The AI Journal

In April 1902, in a room inside the Vatican, a fifty-three-year-old man named Alessandro Moreschi sang into a recording horn for engineers from the Gramophone and Typewriter Company. He was a castrato, the only one ever recorded, and by the time he sang he had spent three decades as a paid member of the Sistine Chapel choir. He would not be pensioned off until 1913. By any account of the castrato’s history that treats its end as a triumph of reform, Moreschi should not have existed. Italy had criminalised castration for voice in 1861. The Papacy itself had announced, in 1878, that it would hire no more castrati. Moreschi was recruited into the choir in the early 1870s, and was born in 1858 — after both the moral consensus against the practice and, for the church at least, the stated policy against it were already in place.

The standard account treats the castrato’s disappearance as a delayed but continuous moral achievement: two centuries of travellers, physicians and Enlightenment writers condemned the mutilation of boys for singing, and in the nineteenth century that condemnation finally hardened into law, first under Napoleonic administration in Italy, which shut the conservatories that trained castrati and barred their engagement, and later under the Italian and papal states in their own right. On this account the practice ended because it was, at last, successfully forbidden. The dates do not support it. The gap between the first prohibitions and the last castrato is not a short lag while enforcement caught up; it is the better part of a working lifetime, populated by boys who were castrated, trained, and paid public salaries by the Church throughout.

John Rosselli’s account of the profession makes clear why two markets, not one, had to fail before the practice could actually end. Castrati were never simply an operatic taste; Rosselli’s survey of the professional group between 1550 and 1850 finds several hundred of them living in Italy at any point between roughly 1630 and 1750, supplied by a training system built around church choirs that could not employ women and only later, and more lucratively, diverted its most gifted graduates into opera seria. The two markets overlapped but were not identical, and it is the confusion between them that makes the standard narrative plausible: reformers, popes included, spent the eighteenth century inveighing against castrati on the opera stage, an institution with its own economic logic of star singers and box-office risk, while the choir stalls that had trained those singers in the first place answered to a much older and more conservative institutional habit, unresponsive to shifts in secular taste.

What actually emptied the practice of its economic reason to exist happened not in a law court but in a Paris opera house, and considerably earlier than any of the prohibitions that supposedly ended it. In April 1837, the tenor Gilbert-Louis Duprez sang the role of Arnold in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell and took its high C in full chest voice rather than in the blended falsetto register — falsettone — that tenors and castrati alike had used for that register for a century. Two Lyonnais physicians, Paul Diday and Joseph Pétrequin, published an essay on him three years later under the title “Mémoire sur une nouvelle espèce de voix chantée”: a memoir on a new species of singing voice. Gregory Bloch’s study of that essay shows contemporaries did not experience Duprez’s C as a refinement of existing technique but as a rupture — a different vocal category, medically as well as musically. The perception mattered more than the physiology. Once a full-voiced heroic top register existed as an audible possibility, the falsettist sound that castrati and tenors had shared became, almost overnight, the old-fashioned one.

Duprez was not, in the narrowest sense, first. Research into the pre-history of what singers of the period called the pharyngeal voice has traced testimony, recorded by the critic Paolo Scudo, that Giovanni Battista Rubini and the elder Manuel García had approached something like a chest-extended high register before 1837. Neither performed it as Duprez did: in a leading role, written for the older style, in the city that set operatic fashion for the rest of Europe. What Duprez supplied was not a new physiological trick but a public occasion on which the trick became the standard against which every subsequent tenor, and by extension every remaining falsettist voice, would be measured. Rossini, who had composed Arnold’s part for the older sound, is reported to have found the new one distasteful; the public did not share his judgement, and within it lay the commercial verdict that mattered. Composers responded within a decade: the tenor roles Verdi and his contemporaries wrote from the 1840s assumed the new register as normal, with no equivalent revision of writing for castrati, because there was by then effectively nowhere left to write it for. The market that had supported castrati economically — opera seria, and after it the transitional repertoire of the early nineteenth century — had already moved on to a different voice before a single Italian court had made the operation illegal.

The obvious objection is that moral and legal pressure surely did matter, and it is not one to wave off. Public revulsion at castration was neither new nor decorative in the nineteenth century; it had been argued in print since the eighteenth by travellers and physicians who found the operation impossible to defend, and the criminal statutes of the newly unified Italian state did shrink the pipeline of boys offered for the operation, forcing families and the surgeons willing to perform it into concealment they had not previously needed. Martha Feldman traces the resulting pattern of evasion into the century’s final decades: boys who had unmistakably been castrated for their voices were presented to teachers and choirmasters as having suffered a hernia, an accident, an illness in infancy — anything but the operation itself, since the operation itself was now the one thing that could not be named. Moreschi’s own generation of singers gave versions of this same story when a German singing teacher later interviewed the last survivors of the practice.

That evasion is itself the evidence against treating the law as the operative cause, not for it. A prohibition that has to be routinely and successfully evaded for two generations, by a market that has otherwise collapsed everywhere except one small and self-contained institution, is not the mechanism that ends the practice; it is what a dying practice looks like while something else keeps a narrow channel of demand alive. Where the law plainly did bite was on the supply side — fewer families were willing to risk an operation that could now end in prosecution, and the pool of boys offered for it shrank accordingly, compounding a decline already under way. But compounding is not causing. The channel that stayed open after 1861 was the Church’s own, running on liturgical convention rather than public taste, and it was the Church’s own administrative reform — Pius X’s 1903 instruction on sacred music, not a strengthened criminal code, and not a court judgment against anyone still singing — that finally closed it.

Moreschi’s recordings exist because a commercial record company wanted a curiosity in 1902, a year before that instruction was issued. He had been performing, legally forbidden and administratively tolerated, in a register opera had stopped composing for since his own grandfather’s generation. The reform that is credited with ending the castrato took sixty-six years to catch up with a voice the theatre had already made obsolete.