Abel, Sam. Opera in the Flesh: Sexuality in Operatic Performance. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Print.
Abel wants to know “why opera feels so much like sex” (4). He studies what critical and analytical theorists of opera have regularly avoided: the body from which the voice emanates. He considers the performing body to be a commodity upon which spectators can inscribe their power (47). By paying a ticket price to look at this singer, the spectator initiates the gaze “which becomes the means of controlling desire” (47). Abel understands performance as a battle of the castrati against singers and the entire orchestra to win the erotic attention of their audience (130). He imagines the castrato’s body as highly sexualized: “Farinelli’s voice became his phallus; it swells, shakes and leaves the less potent rival in his wake, until it reaches a musical climax and induces the audience in a frenzy of applause” (130). Abel imagines the body of the castrato to be a queer “open mesh of possibility” (65): though dwelling in this space between male and female, this body that was marked as male appealed to a specifically homoerotic desire on stage (137). This source is wonderful because it complicates my understanding of sexuality. Before engaging this text I did not conceive of the spectator as engaging their own homoerotic desires on the conquered, feminized body of the singer, who is performing as the submissive partner in this homosexual relationship (137). I imagine using this text to explore my own role as spectator to an imagined performance of a castrati. This text has challenged my notions of operatic performance as a sexual battle for power between performers, musicians and spectators.
André, Naomi. Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth Century Opera. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Print.
André is concerned with the haunting legacy of the castrati in 19th century opera. She explains how gender, which was once viewed as a point along a single continuum (45), shifted during the Enlightenment into the binary system as defined by cultured gender (46). André examines Balzac’s 1830 novella “Sarrasine” which looks backwards to the castrati, the “Saracen” or the Orientalized Other (21). The protagonist sees the castrati named “La Zambinella” perform, believing the voice and body belong to a female. This ambidextrous appearance, possessing both male and female physical traits, allowed the castrati to perform both on and off the stage, continuing into a “third zone” (49) where neither gender simply described who they were (49). André is concerned with how these “visual markers of the castrati – their physical characteristics – were remapped onto [the female singer in the 19th century]” (28). This source is concerned with the voice and the body; André’s exploration into how gender is marked and how this marking is passed onto a female performer’s body through an operatic role suggests the fluidity of gender in opera. This useful source provides me with more questions to consider in my own research: if the body of the castrato was always seen as the form of the “idealized lover,” how would a woman’s body adopt the markings of that role? Does the castrato force this exotic and Other status onto a woman’s body which is also cross-dressing? This source forces me to think about the repercussions of the castrato phenomenon for single-gendered singers.
Barbier, Patrick. The World of the Castrati: The History of an Extraordinary Operatic Phenomenon. London: Harper Collins, 1996. Print
Barbier offers a comprehensive guide to the life of the castrati from training in conservatories, to the temperaments of the performer, to the debut of a name. His chapter “Castrati in Society,” offers details about the performer’s life outside of the proscenium arch and into a society of nobility, love affairs, and curious observers. The castrati reportedly performed their gender on the streets; one account states, “…they attempt by their carriage, gestures, movements, and facial expression to imitate women, in such a way that from this point of view the illusion is complete” (153). Barbier’s comprehensive listing of aristocratic responses to the castrati offer an adequate archived history; however, this source would be more useful if it also began to explore what this every-day performance meant for the performer. I can re-examine my current sources or find other sources which might help me answer why the castrati chose (more often than not) to perform his feminine side in the streets. I begin to wonder, is the spectator viewing a more feminine body because of his own desires? If the castrati lost his symbolic (and literal) “manhood,” what symbol did he gain/posses that marked his “womanhood” or his eternal “boyhood?”
Bergeron, Katherine. “The Castrato as History.” Cambridge Opera Journal 8:2, 1996, 167-184.
Bergeron argues that the “sumptuously though often inaccurately detailed” (167) narrative of Gerard Corbiau’s 1994 film, Farinelli, Il Castrtato, reflects the mythic and mysterious eclipse of the castrato in musical history. Bergeron believes Farinelli and other castrati “fail to appear” (167) because of their unrecoverable “voice [that] we cannot re-create” (184). Bergeron examines how the violent splices or “cutting” of scenes (178) as well as the combination of a male and female voices in “digital interpolation” (183) to create an artificial yet unified sound for Farinelli, remind the viewer of the castrati’s performance as superhuman virtuoso and simultaneously as subhuman, genderless, and marked performer. Bergeron expertly presents the castrati as a strange figure who has gone unquestioned in the western cannon. She successfully explores how the film supports myths of hyper-sexuality and rock-star status. Bergeron flirts with the complexity of the castrati on stage and how, unlike the sexy and seductive film, she “simply cannot fathom the body that produces those sounds. The voice, in its utter strangeness, cuts off the possibility of my forming any real or imagined connection with the singing body” (175). I am interested in where and when this “cut” or inability to identify with a performer takes place for the spectator. Bergeron does not go into depth about how an eighteenth-century audience would view a castrato’s body. In my own research, I am interested in how the audience would begin to undress a castrated body in performance, and at what point the body becomes a source of anxiety regarding sexuality and gender.
