From the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, heroic roles were generally composed for castratos: male sopranos or altos who had been castrated before puberty to preserve their high voice. Throughout the Baroque and classical eras castratos were common on the stage. They disappeared, however, in the early nineteenth century as the practice of castration for musical purposes was deemed barbaric, though they were kept on in the choir of the Sistine Chapel in Rome; the last survivor lived long enough to make gramophone recordings. The question then arose: how to perform the music written for them? One solution, favoured in Germany, was to transpose it down an octave for tenor or baritone. This was unsatisfactory, because it introduced an alien timbre and caused problems in ensembles.

The most common solution is to assign the roles to a woman, soprano or alto. Berlioz did this in his conflation of the two versions of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, and it was in the role of Orpheus that the contralto Kathleen Ferrier (1912–53) made her name. But however skilful the costume and make-up, one is always conscious of watching a woman dressed as a man.

With the advent on stage in the twentieth century of the countertenor, the integrity of both pitch and appearance is preserved: singers such as James Bowman or Andreas Scholl (b. 1967) can be wonderfully convincing, although the actual sound is quite different from the castrato’s. Soprano castrato parts, however, which remain outside the countertenor’s range, continue perforce to be sung by women.

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