The World of the Castrati

Author: Patrick Barbier
Publisher: Souvenir Press
ISBN:
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
This entertaining and authoritative study of the castrati during the baroque period explores the lives and triumphs of more than 60 singers over three centuries-their social origins, training, and relationship to society and church. Blending history and anecdote, it traces the course of a phenomenon that held Europe in its thrall. People were fascinated by these hybrids-part man, part woman, and part child-who became virile heroes on the operatic stage. The reader will learn of the horrors of castration, the nature of the strange castrato voice, and the conflicts these singers experienced.

World of Castrati

Author: Patrick BARBIER
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description

Cry to Heaven

Author: Anne Rice
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345396936
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 578

Book Description
In a sweeping saga of music and vengeance, the acclaimed author of The Vampire Chronicles draws readers into eighteenth-century Italy, bringing to life the decadence beneath the shimmering surface of Venice, the wild frivolity of Naples, and the magnetic terror of its shadow, Vesuvius. This is the story of the castrati, the exquisite and otherworldly sopranos whose graceful bodies and glorious voices win the adulation of royal courts and grand opera houses throughout Europe. These men are revered as idols—and, at the same time, scorned for all they are not. Praise for Anne Rice and Cry to Heaven “Daring and imaginative . . . [Anne] Rice seems like nothing less than a magician: It is a pure and uncanny talent that can give a voice to monsters and angels both.”—The New York Times Book Review “To read Anne Rice is to become giddy as if spinnning through the mind of time.”—San Francisco Chronicle “If you surrender and go with her . . . you have surrendered to enchantment, as in a voluptuous dream.”—The Boston Globe “Rice is eerily good at making the impossible seem self-evident.”—Time

The Castrato

Author: Martha Feldman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520292448
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

Book Description
The Castrato is a nuanced exploration of why innumerable boys were castrated for singing between the mid-sixteenth and late-nineteenth centuries. It shows that the entire foundation of Western classical singing, culminating in bel canto, was birthed from an unlikely and historically unique set of desires, public and private, aesthetic, economic, and political. In Italy, castration for singing was understood through the lens of Catholic blood sacrifice as expressed in idioms of offering and renunciation and, paradoxically, in satire, verbal abuse, and even the symbolism of the castrato’s comic cousin Pulcinella. Sacrifice in turn was inseparable from the system of patriarchy—involving teachers, patrons, colleagues, and relatives—whereby castrated males were produced not as nonmen, as often thought nowadays, but as idealized males. Yet what captivated audiences and composers—from Cavalli and Pergolesi to Handel, Mozart, and Rossini—were the extraordinary capacities of castrato voices, a phenomenon ultimately unsettled by Enlightenment morality. Although the castrati failed to survive, their musicality and vocality have persisted long past their literal demise.

The Castrati In Opera

Author: Angus Heriot
Publisher: Da Capo Press, Incorporated
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description

Surgery and Selfhood in Early Modern England

Author: Alanna Skuse
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108843611
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Book Description
Implements stories of surgical alteration to consider how early modern individuals conceived the relationship between body, mind, and self.

Portrait of a Castrato

Author: Roger Freitas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521885213
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Book Description
A fascinating insight into the life and music-making of the most documented musician of the seventeenth century, castrato Atto Melani.

The Modern Castrato

Author: Patricia Howard
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199365202
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
The Modern Castrato: Gaetano Guadagni and the Coming of a New Operatic Age chronicles the career of the most significant castrato of the second half of the eighteenth-century. Guadagni may have been the only singer of the time fully able to understand the demands and opportunities of this reform, as well to possess the intelligence and self-knowledge to realize that it suited his skills, limitations and temperament perfectly--making him the first castrato to embrace the concepts of modern singing.

Eunuchs and Castrati

Author: Piotr O. Scholz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Book Description
A social history of the role of eunuchs in the households and courts of Greece, Rome, China, Byzantine, medieval Europe and the East, which aims to challenge traditional preconceptions about their duties.

The Alteration

Author: Kingsley Amis
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590176170
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
BOOKER PRIZE–WINNING AUTHOR Set in a world in which the Reformation failed, this award-winning science fiction tale is “one of the best . . . alternate-worlds novels in existence” (Philip K. Dick) In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history it is 1976, but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s second requiem) is about to be sung to lay him to rest. In the choir is our hero, Hubert Anvil, an extremely ordinary ten-year-old boy with a faultless voice. In the audience is a select group of experts whose job is to determine whether that faultless voice should be preserved by performing a certain operation. Art, after all, is worth any sacrifice. How Hubert realizes what lies in store for him and how he deals with the whirlpool of piety, menace, terror, and passion that he soon finds himself in are the subject of a classic piece of counterfactual fiction equal to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. The Alteration won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel in 1976.