Farinelli, Il Castrato. Dir Gerard Corbiau. Perf. Stefano Dionisi, Enrico Lo Verso, and Elsa Zylberstein, 1994. DVD.
Corbiau’s 1994 film Farinelli, Il Castrato, follows the rise of Carlo Broschi, or Farinelli, opera’s most famous castrati. The film centers on the Broschi brothers who share more than music; Farinelli takes adoring women to bed, while Riccardo, his older brother who is a composer, finishes the deed while his brother watches. The film follows Farinelli on tour through the continent and into England, as he performs and mesmerizes his toughest critic, the composer Handle. As Farinelli rises to rock-star status the film depicts the darker side of this fame: the threat of losing one’s voice and ultimately one’s livelihood, the inability to perform as a male and procreate, and the horrors of a repressed past that cannot be castrated from the self. This source was vital in my understanding of what the life of a singer might have been like. The film focuses on the many ways the body of the castrati performed: on stage as spectators watched in awe, and often orgasmic ecstasy, or as an ambiguous sexual being whose complicated gender blurring left him incapable of procreation. This film will work its way into my own research because it hypothesizes the repertoire, or the living, breathing, singing body of a sexually impotent, yet powerfully gendered performer. By watching this film, I am able to see and hear what lies outside the confines of written history. This film places me as a spectator to every move of this gendered body in the performance of everyday life.
Freitas, Roger. “The Eroticism of Emasculation: Confronting the Baroque Body of the Castrato.” The Journal of Musicology 20:2, 2003, 196-249.
Freitas is fascinated by the paradox of the castrato; why was the castrato in his “special sexual status… [of] boyish suspension” (233) cast in operas as the virile hero and lover? Freitas understands notions of sexuality in the 17th and 18th century as functioning in dramatically different ways than it does today. The castrato was seen as inhabiting a desirable middle ground, adjacent to the prepubescent child, falling between man and woman (204). Freitas describes the performance of gender and youth by the castrati: “the castrato represented a theatrical imitation of this erotically charged boy” (214). He sees the castrati as not merely an asexual voice, but rather the beardless, soft and effeminate body of an “idealized lover” (248), an erotic object for possibly both men and women as suggested by art, literature and historical accounts. I was thrilled to find a source that discussed the performance of the marked body both on the stage and in everyday life. I can use this source to more fully expand my own understanding of 17th and 18th century notions of what defines one’s sexuality. It fits into my research nicely, because I would like to explore the body of the castrati from different lenses: historical, contemporaneous, as a passive spectator and as an active lover. What did (or do) we write onto a body that is marked by so many sexual markers?
Koestenbaum, Wayne. The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. Print.
Koestenbaum’s non-fiction essay is told through the gaze of a white, male, gay, intellectual writing about opera from a field other than music. On the surface he is interested in opera and its fascination to a particular generation of closeted, self-deprecating gay men (6). However, his prose examines the stunningly erotic nature of an art form which we often perceive to be a conservative, elite, blue-haired genre stuck in the past. Koestenbaum’s narrative of becoming an “opera queen” is littered with moments of true insight into the power of performance: “A singer’s voice sets up vibrations and resonances in the listener’s body…. The listeners inner body is illuminated, opened up: a singer doesn’t expose her own throat, she exposes the listener’s interior. Her voice enters me, makes me a “me,” by virtue of the fact that I have been entered” (43). Koestenbaum suggests a sexual tryst occurring when the voice, standing in for a phallus, enters his own body which is open and penetrable to sound. This source is useful because it offers a twenty-first century viewpoint. I expected this text to deal more directly with castrati and their own desire and allure to the audience, though unfortunately it only alludes to their existence in a casual way. Despite this absence, the text offers unique insight into the gaze of a spectator, in this case, the gay, subjugated male. This text works well with Sam Abel’s book on sexuality in opera, for they each propose completely opposite positions for the spectator. I imagine using this text to heighten my understanding of the singing body as a (potentially) sexually erotic event.
Pleasants, Henry. The Great Singers: From the Dawn of Opera to Caruso, Callas, and Pavarotti. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966. Print.
