The Castrato

Author : Martha Feldman
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520292448
Total Pages : 496 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Castrato written by Martha Feldman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-08-02 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Helen Berry
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191620181
Total Pages : 327 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Castrato and His Wife written by Helen Berry and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-09-22 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The opera singer Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci was one of the most famous celebrities of the eighteenth century. In collaboration with the English composer Thomas Arne, he popularized Italian opera, translating it for English audiences and making it accessible with his own compositions which he performed in London's pleasure gardens. Mozart and J. C. Bach both composed for him. He was a rock star of his day, with a massive female following. He was also a castrato. Women flocked to his concerts and found him irresistible. His singing pupil, Dorothea Maunsell, a teenage girl from a genteel Irish family, eloped with him. There was a huge scandal; her father persecuted them mercilessly. Tenducci's wife joined him at his concerts, achieving a status as a performer she could never have dreamed of as a respectable girl. She also wrote a sensational account of their love affair, an early example of a teenage novel. Embroiled in debt, the Tenduccis fled to Italy, and the marriage collapsed when she fell in love with another man. There followed a highly publicized and unique marriage annulment case in the London courts. Everything hinged on the status of the marriage; whether the husband was capable of consummation, and what exactly had happened to him as a small boy in a remote Italian hill village decades before. Ranging from the salons of princes and the grand opera houses of Europe to the remote hill towns of Tuscany, the unconventional love story of the castrato and his wife affords a fascinating insight into the world of opera and the history of sex and marriage in Georgian Britain, while also exploring questions about the meaning of marriage that continue to resonate in our own time.

Author : Lawrence Goldman
Publisher : John Day Company, Incorporated
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Castrato written by Lawrence Goldman and published by John Day Company, Incorporated. This book was released on 1973 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Nicholas Clapton
Publisher : Haus Pub.
ISBN 13 : 9781905791422
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.29/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Moreschi and the Voice of the Castrato written by Nicholas Clapton and published by Haus Pub.. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Known as the 'Angel of Rome,' Alessandro Moreschi was the last surviving castrato singer of the Vatican choir, and the only castrati whose voice was recorded. Its ethereal, haunting quality was highly prized for centuries in the papal basilicas and opera houses of Europe (readers can request a copy on CD using details in the book). The castrati tradition was established in Italy in the sixteenth century by Pope Clement VIII, and by the seventeenth century had moved onto the secular operatic stage, where castrato singers were feted as the 'pop stars' of their day. No other singers came close to matching their fame and notoriety. By the nineteenth century, however, their very existence had become an embarrassment, and when Moreschi himself joined the Sistine Chapel in 1883, there were only six castrati left inthe choir, and by 1903 they were officially no more. The strange and lonely life of Alessandro Moreschi was lived in the shadows of great events and great institutions, his personality glimpsed only by inference and allusion. Written by the acclaimed musicologist and countertenor Nicholas Clapton, this is a perceptive and informed study of the last survivor of a perennially intriguing part of Western cultural history. Clapton addresses the complexities inherent in such a complicated and historically neglected subject, establishing that castratisingers were an integral part of the lineage of Western music that should not be judged or condemned from the perspective of the twenty-first century. A professor of singing at the Royal Academy of Music,Nicholas Clapton's career as a counter-tenor has seen him particularly involved in performing the repertoire of the great castrati. In 2006, he produced and presented a television documentary on the castrato voice for the BBC.

Author : Alanna Skuse
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108843611
Total Pages : 211 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Surgery and Selfhood in Early Modern England written by Alanna Skuse and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-18 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Implements stories of surgical alteration to consider how early modern individuals conceived the relationship between body, mind, and self.

Author : Patricia Howard
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0199365202
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Modern Castrato written by Patricia Howard and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first full-length biography of one of the most outstanding singers of the eighteenth century. Gaetano Guadagni is widely known for his creation of the role of Orpheus in Gluck's 'Orfeo ed Euridice'; he was also a leading singer in Handel's oratorios, and worked with other progressive composers such as Traetta, Jommelli and Bertoni. His career coincided with a movement to reform heroic opera, with the intention of freeing dramatic music from restrictive conventions, and bringing it into harmony with the more expressive aims of the age of sensibility.

Author : Roger Freitas
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521885213
Total Pages : 433 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Portrait of a Castrato written by Roger Freitas and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-14 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating insight into the life and music-making of the most documented musician of the seventeenth century, castrato Atto Melani.

Author : Joyce Pool
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781935954415
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Castrato written by Joyce Pool and published by . This book was released on 2016-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This young adult novel shines a light on the life of the boys whose pure voices would never change. The politics, the intrigue, and the all-encompassing music rises from the pages of this enthralling, disturbing novel.

Author : Linda Kelly
Publisher : Starhaven
ISBN 13 : 9780936315218
Total Pages : 150 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Susanna, the Captain & the Castrato written by Linda Kelly and published by Starhaven. This book was released on 2004 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susanna Burney was by all accounts the sweetest and most 'spirituelle' member of the famous family which enlivened English cultural life in the later 18th century. Though less well-known than her sister, the novelist Fanny Burney, Susanna was the principal attraction of her father's musical salon for the last of the great castrati, Gasparo Pacchierotti, during his triumphant season in London in 1779-80. An unspoken romance between the singer and Susanna dominates her letter-journals to her sister, written during a year which also saw a near invasion of England, the Gordon Riots and the death of Captain Cook on the far side of the world, an event at which both Susanna's brother and her future husband were present. Drawing on these still-unpublished journals, historian Linda Kelly tells a tale of the Pacchierotti affair, the eventful year and the sadly brief life of her charming young heroine with an immediacy that makes it feel almost contemporary.

Author : Anne Rice
Publisher : Ballantine Books
ISBN 13 : 0345396936
Total Pages : 578 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cry to Heaven written by Anne Rice and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 1995-04-01 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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