The castrated cantor of the Popes who accompanied the funeral of Umberto I died in 1922: he was the last of the boys emasculated to ensure that they had an acute register
It has a tear in every note and a sigh in every breath. The charming American writer Lillie De Hegermann-Lindencrone, who had studied singing, was the wife of a Danish diplomat and kept a sparkling Time.news of social life, was thrilled to be there that evening at Mrs. Bristed’s house in New York: The Pope’s singers are a real attraction … since his living room is the only place outside the churches where you can hear them. Alessandro Moreschi, then! When she sang he on certain crowded occasions, she sent a servant with a rug and a camp stool to hold her place: The high notes of his poignant voice become almost supernatural.
It is exactly one hundred years that is gone, the last castrated cantor of the choir of the Sistine Chapel. And yet hear her on YouTube Ave Maria, with all the limitations of a pioneering recording made in the Gramophone & Typewriter studios in London back in 1904, it still puts the chills. To the point you imagine the famous dialogue between Paul VI and Igor Stravinsky in June 1965, when the Pope asked the great Russian composer: Can I do something for music? Your Holiness, return the castrati to music.
Regrets? Not the case. What were the castrati let us tell the famous Encyclopdie of Diderot and d’Alembert: This is the name of those who have been made eunuchs since childhood to procure them a clearer, higher-pitched voice. In Italy there are barbarian fathers who, sacrificing nature to luck, surrender their children to the operation of castration for the pleasure of voluptuous and cruel people who dare to seek the song of these unfortunates. A very harsh judgment. Shared by those who gradually became very clear how the price to pay for that art was too high. The most terrible thing was, as Paolo Isotta wrote for example, that since it had to be carried out at an early age to produce its effects, that is, the abnormal development of the rib cage following the suitable exercises carried out in the Conservators, so many children were subjected to it, so to speak, blindly, before, that is, that it was possible to establish whether they possessed singing and musical talent. So the greater portion then languished without art. With enormous responsibilities, Giacomo Baroffio explains in the essay The lost voice. Life of Farinelli emasculated cantor by Sandro Cappelletto, on the part of the Catholic hierarchy: The story of the emasculated cantors is a horrendous and squalid proof of how much the ecclesiastical misrule, not the Church but some people who have found tacit consent in it from a cowardly flock, can reach fulfill in contempt for man and God.
The first castrato admitted to the Sistine Chapel Choir according to a senseless Byzantine interpretation of a letter from Paul of Tarsus to the Corinthians (Let the woman keep quiet in the church) re-emerged at the time of the Council of Trent col prohibition of women from singing in church, was Jacomo Vsquez in 1587. The last, in fact, Alessandro Moreschi, born in 1858 in Montecompatri, on the Roman hills, geographically close to Frascati but very far away, explains the English historian Nicholas Clapton, author of the precious biography Moreschi. The Angel of Rome, Edizioni Controluce, in economic, political and cultural terms: the mule or the horse and the cart were still the main means of transport, agriculture was stingy and at the 1871 census 67.7% of the population was illiterate. To understand: what did he know about castrati, where he had grown up, little Alexander? He had a beautiful voicesang in the feast days in the chapel of the Madonna del Castagno, was overheard by a talent scout of the school of singers Roman. End. It is not even known, Clapton writes, when he was emasculated. Childhood accidents, they said … The most frequent was the attack by a wild boar. Castration, if not enough, had been considered for centuries as a cure for various diseases, such as gout, hernia and others, for both children and adults….
Made that Alessandro look out on that world that would have fascinated out of time, in 1871. After Porta Pia. When Pius IX was already the first Pope without temporal power and the fate of the same school of singers it was now marked. He was thirteen years old, he was a country boy brought to the heart of a city in turmoil and the collective anxieties were added to him about his own identity. A very uncomfortable reality. What made him a man embittered by loneliness. The talent, however, was crystal clear indeed. Twelve years of studies, choirs, increasingly important ceremonies and in 1883 (despite some internal controversy of those who accused him, like the director of the Giulia Chapel, of taking on too many commitments with the result of passing from splendid evenings to sudden lowering of voice) first soprano of the papal chapel. To become a pointer secretary in 1892 and a pro tempore teacher the following year.
All while growing in parallel his fame as a soloist loved to the point that, after having been renamed the Angel of Rome and having sung at the annual masses in memory of Vittorio Emanuele II, on 9 August 1900 he was invited to the Pantheon to sing at the solemn funeral of Umberto I, killed in Monza by Gaetano Bresci. Under the musical direction of the then thirty-seven year old Pietro Mascagni. A memorable moment. Also because, explains the English biographer, relations between the Vatican and the State were still more or less frozen, despite the fact that, since the unification of Italy, there had already been a monarch and a Pope and the choice of Leo XIII fulfill theat the request of the Savoy it was a key passage of relaxation. And proof of how popular Alexander was.
The end came to an end in 1903, when the new Pope Pius X decided Motu proprio from close the long (three and a half centuries) and contested history emasculated
singers: If the acute voices of sopranos and altos are to be used, these must be supported by children, according to the very ancient custom of the Church. Indeed, it will also be fitting that the cantors, while singing in church, wear the ecclesiastical habit and surplice. On June 22, 1905, the decision was made into law.
A decade after that Motu proprioon Easter Saturday 1913, Moreschi concluded his 30-year contract with the Sistine Chapel. He was ready to retire. But he was still singing at the Giulia Chapel, Clapton says, when, three months before the outbreak of the Great War, he was contacted by the Viennese scholar Franz Habck who had half an idea of offering him a tour singing the music that had been written for Farinelli. They had doubts: was he going to make it? The war tragedy swept everything away. Mor in his house in via Plinio, a few steps from Porta Sant’Anna.
July 12, 2022 (change July 12, 2022 | 21:37)
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