Musical critic Henry Pleasants explores opera’s origins in the Church of Rome, where “women were forbidden…not only to speak in church, but also to sing” (37). In the complex, multi-voiced music that evolved in the church, the absence of women on the stage in the late 16th century required more than boys who would outgrow their voice or straining male falsettists; out of this competitive and lucrative European art, the Italian castrato was born. Pleasants explores the accounts, or the archival documents that supply evidence: by the 18th century “more than four thousand boys were castrated [before or at puberty] each year” (38). The church decreed the operation punishable by death, yet surgeries occurred under the guise of some “tortured excuse” (40); the castrati, the castrati’s family, the church, composers, and eventually opera houses, might find outrageous fame and fortune. I found Pleasants’ reliance on accounts and written documents useful to an archived understanding of how the church limited all marital rights for a castrati and how powerful figures such as Casanova reflects on watching a “monster” with “inexpressible charm…so that you were madly in love before you realized it” (44). This general overview of the birth and rise of the castrati in Italian culture supplements my understanding of the cultural, social, and artistic situation in Italy. This source, relying on documented accounts, makes me even more curious about the repertory. I would like to examine how the archived accounts does or does not capture the ephemeral performance of voice, sexuality and gender.
Donnington, Robert. The Rise of Opera. Great Britain: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981. Print.
King, Thomas A. “The Castrato’s Castration.” Studies in English Literature 46:3, 2006, 563-583.
Kobialka, Michal. “Words and Bodies: A Discourse on Male Sexuality in Late Eighteenth-Century English Representational Practices.” Theater Research International 28: 1, 2003, 1-19.
Laqueur, Thomas W. “The Rise of Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Historical Context and Historiographical Implications.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 37:4, 2012, 802-813.
"mark, n.1". OED Online. September 2012. Oxford University Press. 3 November 2012 <http://www.oed.com.silk.library.umass.edu/view/Entry/114169?rskey=L9LVBv&result=1&isAdvanced=false>.
Poizat, Michel. The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Print.
Scholz, Piotr O. Eunuchs and Castrati: A Cultural History. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2001. Print.
Somerset-Ward, Richard. Angels & Monsters: Male and Female Sopranos in the Story of Opera, 1600-1900. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Print.
Weiss, Piero. Opera: A History in Documents. New York: Oxford Press, 2002. Print.
Abel wants to know “why opera feels so much like sex” (4). He studies what critical and analytical theorists of opera have regularly avoided: the body from which the voice emanates. He considers the performing body to be a commodity upon which spectators can inscribe their power (47). By paying a ticket price to look at this singer, the spectator initiates the gaze “which becomes the means of controlling desire” (47). Abel understands performance as a battle of the castrati against singers and the entire orchestra to win the erotic attention of their audience (130). He imagines the castrato’s body as highly sexualized: “Farinelli’s voice became his phallus; it swells, shakes and leaves the less potent rival in his wake, until it reaches a musical climax and induces the audience in a frenzy of applause” (130). Abel imagines the body of the castrato to be a queer “open mesh of possibility” (65): though dwelling in this space between male and female, this body that was marked as male appealed to a specifically homoerotic desire on stage (137). This source is wonderful because it complicates my understanding of sexuality. Before engaging this text I did not conceive of the spectator as engaging their own homoerotic desires on the conquered, feminized body of the singer, who is performing as the submissive partner in this homosexual relationship (137). I imagine using this text to explore my own role as spectator to an imagined performance of a castrati. This text has challenged my notions of operatic performance as a sexual battle for power between performers, musicians and spectators.
André, Naomi. Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth Century Opera. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Print.
André is concerned with the haunting legacy of the castrati in 19th century opera. She explains how gender, which was once viewed as a point along a single continuum (45), shifted during the Enlightenment into the binary system as defined by cultured gender (46). André examines Balzac’s 1830 novella “Sarrasine” which looks backwards to the castrati, the “Saracen” or the Orientalized Other (21). The protagonist sees the castrati named “La Zambinella” perform, believing the voice and body belong to a female. This ambidextrous appearance, possessing both male and female physical traits, allowed the castrati to perform both on and off the stage, continuing into a “third zone” (49) where neither gender simply described who they were (49). André is concerned with how these “visual markers of the castrati – their physical characteristics – were remapped onto [the female singer in the 19th century]” (28). This source is concerned with the voice and the body; André’s exploration into how gender is marked and how this marking is passed onto a female performer’s body through an operatic role suggests the fluidity of gender in opera. This useful source provides me with more questions to consider in my own research: if the body of the castrato was always seen as the form of the “idealized lover,” how would a woman’s body adopt the markings of that role? Does the castrato force this exotic and Other status onto a woman’s body which is also cross-dressing? This source forces me to think about the repercussions of the castrato phenomenon for single-gendered singers.
