The Voice That Was Manufactured

For roughly two centuries, European music had a voice type that does not now exist and cannot be reproduced. Understanding why requires only the anatomy from the first lesson in this book.

At puberty, testosterone enlarges the larynx and lengthens and thickens the vocal folds. Longer, heavier folds vibrate more slowly, so the pitch drops, which is what happens to a boy's voice. The larynx also descends and becomes prominent.

Remove the hormonal trigger before that happens and none of it occurs. The larynx stays small, the folds stay short, and the high range is retained permanently. There is no prominent Adam's apple.

Meanwhile the rest of the body continues to grow. The ribcage, the lungs, the resonating spaces of throat and mouth all reach adult size or beyond; without testosterone the limbs and ribs often grew unusually long, which increased capacity further.

So: a child's sound source behind an adult's or larger-than-adult's air supply and resonating volume. Short folds for the pitch, enormous lungs for the power and the breath length, and then ten or more years of training in some of the most demanding conservatory systems ever built.

The result was a voice with the range of a boy soprano, the volume of an adult, and a breath capacity that allowed phrases no other singer could sustain. The composers of the eighteenth century wrote for it accordingly, and the roles are still in the repertoire, now sung by countertenors and mezzos who are doing something different with different equipment.

The operation was performed on boys of roughly eight to thirteen. It was illegal in the places where it was most practised, which produced a documented culture of evasion: families explained the condition with stories about riding accidents, falls and hernia operations requiring surgery. It was never officially a career path, and that is part of why the numbers are not reliably known and why confident statistics about how many boys were involved should be distrusted. The known medical literature contains very few post-mortem examinations, and the ones that exist confirm the expected anatomy: a small larynx with short folds.

The practice ended slowly and then formally. The Papal States outlawed it in 1870, Leo XIII stopped the hiring of new castrati in 1878, and Pius X's motu proprio of 22 November 1903 required boys for the high parts, which closed the last institutional exception.

Which brings us to Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato of the Sistine Chapel choir, and to a hard problem in the history of listening.

Moreschi was recorded in the Vatican in 1902 and again in 1904. Those recordings exist. They are the only documentation of the voice type anybody will ever have.

They are also poor evidence, in about five separate ways at once. Acoustic recording of 1902 and 1904, capturing a narrow frequency band through a horn. A singer in his forties, well past whatever his peak had been. Trained in a late nineteenth-century Roman church style with heavy portamento and a devotional manner, not in the eighteenth-century operatic technique the famous castrati were built for. Repertoire chosen for the Vatican rather than for display. And a performer who had never had the competitive operatic career that produced Farinelli.

People listen, hear something thin and strange and oddly sobbing, and conclude that is what the castrato voice was.

What they are hearing is one late practitioner of a degraded tradition, in middle age, on primitive equipment, singing the wrong music. It is roughly the position of assessing the entire violin tradition from a single wax cylinder of an elderly provincial player.

The honest conclusion is the uncomfortable one. We know precisely why the voice type existed, we know the anatomy that produced it, we have the music written for it, and we do not know what it sounded like. That evidence is gone and the recordings do not recover it.