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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 .
Farinelli is widely regarded as the greatest, most accomplished, and most respected opera singer of the "castrato" era, which lasted from the early 1600s into the early 1800s, and while there were a vast number of such singers during this period, originating especially from the Neapolitan School of such composers as Nicola Porpora, Alessandro ...
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.
Giovanni Carestini (13 December 1700 in Filottrano, near Ancona – 1759 in Bologna) was an Italian castrato of the 18th century, who sang in the operas and oratorios of George Frideric Handel. He is also remembered as having sung for Johann Adolf Hasse and Christoph Willibald Gluck .
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.
Searching Riccardo's house for the stolen music, Handel confronts him and sabotages the relationship. Beguiled by Handel, Riccardo reveals (in a flashback-within-a-flashback) that Carlo was a superb singer as a child, and when their father died, the fear of losing that voice prompted him to drug Carlo and castrate him illegally, then promise to ...
Details of his early life are scarce. It is possible that he studied with Mario Bittoni, maestro di cappella in the cathedral of his home city, Fabriano.Under the stage name of Porfirio Pacchierotti, he made his début in Baldassare Galuppi's opera Le nozze di Dorina at the Teatro dei Nobili in Perugia during the carnival season of 1759, playing, as young castrati often did, a female role ...
Charles Burney, a contemporary music historian, described the Florentine castrato thus: "Manzoli's voice was the most powerful and voluminous soprano that had ever been heard on our stage since the time of Farinelli; and his manner of singing was grand and full of dignity. The applause he received was a universal thunder of acclimation."