Description
Book SynopsisAn exploration of why innumerable boys were castrated for singing between the mid-sixteenth and late-nineteenth centuries. This book shows that the entire foundation of Western classical singing, culminating in bel canto, was birthed from an unlikely and historically set of desires, public and private, aesthetic, economic, and political.
Trade Review"Rich in scholarship and filled with subtle analysis." -- Colm Toibin London Review of Books "This is a remarkable book... An impressive achievement." -- Nicholas Clapton Early Music "Meticulously researched, beautifully written and richly illustrated ... In this book, as erudite as it is gripping, there is little to criticize." Cultural History "?Feldman's high-mindedness? ... ?allows her to investigate this most easily sensationalized of topics with subtlety, taste and doses of scholarship that are not suffocatingly encyclopedic?... ?If you love singing there's every reason to read The Castrato?.?" -- Tim Pfaff The Bay Area Reporter
Table of ContentsPreface Note on Textual Transcription, Translations, Lexicon, and Musical Nomenclature PART ONE. Reproduction 1. Of Strange Births and Comic Kin Appendix to Chapter 1 2. The Man Who Pretended to Be Who He Was PART TWO. Voice 3. Red Hot Voice 4. Castrato De Luxe PART THREE. Half-light 5. Cold Man, Money Man, Big Man Too 6. Shadow Voices, Castrato and Non Acknowledgments Abbreviations Notes Bibliography List of Illustrations Index
