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Author: Roger Freitas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521885213
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
A fascinating insight into the life and music-making of the most documented musician of the seventeenth century, castrato Atto Melani.
Author: Roger Freitas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521885213
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
A fascinating insight into the life and music-making of the most documented musician of the seventeenth century, castrato Atto Melani.
Author: Touba Ghadessi
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
ISBN: 1580442765
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
At the center of this interdisciplinary study are court monsters--dwarves, hirsutes, and misshapen individuals--who, by their very presence, altered Renaissance ethics vis-a-vis anatomical difference, social virtues, and scientific knowledge. The study traces how these monsters evolved from objects of curiosity, to scientific cases, to legally independent beings. The works examined here point to the intricate cultural, religious, ethical, and scientific perceptions of monstrous individuals who were fixtures in contemporary courts.
Author: Martha Feldman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520292448
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496
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Book Description
The Castrato is a nuanced exploration of why innumerable boys were castrated for singing between the mid-sixteenth and late-nineteenth centuries. It shows that the entire foundation of Western classical singing, culminating in bel canto, was birthed from an unlikely and historically unique set of desires, public and private, aesthetic, economic, and political. In Italy, castration for singing was understood through the lens of Catholic blood sacrifice as expressed in idioms of offering and renunciation and, paradoxically, in satire, verbal abuse, and even the symbolism of the castrato’s comic cousin Pulcinella. Sacrifice in turn was inseparable from the system of patriarchy—involving teachers, patrons, colleagues, and relatives—whereby castrated males were produced not as nonmen, as often thought nowadays, but as idealized males. Yet what captivated audiences and composers—from Cavalli and Pergolesi to Handel, Mozart, and Rossini—were the extraordinary capacities of castrato voices, a phenomenon ultimately unsettled by Enlightenment morality. Although the castrati failed to survive, their musicality and vocality have persisted long past their literal demise.
Author: Nicholas Clapton
Publisher: Haus Pub.
ISBN: 9781905791422
Category : Castrati
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Known as the 'Angel of Rome,' Alessandro Moreschi was the last surviving castrato singer of the Vatican choir, and the only castrati whose voice was recorded. Its ethereal, haunting quality was highly prized for centuries in the papal basilicas and opera houses of Europe (readers can request a copy on CD using details in the book). The castrati tradition was established in Italy in the sixteenth century by Pope Clement VIII, and by the seventeenth century had moved onto the secular operatic stage, where castrato singers were feted as the 'pop stars' of their day. No other singers came close to matching their fame and notoriety. By the nineteenth century, however, their very existence had become an embarrassment, and when Moreschi himself joined the Sistine Chapel in 1883, there were only six castrati left inthe choir, and by 1903 they were officially no more. The strange and lonely life of Alessandro Moreschi was lived in the shadows of great events and great institutions, his personality glimpsed only by inference and allusion. Written by the acclaimed musicologist and countertenor Nicholas Clapton, this is a perceptive and informed study of the last survivor of a perennially intriguing part of Western cultural history. Clapton addresses the complexities inherent in such a complicated and historically neglected subject, establishing that castratisingers were an integral part of the lineage of Western music that should not be judged or condemned from the perspective of the twenty-first century. A professor of singing at the Royal Academy of Music,Nicholas Clapton's career as a counter-tenor has seen him particularly involved in performing the repertoire of the great castrati. In 2006, he produced and presented a television documentary on the castrato voice for the BBC.
