But behind the ethereal sound of the castrato singers lay an unspeakable truth. To preserve the high, angelic tone of boyhood, thousands of young boys were castrated. After women were forbidden by ...

For a solid portion of musical history, castrato singers or ‘castrati’ had a prominent role in operas, churches and courts across Europe. But why were young boys forced to undergo the gruesome ...

What else happened? According to The Castrato, a book by Martha Feldman on the castrati singers, there were quite a few different outcomes. She writes, “There were high-sopranos, mezzos ...

But the surgical mutilation continued for the next two centuries because, as Berry writes, “The fully trained castrato voice epitomized everything about Baroque style — artifical, sensuous ...

Listen to the "last castrato", Alessandro Moreschi, recorded in 1902. The castrato's voice was prized for its combination of pitch and power - an unbroken male voice able to reach the highest notes, ...

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. In The Castrato and His Wife, Helen Berry explores 18th-century marriage, gender and celebrity through the ...

The castrato's voice was prized for its combination of high pitch and power - with the unbroken voice able to reach the high notes, but delivered with the strength of an adult male. Composers were ...

“Farinelli,” yet another glossy re- creation of the musical past, tells a singularly bizarre tale of fraternal love and hate, focusing on a hugely celebrated castrato singer and his hack ...

The legendary castrato singer Farinelli (1705–1782) suffered from a disease typical of post-menopausal women, according to the first-ever osteological analysis of a eunuch. The poorly preserved ...