The whole of Europe was infatuated with castrati. Elevated to the position of stars throughout the 18th century, they raised the art of singing beyond human limits….They were idolized as much as today’s androgynous rock stars such as David Bowie, Prince or Mick Jagger. In fact, 18th-century ‘groupies’ went so far as to wear medallions bearing the portraits of their favorite castrato, a fashion not dissimilar to the pins and T-shirts fans of rock stars wear today.
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The film Farinelli picks up on this theme of 18th-century castrato-as-rock-star and continues the translation of the past into easily recognizable patterns. It does so in part by adhering to a popular cinematic practice for 18th-century period pieces–that of putting only the unsympathetic male characters in powdered wigs and letting our heroes trounce around in flowing, masculine manes. In this case there is the added irony that a character who’s supposed to be a eunuch is decked out in his macho freak flag and set against uncastrated men in effeminate powdered wigs. Two phobias are at work in Farinelli: a fear of having the hero seem too effeminate and a fear of having him seem too unfamiliar. The film spoon-feeds us an image of a castrato we can all easily recognize: that of a misunderstood, narcissistic rock star.
The film has a lot of problems that needn’t concern listeners of its sound track. Under the direction of Christophe Rousset, a respected interpreter of baroque music, the CD makes for pleasant listening and contains in its entirety the digitally simulated voice of the castrato, created by blending those of a male countertenor and a female soprano–a seemingly novel solution to the problem of how to reproduce 18th-century works containing male soprano parts. The standard solution in the modern presentation of such works has been to have either male countertenors (with a voice higher than tenor) or female contraltos (with a voice lower than soprano) sing castrati parts. Deeper-voiced female contraltos are chosen to sing male soprano parts over the more commonly available female sopranos. When a woman is chosen to sing a castrato part (often opposite a female soprano lead) the difference in vocal range is used to compensate for the lack of difference in gender. The current use of technology to more precisely simulate a castrato voice is still an attempt to preserve gender difference. In the liner notes for the CD Travelling-Auvidis frames the castrati problem purely in terms of vocal range: “As no one alive today possesses the vocal range of castrati–as much as three and a half octaves–it was decided to call upon two singers, one a countertenor (Derek Lee Ragin), the other a soprano (Ewa Mallas Godlewska), working from the assumption that the former would sing the lower passages, the latter the highest.”
