“Eviva il Coltello”? The Castrato Singer in Eighteenth-Century German Literature and Culture

Abstract

This article investigates how eighteenth-century writers used the figure of the castrato as a privileged metaphor for the negotiation of class conflicts, gender concepts, and the nature of art. A reading of Johann Jakob Wilhelm Heinse's novel Hildegard von Hohenthal shows that Heinse uses the character of the (fake) castrato to celebrate the artificiality of gender, desire, and art, but his novel leaves class boundaries intact. Friedrich Schiller's poem “Kastraten und Männer” attacks aristocratic supremacy but naturalizes gender codes and equates masculinity and art.