Gerard Corbiau's Farinelli: Il Castrato (1994)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109771/
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.
Singing for the Castrati...
If we could speak with a castrato today, what would we ask him? Would we be most interested in what he is lacking, the "missing thing?" Would we wish to hear him sing so that we could make that which is not visible more visible? How different would our own interests and fantasies really be from spectators that precede us? Would we look at him as a science experiment, a monster, an artist, or a performer? What is he beyond a marked body?
If a castrato spoke to us today, what would he want to tell us? How would he understand his own performance of sexuality? We can only speculate as to how this historically enigmatic figure would re-write history from his own point of view. Imagine if those who are openly marked as abnormal, monstrous or different were the ones who wrote (or better yet performed) history.
Today, many opera singers are interested in the legacy of the castrati. Performers like Italian soprano Cecilia Bartoli literally embody the very shape of the castrated male (see photos below). As a female soprano who performs as a castrated male, Bartoli engages with her own marked body. I believe she drags the castrati from out of the shadowy archives of music history and into the world of the repertoire. She is a dramatic, frenetic, moving body that engages her audience (even via video) in a way that I imagine is similar to the castrato. When she opens her mouth and sings I am initially in awe, then I begin to ask, "How does she do that?" I imagine that the castrati evoked similar questions from their audience about singing and performing the voice and the body in opera.
If a castrato spoke to us today, what would he want to tell us? How would he understand his own performance of sexuality? We can only speculate as to how this historically enigmatic figure would re-write history from his own point of view. Imagine if those who are openly marked as abnormal, monstrous or different were the ones who wrote (or better yet performed) history.
Today, many opera singers are interested in the legacy of the castrati. Performers like Italian soprano Cecilia Bartoli literally embody the very shape of the castrated male (see photos below). As a female soprano who performs as a castrated male, Bartoli engages with her own marked body. I believe she drags the castrati from out of the shadowy archives of music history and into the world of the repertoire. She is a dramatic, frenetic, moving body that engages her audience (even via video) in a way that I imagine is similar to the castrato. When she opens her mouth and sings I am initially in awe, then I begin to ask, "How does she do that?" I imagine that the castrati evoked similar questions from their audience about singing and performing the voice and the body in opera.
Andreas Scholl also performs music that was originally written for the castrati. As a counter-tenor, how does Scholl remind us of the castrated body? Does his body become marked in the process of singing this music? I remember the first time I heard (and saw) a counter-tenor at Santa Fe Opera - I was shocked! I was taken out of the performance and turned to my sister and asked, "Isn't that a man? Isn't it?" It seemed that the body was not matching up to the voice. I marked the body as an anomaly, yet I still remember how spectacularly beautiful and mesmerizing I found that voice to be. Did the fact that I had marked the body as surprising make the voice that much more memorable? This dissonance between body and voice made me, as a spectator, engage with the performer in a new way; I watched his body move across the stage and the very words that emerged from him took on a new meaning beyond the literal text...
This second video is interesting because it shows me how the singer uses the text to evoke a bodily emotion. Scholl is clearly connecting his body to his voice; the two are inseparable to a real performance. When a singer utilizes their body, it can aid in the compression and release of a line of music.
What about the libretti or the text of these arias? As a poet approaching performance, why haven't I looked at the text?