The lure of the castrato

Abstract

This is a remarkable book, one that contains a great deal that is of value. It is by no means straightforward to read, any more than it is a mere chronological account of the phenomenon of the castrato voice in Western art music between the 16th and early 20th centuries: it is both more than that, and less. Originally given as the Ernst Bloch Lectures, attached to the eponymous professorship held by Martha Feldman at the University of California, Berkeley, the six chapter titles lay out what the reader should expect: ‘Of strange births and comic kin’; ‘The man who pretended to be who he was: a tale of reproduction’; ‘Red hot voice’; ‘Castrato de luxe’; ‘Cold man, money man, big man too’; ‘Shadow voices, castrato and non’. Since this is a book of around 400 pages, including 100 of notes, these are long chapters, several running to around 50 pages, including lavish music examples and black-and-white illustrations. Though the volume as a whole is well produced, some of these latter are of poor quality, especially the reproductions of pages from 18th- and 19th-century printed books, which emerge as more grey-on-grey. Nor are they always placed close to the material that they illustrate. Though this book ‘evolved’ from a series of lectures revised for publication, Feldman’s voice remains audible in her texts, and the process of reading the volume involves a great deal of to-ing-and-fro-ing to the many endnotes, in order to appreciate fully the depth and range of the scholarship here displayed: the longest chapter has 155 notes, adding 23 more pages to its own 53. Neither as a physical object nor as a source of information does this book give up its secrets easily.