At 06:30 AM 05/31/2000 +1000, Reg Boyle wrote:
>By the way John, JSBach was a bass-baritone so that may be a clue
>as to who he had in mind while writing that work!
Delightful tidbit - since I'm a bass-baritone too and a Bach nut
since before my voice changed.... when I was a boy alto :) Do
you have a reference on that - I'd like to verify it.
But on the subject of castrati, which has come up quite a bit
recently, what do we really know about them, other than the
range of their voices and (sometimes) the parts that were
written for them? Perhaps there are contemporary writings that
say more?
Today, they're really an extinct species, for all practical
purposes. No living person has ever seen or heard one. To be
effective for singing purposes, as I understand it, the
operation had to be done before puberty. We never let anything
like that happen to our sons today, and should it occur by
accident or disease, we use hormone treatments to help them
develop normally into men.
So how can we know that they "sounded male" or "looked like men"
or "acted like men?" My intuition tells me that they would end
up looking like large, soft boys, but, then again, I have no
experience to base that on. On the stage they may well have
"acted like men," but then, again, they were trained actors, so
they could probably have acted like women as easily, if so
trained and the part demanded it.
Beyond that, and most importantly, what do we know about how
they sang? What technique they used might be at times inferred
from the parts they sang, to some degree, maybe, but what they
really sounded like seems like quite a mystery. And there may
not have been just one sound - perhaps there were several or
many Fäche - if that word applies to the period - that a
castrato voice might grow into.
If anyone has information on this, I'm curious to hear it.
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