Excavating the Castrato: Toward New Archaeologies

On a common view, phonography offers acoustic presence, amplifying sound, even as it highlights absence--the loss of immediacy that live performance should provide. This paper confronts that paradox through recourse to recordings made to preserve castrato vocality at the very moment of its demise, in Rome 1902-04, when acoustic capture of the last castrato Alessandro Moreschi sought to preserve a vanishing performance tradition.
How might an archaeology of Moreschi's vocality uncover those material remains? How might it give purchase on Moreschi's idiosyncratic and bewildering vocal habits as acoustic shards of past practices that surface in the form of the trace, above all laryngeal catches in the throat manifested as unpitched phonations, aspirates, upward scoops, and even sobs?
My paper addresses these questions by following Moreschi's vocal tics backwards in several forking traditions, each with separate but overlapping residues: 1) a bel canto and castrato tradition described by Pierfrancesco Tosi (1723), Domenico Corri (1810), Manuel Garcia Jr. (1840), Paolo Pergetti (1850), and others; 2) a longstanding Sistine tradition documented by chapelmaster Giuseppe Baini (1806) and Felix Mendelssohn (1831); and 3) a romantic but ultimately verismo tradition that sounded in the opera houses of Moreschi's time. Pursuing the first two, the paper augments evidence first adduced by Robert Buning (1990). For the third, it combines new archival findings with a wealth of early and neglected phonographic evidence of opera singers Moreschi would have heard, as established in oral histories I have taken from Moreschi's living descendants, who describe him as having been a regular attendee at the opera. The last aligns with his documented second life as a salon singer of female arias and illuminates his vocal affinities with operatic divas staged during Moreschi's Roman years (1871-1922), including Ernestina Bendazzi-Garulli, Cesira Ferrani, and Emma Calvé. The paper ends by rethinking the Derridean trace and Certeau's "vocal utopias" in relation to what I call a "sacred vernacular" that tempered verismo's raw emotionality with nineteenth-century religious sentimentality and that can be tracked through the quirky aural tattoos of the upward appoggiatura and the sob as historically embedded phono/graphic plays of difference.

In 2013, Italian archaeologists exhumed the remains of singer Gasparo Pacchierotti (1740–1821). They hoped his desiccated bones would reveal how castration had affected his physical body, enabling us to "understand the secrets behind his sublime voice" (Zanatta et al., 2016). In seeking a material basis for culturally contingent aesthetics, the researchers were pursuing a methodological premise that had gained new currency during the singer's own lifetime two centuries earlier: the study of human history through its material remains. Classical archaeology was supposedly "invented" in the 1760s by German art historian J. J. Winckelmann, who limned an aesthetic-stylistic history of Greece through the vases, statues, and ruins littering Southern Italy. By taxonomizing and narrativizing fragments of the past into an ideology of the present, Winckelmann's archaeology offered eighteenth-century Europeans a framework for adumbrating the cultural concerns of their own mid-Enlightenment moment.


This paper uses Pacchierotti as a case study to argue that histories of the castrato are necessarily cultural archaeologies, albeit grounded in scores, reviews, and other textual inscriptions rather than potsherds. From the late eighteenth century onward, Pacchierotti's interlocutors portrayed him in music and writing as a mediating figure who had balanced such dichotomies as materiality and ephemerality, intimacy and monumentality, and neoclassicism and protoromanticism (e.g., anon., 1792; Stendhal, 1824; Cecchini, 1844; Lee, 1880) All told Pacchierotti was mythologized as having materially embodied and envoiced multiple aesthetic and epistemic shifts, becoming an emblem of different historically-situated cultural tensions.


More recently, the figure of the castrato writ large has provided a similar site for historians, opening the way for considering pre-modern notions of queerness (Wilbourne, 2018), disability (Law, 2015; Crawford, 2019), racialized difference (Crawford, 2019; Gordon, forthcoming), voice and embodiment (Davies, 2014; Feldman, 2015; Peritz 2019), even music history itself (Bergeron, 1996). Unlike earlier castrato archaeologies, however, in such studies the traces of voices and bodies function not as evidence for presentist ideologies, but rather as fragments of histories that have been ideologically effaced. In thus exhuming the remains of embodied sonic practices, whether skeletons or scores, castrato excavations expand the epistemological possibilities of cultural history.

       It's no secret that even those who found the castrato voice ravishing blamed someone else. The French blamed the Italians who blamed the Spanish who blamed the Moors and the Turks. This paper unpacks this endless displacement by arguing that the voice of the European castrato, who often migrated north and west from southern Italy, sonically marked the edge of the European and English geographical imaginary and a place of nostalgic recovery. This builds on Serena Guarracino's understanding of "the castrati's mutilated sexual organs" as the "Other of Western reason and modernity."  
I begin with two performances by Marc Antonio Pasqualini in Paris that were staged by Cardinal Jules Mazarin in 1645 and 1647. The paper is less about Pasqualini himself than an archaeology of his voice, purposefully reading between the lines of fact and fiction. Pasqualini, born in Imola, near Bologna, was nevertheless assimilated to the imaginary of the Global South. One of the most famous singers of the seventeenth century, he was by the 1630s regularly celebrated by travelers to Rome but was also at the center of satirical attacks on the Barberini and on the Italians. In Paris, a massive pamphlet attack on Mazarin suggested the Cardinal have his balls cut off and, in short, blamed him for the moral degeneration of France. By 1706, before a castrato had even performed publicly in England, critics already objected to the alien nature of Italian opera and warned against the southern loss of liberty as a result of degeneracy and corruption. John Dennis's "Essay on the Opera's after the Italian Manner" situated Italian opera all told as monstrous.
Rather than reading castrati through the English-speaking Enlightenment, this remapping hears them through their early and pre-modern migrations and ask how their real and imagined incarnations formed part of larger inscriptions of alterity and processes of globalization. Doing so means de-centering the erotic politics that have dominated Anglo-American recoveries of castrato song and hearing their sounds in the context of European fascinations, fears, and desires in which song embeds ideologies of speaking and writing, reason and civilization.