Author: Anne Rice
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345396936
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 578
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Book Description
In a sweeping saga of music and vengeance, the acclaimed author of The Vampire Chronicles draws readers into eighteenth-century Italy, bringing to life the decadence beneath the shimmering surface of Venice, the wild frivolity of Naples, and the magnetic terror of its shadow, Vesuvius. This is the story of the castrati, the exquisite and otherworldly sopranos whose graceful bodies and glorious voices win the adulation of royal courts and grand opera houses throughout Europe. These men are revered as idols—and, at the same time, scorned for all they are not. Praise for Anne Rice and Cry to Heaven “Daring and imaginative . . . [Anne] Rice seems like nothing less than a magician: It is a pure and uncanny talent that can give a voice to monsters and angels both.”—The New York Times Book Review “To read Anne Rice is to become giddy as if spinnning through the mind of time.”—San Francisco Chronicle “If you surrender and go with her . . . you have surrendered to enchantment, as in a voluptuous dream.”—The Boston Globe “Rice is eerily good at making the impossible seem self-evident.”—Time
Author: Joyce Pool
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781935954415
Category : JUVENILE FICTION
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This young adult novel shines a light on the life of the boys whose pure voices would never change. The politics, the intrigue, and the all-encompassing music rises from the pages of this enthralling, disturbing novel.
Author: Patricia Howard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019937970X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
The Modern Castrato: Gaetano Guadagni and the Coming of a New Operatic Age chronicles the career of the most significant castrato of the second half of the eighteenth-century. Through a coincidence of time and place, Gaetano Guadagni was on the forefront of the heroic opera reform, and many forward-thinking composers of the age created roles for him. Author Patricia Howard reveals that Guadagni may have been the only singer of the time fully able to understand the demands and opportunities of this reform, as well to possess the intelligence and self-knowledge to realize that it suited his skills, limitations and temperament perfectly--making him the first castrato to embrace the concepts of modern singing. The first full-length biography of this outstanding singer, The Modern Castrato illuminates the everyday lives of eighteenth-century singers while spotlighting the historic high points of the century. Most famous for his creation of the role of Orpheus in Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, his career ranged widely and brought him into contact with many progressives theorists and composers such as Traetta, Jommelli, and Bertoni. Howard's focus on the development of Guadagni's career pauses on essential, related topics along the way, such as the castrato in society, the eighteenth-century revolution in acting, and the remarkable evidence for Guadagni's marionette theater. Howard also assesses Guadagni's surviving compositions, which give new insight into the quality and character of his voice as well as his technical and expressive abilities. The Modern Castrato is an engaging narrative that will prove essential reading for opera lovers and scholars of eighteenth-century music.
Author: Nicholas Clapton
Publisher: Haus Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
Behind the extraordinary sound of the voice of ‘the last castrato’ lies a strange and lonely life lived in the shadow of great events and institutions, a personality glimpsed by inference and allusion.
Author: Lawrence Goldman
Publisher: John Day Company, Incorporated
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
Author: Helen Berry
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191620181
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
The opera singer Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci was one of the most famous celebrities of the eighteenth century. In collaboration with the English composer Thomas Arne, he popularized Italian opera, translating it for English audiences and making it accessible with his own compositions which he performed in London's pleasure gardens. Mozart and J. C. Bach both composed for him. He was a rock star of his day, with a massive female following. He was also a castrato. Women flocked to his concerts and found him irresistible. His singing pupil, Dorothea Maunsell, a teenage girl from a genteel Irish family, eloped with him. There was a huge scandal; her father persecuted them mercilessly. Tenducci's wife joined him at his concerts, achieving a status as a performer she could never have dreamed of as a respectable girl. She also wrote a sensational account of their love affair, an early example of a teenage novel. Embroiled in debt, the Tenduccis fled to Italy, and the marriage collapsed when she fell in love with another man. There followed a highly publicized and unique marriage annulment case in the London courts. Everything hinged on the status of the marriage; whether the husband was capable of consummation, and what exactly had happened to him as a small boy in a remote Italian hill village decades before. Ranging from the salons of princes and the grand opera houses of Europe to the remote hill towns of Tuscany, the unconventional love story of the castrato and his wife affords a fascinating insight into the world of opera and the history of sex and marriage in Georgian Britain, while also exploring questions about the meaning of marriage that continue to resonate in our own time.
