I'm glad this tradition is gone.

The other day, I stumbled upon a BBC News Article from 2006, which detailed the exhumation of castrato virtuoso Farinelli in order to study exactly how his amazing voice developed.

(An amusing aside: Chad and I were discussing this late one night as we walked to Turkey Hill. We were still talking about it when we paid at the register. The cashier asked us what we were talking about, and we had to explain to him that in the 1700s, it was fashionable to castrate little boys so that they could sing soprano as adults in choirs and in opera. He looked mildly horrified, and very confused as to why we were talking about this at all.)

Now, I honestly don't understand this. Don't we know how his voice developed? He was castrated before puberty. Beyond that, I highly doubt his progression was much different than any other amazing singer. So, really, what's the point?

The Farinelli Study Center in Bologna is sponsoring this. In the article, it says that through studying, they want to spread the word about his achievements. Here I will openly admit that I'm not familar with Farinelli or these achievements. Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I don't really see the point. It's not like he was a composer, with tangible documents to show what he did. There's only one recording of a castrato singer in existence, and it's of Allesandro Moreschi, over a century later. And while I'm sure that he was brilliant, what is the real value of spreading the word? What can we really learn from this? "Once, three hundred years ago, there was this guy called Farinelli. His parents mutilated him when he was a little boy, and then he was allegedly a really good singer. But since it was in the early 1700s we can't really tell for sure."

My opinion, however, is biased. Aside from the obvious negative aspects, namely the whole castration thing, I don't even like the way Castrato singing sounds. To be honest, it kind of creeps me out. The above recording, by Allesandro Moreschi, is the only recording because Moreschi was the last castrato to perform. By the 1900s, castration was already illegal. And maybe Moreschi isn't a prime example, but I don't have much else to compare it to.

I guess, creepiness aside, I can understand why they were "en vogue" so long. Castration before puberty has a lot of physiological effects that are beneficial to singing. It prevents the male vocal chords from changing and settling into an adult form, so they stay small and become very flexible. Because they had little to no testosterone, their bones grew abnormally long. In addition to making them very tall (Farinelli was reputed to be abnormally tall and this was confirmed when his bones were exhumed), their ribs were also unusually long, giving them a lot of extra space. This, combined with heavy training, allowed for amazing breath capacity.

The problem, though (aside from the obvious), is that there were a LOT of boys who were castrated by their parents in order to become singers, but very few were actually successful. This means that, having come from poor areas to begin with, a lot of boys grew up as eunuchs, mutilated pointlessly.

Apparantly now there is a disorder that prevents a boy from ever reaching sexual maturity... so castrati could still exist, minus the castration part.