Barbier, Patrick. The World of the Castrati: The History of an Extraordinary Operatic Phenomenon. London: Harper Collins, 1996. Print
Barbier offers a comprehensive guide to the life of the castrati from training in conservatories, to the temperaments of the performer, to the debut of a name. His chapter “Castrati in Society,” offers details about the performer’s life outside of the proscenium arch and into a society of nobility, love affairs, and curious observers. The castrati reportedly performed their gender on the streets; one account states, “…they attempt by their carriage, gestures, movements, and facial expression to imitate women, in such a way that from this point of view the illusion is complete” (153). Barbier’s comprehensive listing of aristocratic responses to the castrati offer an adequate archived history; however, this source would be more useful if it also began to explore what this every-day performance meant for the performer. I can re-examine my current sources or find other sources which might help me answer why the castrati chose (more often than not) to perform his feminine side in the streets. I begin to wonder, is the spectator viewing a more feminine body because of his own desires? If the castrati lost his symbolic (and literal) “manhood,” what symbol did he gain/posses that marked his “womanhood” or his eternal “boyhood?”
Bergeron, Katherine. “The Castrato as History.” Cambridge Opera Journal 8:2, 1996, 167-184.
Bergeron argues that the “sumptuously though often inaccurately detailed” (167) narrative of Gerard Corbiau’s 1994 film, Farinelli, Il Castrtato, reflects the mythic and mysterious eclipse of the castrato in musical history. Bergeron believes Farinelli and other castrati “fail to appear” (167) because of their unrecoverable “voice [that] we cannot re-create” (184). Bergeron examines how the violent splices or “cutting” of scenes (178) as well as the combination of a male and female voices in “digital interpolation” (183) to create an artificial yet unified sound for Farinelli, remind the viewer of the castrati’s performance as superhuman virtuoso and simultaneously as subhuman, genderless, and marked performer. Bergeron expertly presents the castrati as a strange figure who has gone unquestioned in the western cannon. She successfully explores how the film supports myths of hyper-sexuality and rock-star status. Bergeron flirts with the complexity of the castrati on stage and how, unlike the sexy and seductive film, she “simply cannot fathom the body that produces those sounds. The voice, in its utter strangeness, cuts off the possibility of my forming any real or imagined connection with the singing body” (175). I am interested in where and when this “cut” or inability to identify with a performer takes place for the spectator. Bergeron does not go into depth about how an eighteenth-century audience would view a castrato’s body. In my own research, I am interested in how the audience would begin to undress a castrated body in performance, and at what point the body becomes a source of anxiety regarding sexuality and gender.
Farinelli, Il Castrato. Dir Gerard Corbiau. Perf. Stefano Dionisi, Enrico Lo Verso, and Elsa Zylberstein, 1994. DVD.
Corbiau’s 1994 film Farinelli, Il Castrato, follows the rise of Carlo Broschi, or Farinelli, opera’s most famous castrati. The film centers on the Broschi brothers who share more than music; Farinelli takes adoring women to bed, while Riccardo, his older brother who is a composer, finishes the deed while his brother watches. The film follows Farinelli on tour through the continent and into England, as he performs and mesmerizes his toughest critic, the composer Handle. As Farinelli rises to rock-star status the film depicts the darker side of this fame: the threat of losing one’s voice and ultimately one’s livelihood, the inability to perform as a male and procreate, and the horrors of a repressed past that cannot be castrated from the self. This source was vital in my understanding of what the life of a singer might have been like. The film focuses on the many ways the body of the castrati performed: on stage as spectators watched in awe, and often orgasmic ecstasy, or as an ambiguous sexual being whose complicated gender blurring left him incapable of procreation. This film will work its way into my own research because it hypothesizes the repertoire, or the living, breathing, singing body of a sexually impotent, yet powerfully gendered performer. By watching this film, I am able to see and hear what lies outside the confines of written history. This film places me as a spectator to every move of this gendered body in the performance of everyday life.
Freitas, Roger. “The Eroticism of Emasculation: Confronting the Baroque Body of the Castrato.” The Journal of Musicology 20:2, 2003, 196-249.
