Opera singer pays tribute to castrati

ROME (AP) — Long before botched plastic surgery ruined a movie star’s career, they were the original showbiz victims.

Castrati were young opera singers in past centuries who were castrated to preserve a high-pitched voice. They are now being honored by Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli in a new album.

The opera great dedicated her coming work “Sacrificium” — “Sacrifice” in Latin — to the thousands of boys, often from poor families, who went under the knife to achieve stardom but often ended up destitute and isolated from society.

“Families that were poor and large allowed the mutilation of a son hoping for success, pushed by unscrupulous impresarios,” Bartoli said in an interview in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera.

Because women were banned from the stage for many centuries, operas featured castrated male singers from Italy, then the global genre’s hub, and other countries. The practice peaked in the 18th century, when up to 4,000 boys were emasculated annually in Italy alone, Bartoli says in an interview on her Web site.

On the album, released worldwide on Friday, Bartoli sings rare arias, some never recorded before, written specifically for castrati by composers including Handel and Nicola Porpora, who ran the top school for the special singers in Naples.

Bartoli, one of the world’s top mezzo sopranos, said in the Web interview that the complex arias were “probably the most difficult music I ever recorded.”

Surgical castration before or during the early stages of puberty created singers with the larynx of a youth, and the lungs and chest of an adult male, producing a unique, powerful voice with great range.

That, along with rigorous training, allowed them to execute extremely difficult pieces and made superstars out of castrati like the legendary Farinelli, who was the most-popular and best-paid opera singer in 18th-century Europe.

“What happened to those who didn’t make it?” Bartoli asked in the Corriere interview. “Obviously they couldn’t marry. They became pariahs. They were relegated to a choir.”

Though the castrati declined in the 19th century as the cruel practice was banned and women entered the opera world, Bartoli, 43, noted that people still go to extreme lengths today for a shot at fame and success.

“I think of plastic surgery. Especially women, but also men, mutilate themselves and sometimes are left disfigured,” she said. “Botox. Liposuction. These are also a ‘sacrificium.’”

The album’s special edition is accompanied by a book on the castrati, “Evviva il coltellino!” — “Long live the little knife!” — after the grisly cheer with which fans saluted performances.

On the album, Bartoli is accompanied by the Italian period instrument orchestra Il Giardino Armonico and its director Giovanni Antonini, with whom she recorded the 2000 Grammy-winning “The Vivaldi Album.”