The Castrato

Author : Martha Feldman
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 496 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2016-08-02
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780520292444

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The Castrato by Martha Feldman Pdf

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
Page : 327 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2011-09-22
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780191620188

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The Castrato and His Wife by Helen Berry Pdf

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 : Linda Kelly
Publisher : Starhaven
Page : 150 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : History
ISBN : 0936315210

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Susanna, the Captain & the Castrato by Linda Kelly Pdf

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 : Lawrence Goldman
Publisher : John Day Company, Incorporated
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 1973
Category : Fiction
ISBN : UOM:39015003932095

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The Castrato by Lawrence Goldman Pdf

Author : Joyce Pool
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2016-11
Category : JUVENILE FICTION
ISBN : 1935954415

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The Castrato by Joyce Pool Pdf

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 : Nicholas Clapton
Publisher : Haus Pub.
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Castrati
ISBN : 1905791429

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Moreschi and the Voice of the Castrato by Nicholas Clapton Pdf

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
Page : 211 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2021-02-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9781108843614

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Surgery and Selfhood in Early Modern England by Alanna Skuse Pdf

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
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2014
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780199365203

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The Modern Castrato by Patricia Howard Pdf

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 : Fred Everett Maus,Sheila Whiteley
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 691 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2022-01-28
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780197607527

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The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness by Fred Everett Maus,Sheila Whiteley Pdf

Music and queerness interact in many different ways. The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness brings together many topics and scholarly disciplines, reflecting the diversity of current research and methodology. Each of the book's six sections exemplifies a particular rhetoric of queer music studies. The section "Kinds of Music" explores queer interactions with specific musics such as EDM, hip hop, and country. "Versions" explores queer meanings that emerge in the creation of a version of a pre-existing text, for instance in musical settings of Biblical texts or practices of karaoke. "Voices and Sounds" turns in various ways to the materiality of music and sound. "Lives" focuses on interactions of people's lives with music and queerness. "Histories" addresses moments in the past, beginning with times when present conceptualizations of sexuality had not yet developed and moving to cases studies of more recent history, including the creation of pop songs in response to HIV/AIDS and the Eurovision song contest. The final section, "Cross-cultural Queerness," asks how to understand gender and sexuality in locations where recent Euro-American concepts may not be appropriate.

Author : Anne Rice
Publisher : Ballantine Books
Page : 578 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 1995-04-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780345396938

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Cry to Heaven by Anne Rice Pdf

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

Author : Roger Freitas
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 433 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2009-05-14
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780521885218

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Portrait of a Castrato by Roger Freitas Pdf

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

Author : Naomi André
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2006-02-13
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780253217899

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Voicing Gender by Naomi André Pdf

Documents the changes in approaches to gender in opera in the early 19th century.

Author : Nicholas Clapton
Publisher : Haus Publishing
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : UOM:39015057511084

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Moreschi by Nicholas Clapton Pdf

Behind the extraordinary sound of the voice of ‘the last castrato’ lies a strange and lonely life lived in the shadow of great events and institutions, a personality glimpsed by inference and allusion.

Author : Naomi Adele André
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 254 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Music
ISBN : 0253346444

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Voicing Gender by Naomi Adele André Pdf

Documents the changes in approaches to gender in opera in the early 19th century.

Author : Paul F. Rice
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 195 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2014-06-19
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781443861960

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Venanzio Rauzzini by Paul F. Rice Pdf

Venanzio Rauzzini (1746–1810) enjoyed a multi-faceted career as a singer, composer and concert director. He began his career in Rome in 1765 as a soprano castrato, and quickly established his operatic credentials in various Italian centres before undertaking leading roles in Vienna and Munich. He returned to the Italian peninsula in 1772 and created the role of Cecilio in the premiere of W.A. Mozart’s opera, Lucio Silla on 26 December. Mozart was so pleased with Rauzzini’s singing that he composed the motet, Exultate jubilate, for the singer. Rauzzini accepted the invitation to become the primo uomo at the King’s Theatre in London for the 1774–75 season of Italian operas. Such was his success that the contract was extended for a further two seasons. Rauzzini remained in Britain rather than returning to the Continent. He continued to sing professionally, directed concerts in both London and Bath, and was a prolific composer. Rauzzini directed the subscriptions concerts in Bath from 1777–1810, raising their prestige to the equal of any in London. Furthermore, he was one of the most sought-after voice teachers in Britain. The cantata, Piramo e Tisbe, was drawn from his opera of the same name that was given its first London performance on 16 March 1775. Rauzzini’s opera proved to be a favourite with both audiences and other singers, and it was revived in London in 1776 and 1781. The composer never published the complete opera, but extended excerpts from it were published in 1775 that created a cantata for the title characters. Not only did the arrangement preserve the principal elements of the story, it likely had greater utility as a performance score than would the publication of the full opera. The overture of the opera has been appended to this edition of the cantata.