Musical Trailblazers 3 - Farinelli
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• David Hackett
Although Paganini and Liszt are often talked about as classical music’s most famous rock-stars, there lived an even more compelling figure in the century before them.
Carlo Maria Michelango Nicola Broschi (1705 – 1782), better known by his stage name Farinelli, was arguably the greatest opera singer in history. As a castrato, his voice had a wonderful flexibility and power, extending three octaves up to C6 (two octaves above middle C). Like Paganini and Liszt, he was capable of technical feats previously thought impossible - whether singing 250 notes in a single breath or sustaining a single note for over a minute - while possessing the musical gifts to manipulate his audience’s emotions in any way he desired.
Castrati were popular in the eighteenth century as their voices could often demonstrate a very rich, treble-range timbre that not even female sopranos could manage – the biggest opera houses of the day liked to have at least one castrato on their books. On the other hand, surgical castration remained a controversial procedure. While slyly encouraged by the Catholic church, it was not officially approved – and one usually needed to come up with a good medical reason to justify it.
Many poorer families did however find a way to justify it, not least when they saw their prepubescent son’s singing talent as a possible future source of income. Following the operation, a boy’s larynx would develop no further and remain more flexible than an adult’s. It could then be trained to perform all manner of wonders.
Born in Apulia (roughly located in the heel of Italy), Farinelli’s own castration supposedly came about after the sudden and premature death of his father – the family needed money and Carlo Maria was seen as their best long-term hope. But Farinelli was already twelve years old on his father’s demise and most musicologists now believe the procedure took place three or four years prior to this.
Making his professional debut aged fifteen, Farinelli was quickly able to demonstrate his unusual gift, becoming famous throughout Italy as il rafazzo (the boy), while particularly making his name in the important cultural centres of Naples, Rome, Venice and Bologna.
He made such an impression that legendary stories quickly spread about the young man – that in one operatic aria he was pitched against a trumpet obbligato, with instrumentalist and singer engaging in a terrific showdown to outdo one another. Farinelli’s superior technique and ad lib ornamentation eventually outshone that of his rival, and as the eighteenth century music historian Charles Burney put it, he was “at last silenced only by the acclamations of the audience.”
reputation was soon spreading beyond the borders of his native land. He would perform in many of the grandest opera houses in Germany, Austria, France and Britain, and for much of the European royalty. The German composer Johann Joachim Quantz would leave a very appreciative account of Farinelli’s singing and why it appealed to so many: "his intonation was pure, his trill beautiful, his breath control extraordinary and his throat very agile, so that he performed the widest intervals quickly and with the greatest ease and certainty. Passagework and all kinds of melismas were of no difficulty to him. In the invention of free ornamentation in adagio he was very fertile."
According to Charles Burney, “it was not only in speed” that Farinelli excelled: "in his voice, strength, sweetness, and compass; and in his style, the tender, the gracious and the rapid. Indeed, he possessed such powers as never met before, or since, in any one human being."
Beyond the musical cognoscenti, the general public would rapidly take a shine to the young castrato, showering him with a general adoration that would quickly rise to a fever-pitched, almost irrational hysteria. To better understand Farinelli’s extraordinary appeal we would need to consider his physicality as well as his almost superhuman gifts.
Like Paganini and Liszt, he was tall and thin, with unusually long limbs (a physique that in his case was certainly linked to his abnormal hormonal balance and growth delays). He took meticulous care over his clothes and personal grooming, while also making regular use of the newly invented toothbrush (a recent exhumation of his skeleton suggested that his teeth were in surprisingly good condition when he died in his late seventies).
Yet Farinelli was also something of an Adonis, possessed of a smooth-skinned, soft-featured, androgynous beauty, appealing equally (though in different ways) to both men and women. As Roger Freitas explains in his article, The Eroticism of Emasculation: Confronting the Baroque Body of the Castrato:
Against the background of early modern views of sexuality, the castrato appears not as the asexual creature sometimes implied today, but as a supernatural manifestation of a widely held erotic ideal. Recent work in the history of sexuality has shown the prevalence in the early modern period of the “one-sex” model, in which the distinction between male and female is quantitative (with respect to “vital heat”) rather than qualitative… Castrati were prized at least in part for their unique physicality, their spectacularly exaggerated embodiment of the ideal lover.
It was for these same reasons that Farinelli was often regarded with great suspicion in conservative circles and not least by large sections of the press, who considered him potentially immoral, a contributor to society’s ills or even a demon.
Farinelli would receive some of his worst abuse during three breathless years living and performing in England during the 1730s. One writer would dub him "this Amphibious Animal", a “piping, fiddling, squeaking, quav'ring, bawling” eunuch and a "Poor Distressed Foreigner, whose Cries have a sort of a Magick Charm in them [and] who is only fit to enervate the Youth of Great Britain, by the pernicious Influence of his Unnatural Voice".
The same writer went on to ask: "is there no Spirit left in the young Fellows of the Age? No Remains of Manhood? Will they suffer the Eyes, Ears, Hearts, and Souls, of their Mistresses, to follow an Echo of Virility? … Have they no Notion of this more Visible Prostitution, this Adultery of the Mind … when a Wife is alienated from her Husband, by any pleasure whatsoever?"
And as for the younger generation mesmerized by this singer? They “begin the ruin of their country."
Women were particularly satirized for their seemingly slavish devotion to Farinelli as they were rumoured to fantasize deliriously about being pleasured by his tongue in more ways than one. Many were said to have bankrupted their own families by showering the singer with expensive gifts. One satirist claimed that a "Lady who had spent all her Cash in Presents to Farinelli, fell into a violent Fever; and for six or seven Days together she was perpetually raving to the People about her, and desiring them to turn that rascally Italian out of the Room. For, says she, he is incessantly singing in that corner, and won't let me get a wink of Sleep."
While there was clearly a large amount of exaggeration, overreaction, jealousy and plain humbug in these various attacks on the singer, they are still very useful in giving us an idea of the huge Farinelli mania which was sweeping the country (and much of Europe) at the time.
The biggest irony of such rumours was that their main object of scorn was anything but a “bad boy” rock star. Aside from his careful lifestyle habits, Farinelli’s amenable, modest, hard-working personality left him popular among his colleagues and he made friends wherever he went. As for being a supposedly master seducer, he showed little interest in sex or in physical relationships throughout his adult life.
Farinelli may have added an extra something to his legend by retiring from the concert stage so comparatively young – at the age of 32 – and leaving his multitude of fans hungry for more. Nor would there be any come-back tours for him in middle or old age: Farinelli would forever be enshrined in their hearts as an eternal, beautiful, androgynous youth.
He still sang professionally for another two decades, as he moved to Spain to become a personal assistant to King Philip V: his inspirational nightly singing is said to have helped the monarch recover from a severe depression. Afterwards he became a great favourite of the royal court. He was appointed private counsellor to the king and allowed to supervise the music-making in both the royal court and Madrid opera house.
He finally retired from all singing in 1759 and moved back to Bologna, living in sumptuous surroundings for the rest of his life, where he was visited by many of the great and good of Europe (including composers Mozart and Gluck, author Giacomo Casanova, and the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II).
He died in Bologna in 1782, generously leaving his fortune to his servants, and to several relatives who had taken care of him during his final years.
To read more from David Hackett, go to www.musicbytheyear.com