The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds by Martha Feldman (review)

Abstract

Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds. By Martha Feldman. (Ernest Bloch Lectures.) Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. [xxiii, 421 p. ISBN 9780520279490 (hardcover); ISBN 9780520962033 (ebook), $60.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.Then too, when castrato first came into being, human body in Europe was still a open and reproducible (p. 208). So writes Martha Feldman in Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds. Although this statement refers to Enlightenment-era decline of castrato in popularity, it could also be mapped onto Feldman's book itself. In this thoughtful, thorough exploration, figure of castrato becomes a relatively open site, permeable to Feldman's larger inquiries, which include definitions of social masculinity and emergence of sexual binaries as associated with singing voice, cultural impact of shifting systems of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury patronage, vocal production and anatomy, virtuosity and sensibility, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century performance practice.This book can easily be situated within current discourse on castrati, patronage, seventeenth-century masculinity, and performance practice. Recent comprehensive studies on figure of castrato have given much-needed attention to individual castrati, following in recent musicological trend of singer-oriented versus workoriented approaches. (These studies include: Patricia Howard, Modern Castrato: Gaetano Guadagni and Coming of a New Operatic Age [New York: Oxford University Press, 2014]; Helen Berry, Castrato and His Wife [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011]; Roger Freitas, Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage, and Music in Life of Atto Melani [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009]; and Nicholas Clapton, Moreschi and Voice of Castrato [London: Haus Books, 2008].) In contrast, Feldman provides a new approach by putting lives of many castrati in dialogue with a complex web of culturalhistorical anthropology.She emphasizes that her goal is not to merely offer an explanation of phenomenon of castrato from 1550 to 1922. Rather, hybridity of castrato is, in Feldman's deft hands, means by which readers can better understand unresolved questions around social, economic, and cultural practices of Western classical vocal production (p. xvi). castrato's hybrid status results from his ability to take advantage of both hybridized socioeconomic systems (a gift economy governed by patron-client relations and an emergent bourgeois economy based in mercantilism and cash exchange, p. xvi) and stillflexible eighteenth-century concepts of gender. book is divided into three parts: Reproduction, Voice, and HalfLight. Three major themes revolving around this concept of hybridity run through six chapters of book: reproduction, economics, and representation. Although musical figures and images are interspersed within individual chapters, additional, more substantial collections of images appear at end of each part.Chapters 1 and 2 (Of Strange Births and Comic Kin and The Man Who Pretended to Be Who He Was: A Tale of Reproduction) explore castrato's attempts to participate in various forms of male social (p. xvii). strictures of primogeniture in early-modern Italy provided perfect climate for a proliferation of castrations: the castrato's nonprocreative status [had] a distinctive place within critical boundaries of patriarchy (p. 45). castrato was thus a sacrificial victim of reproduction who, nonetheless, produced economic advantages for his family. Castrati, despite their inability to sexually reproduce, were politically masculine, and Feldman asks how a man and being a castrato converged on hard ground of lived life (p. 43). Arguing that presence of satirical and comedic accounts of castrati prove that maleness of castrato was indeed historically accepted as tenable, Feldman explores various ways in which castrati participated in reproduction. …