Freitas is fascinated by the paradox of the castrato; why was the castrato in his “special sexual status… [of] boyish suspension” (233) cast in operas as the virile hero and lover? Freitas understands notions of sexuality in the 17th and 18th century as functioning in dramatically different ways than it does today. The castrato was seen as inhabiting a desirable middle ground, adjacent to the prepubescent child, falling between man and woman (204). Freitas describes the performance of gender and youth by the castrati: “the castrato represented a theatrical imitation of this erotically charged boy” (214). He sees the castrati as not merely an asexual voice, but rather the beardless, soft and effeminate body of an “idealized lover” (248), an erotic object for possibly both men and women as suggested by art, literature and historical accounts. I was thrilled to find a source that discussed the performance of the marked body both on the stage and in everyday life. I can use this source to more fully expand my own understanding of 17th and 18th century notions of what defines one’s sexuality. It fits into my research nicely, because I would like to explore the body of the castrati from different lenses: historical, contemporaneous, as a passive spectator and as an active lover. What did (or do) we write onto a body that is marked by so many sexual markers?
Koestenbaum, Wayne. The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. Print.
Koestenbaum’s non-fiction essay is told through the gaze of a white, male, gay, intellectual writing about opera from a field other than music. On the surface he is interested in opera and its fascination to a particular generation of closeted, self-deprecating gay men (6). However, his prose examines the stunningly erotic nature of an art form which we often perceive to be a conservative, elite, blue-haired genre stuck in the past. Koestenbaum’s narrative of becoming an “opera queen” is littered with moments of true insight into the power of performance: “A singer’s voice sets up vibrations and resonances in the listener’s body…. The listeners inner body is illuminated, opened up: a singer doesn’t expose her own throat, she exposes the listener’s interior. Her voice enters me, makes me a “me,” by virtue of the fact that I have been entered” (43). Koestenbaum suggests a sexual tryst occurring when the voice, standing in for a phallus, enters his own body which is open and penetrable to sound. This source is useful because it offers a twenty-first century viewpoint. I expected this text to deal more directly with castrati and their own desire and allure to the audience, though unfortunately it only alludes to their existence in a casual way. Despite this absence, the text offers unique insight into the gaze of a spectator, in this case, the gay, subjugated male. This text works well with Sam Abel’s book on sexuality in opera, for they each propose completely opposite positions for the spectator. I imagine using this text to heighten my understanding of the singing body as a (potentially) sexually erotic event.
Pleasants, Henry. The Great Singers: From the Dawn of Opera to Caruso, Callas, and Pavarotti. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966. Print.
Musical critic Henry Pleasants explores opera’s origins in the Church of Rome, where “women were forbidden…not only to speak in church, but also to sing” (37). In the complex, multi-voiced music that evolved in the church, the absence of women on the stage in the late 16th century required more than boys who would outgrow their voice or straining male falsettists; out of this competitive and lucrative European art, the Italian castrato was born. Pleasants explores the accounts, or the archival documents that supply evidence: by the 18th century “more than four thousand boys were castrated [before or at puberty] each year” (38). The church decreed the operation punishable by death, yet surgeries occurred under the guise of some “tortured excuse” (40); the castrati, the castrati’s family, the church, composers, and eventually opera houses, might find outrageous fame and fortune. I found Pleasants’ reliance on accounts and written documents useful to an archived understanding of how the church limited all marital rights for a castrati and how powerful figures such as Casanova reflects on watching a “monster” with “inexpressible charm…so that you were madly in love before you realized it” (44). This general overview of the birth and rise of the castrati in Italian culture supplements my understanding of the cultural, social, and artistic situation in Italy. This source, relying on documented accounts, makes me even more curious about the repertory. I would like to examine how the archived accounts does or does not capture the ephemeral performance of voice, sexuality and gender.
Donnington, Robert. The Rise of Opera. Great Britain: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981. Print.
King, Thomas A. “The Castrato’s Castration.” Studies in English Literature 46:3, 2006, 563-583.
Kobialka, Michal. “Words and Bodies: A Discourse on Male Sexuality in Late Eighteenth-Century English Representational Practices.” Theater Research International 28: 1, 2003, 1-19.
Laqueur, Thomas W. “The Rise of Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Historical Context and Historiographical Implications.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 37:4, 2012, 802-813.
"mark, n.1". OED Online. September 2012. Oxford University Press. 3 November 2012 <http://www.oed.com.silk.library.umass.edu/view/Entry/114169?rskey=L9LVBv&result=1&isAdvanced=false>.
Poizat, Michel. The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Print.
Scholz, Piotr O. Eunuchs and Castrati: A Cultural History. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2001. Print.
Somerset-Ward, Richard. Angels & Monsters: Male and Female Sopranos in the Story of Opera, 1600-1900. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Print.
Weiss, Piero. Opera: A History in Documents. New York: Oxford Press, 2002. Print.