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A castrato (Italian; pl.: castrati) is a male singer who underwent castration before puberty in order to retain singing voice equivalent to that of a soprano, mezzo-soprano, or contralto. The voice can also occur in one who, due to an endocrinological condition, never reaches sexual maturity.
Around Easter 1914 he met Viennese musicologist Franz Haböck, author of Die Kastraten und ihre Gesangskunst (The Castrati and their Art of Singing, published in Berlin in 1927), who had planned to cast Moreschi in concerts reviving the repertoire of the great eighteenth-century castrato Farinelli. However, Moreschi (now fifty-five years old ...
Giovanni Battista Velluti as a young man. Giovanni Battista Velluti, colloquially "Giambattista" (28 January 1780 – 22 January 1861), was an Italian castrato.Considered "the last great castrato", [1] he had a reputation of being something of a diva, with some singers refusing to appear with him.
The part of Armando was sung by the famous castrato, Giovanni Battista Velluti; the opera was probably the last to feature a leading role written for a castrato. [1] It is the last of Meyerbeer's series of operas in Italian, and became the foundation of the composer's international success.
The name Giacomo Meyerbeer first became known internationally with his opera Il crociato in Egitto—premiered in Venice in 1824 and produced in London and Paris in 1825; incidentally, it was the last opera ever written to feature a castrato, and the last to require keyboard accompaniment for recitatives. This 'breakthrough' in Paris was ...
His last operatic role was Deucalion in Deucalione e Pirra by Antonio Calegari (1781). Lord Mount Edgcumbe heard him in 1784: "I had the good fortune to hear a motetto, or anthem, sung by Guadagni … He was now advanced in years … his voice was still full and well toned, and his style appeared to me excellent."
Born in Siena in about 1735, Tenducci became a castrato and he was trained at the Naples Conservatory. [2] Castration was illegal in both church and civil law, but the Roman Church employed castrati in many churches and in the Vatican until about 1902; and throughout the 17th and 18th centuries the public paid large sums of money to listen to the spectacular voices of castrati in the opera houses.
Farinelli (Italian pronunciation: [fariˈnɛlli]; 24 January 1705 – 16 September 1782) [a] was the stage name of Carlo Maria Michelangelo Nicola Broschi (pronounced [ˈkarlo ˈbrɔski]), a celebrated Italian castrato singer of the 18th century and one of the greatest singers in the history of opera. [1]