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• Inside the Music
• Classical
• Early Baroque

From the late sixteenth century, castratos were engaged as singers by the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Although castration had been forbidden by Pope Gregory XIII, some children who had suffered mutilation were trained as castrato singers. Their voices were found to be much stronger, and their vocal ranges wider, than those of falsettists, whom they gradually ...

• Classical
• Late Baroque

the success of a new opera was based to a considerable extent on the technique and personal attractiveness of the castrato or musico, as he was also called. Many castratos profited materially from their singing careers and the most successful of all – Carlo Broschi (known as Farinelli, 1705–82) – achieved considerable backstage influence at the court of Spain ...

• Performance
• Classical
• Renaissance

(also called falsettists) on the top lines, since women were banned from participating in liturgical singing. During the sixteenth century, countertenors were gradually replaced in some institutions by castratos – adult males who had undergone surgery in boyhood to retain their high voices permanently. Women were not banned from all singing, however: in the late Renaissance, virtuoso ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Late Baroque

In the late Baroque era music both consolidated earlier developments and looked forward to the new styles of the classical era. The output of the two greatest composers of the time, J. S. Bach and Handel, reflects the general trends in music. The main forms – notably the sonata, concerto and opera – became longer and more complex ...

• Women in Music
• Classical
• Early Baroque

one has survived: her opera La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina (1625), the first Italian opera to be performed outside its native country. Operatic productions in France did not use castratos and thus provided more opportunities for female singers, who also performed in the choruses that were so popular on the French operatic stage. The dramatic soprano Marthe Le Rochois ...

• Inside the Music
• Classical
• Renaissance

Ockeghem’s death while the bottom line serves as a cantus firmus, borrowing text and music from his Requiem Mass: ‘Requiescat in pacem’ (‘Rest in Peace’). Inside the Music | Castratos | Early Baroque | Classical ...

• The Voice
• Classical
• Classical Era

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 ...

• The Voice
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

the ‘centuries rolled back’. Tippett encouraged Deller to extend his repertory, which coincided with the beginning of the Baroque opera revival. Many roles in that repertory, written for castratos but for many years assigned to mezzo-sopranos, were reclaimed by countertenors. Deller, and others encouraged by his success, made a new voice-type available to contemporary composers. Among ...