman, 2008). Since Western society had such a low opinion of castrati — so low, in fact, that they were no longer even seen as human — it was impossible for them to be taken seriously onstage. Audiences rejected seeing these performers, especially in the roles of nobles and gods that they traditionally
