The Castrato As a Rhetorical Figure

Martha Feldman The Castrato as a Rhetorical Figure What does it mean to think of opera as rhetorical, and specifically of its performers as rhetoricians? I am not thinking here in terms of rhetorical figures as in the tradition of Joachim Burmeister, who in the early seventeenth century tried to transfer Quintilian’s figures to music by categorically imposing oratorical tropes on musical analogs.1 There was a rigidity in the enterprise that says more about the taxonomical fantasies of Burmeister and his age than about the workings of rhetoric on the ground of music-making. Nor am I thinking in terms of affective categories.2 Rather, I refer to the fact that the operatic genre in which castrati most often sang, called ‘dramma per musica’ or later ‘opera seria’, was rhetorical through and through. Arranging its many solo arias in a chiaroscuro array of affects, tempi, meters, keys, and orchestrations—a kind of large-scale varietas—it suffused each aria with carefully wrought emotional pacing built on carefully modeled syntactic structures, and interlaced them with rhetorically charged recitative, all with an ear forever tuned to the audience.3 What interests me here is the Ciceronian nature of the castrato persona as fundamentally grounded in the dynamics of delivery to a listener. Hence my attention is focused on the body as that vehicle of delivery and the total social phenomenon of which it is a part. While I will not address drama here in a central way, I will think about how this rhetorical castrato ignites the dramatic and makes it persuasive. The .. 1 See Burmeister (Musica poetica passim). 2 For a recent broad view of the relationship of rhetorical persuasion and music, see Haynes/Burgess (The Pathetick Musician passim). Starting in the 1740s, Italians received much of their rhetorical learning from Giannangelo Serra’s Compendio della rettorica, which was reprinted often throughout the century. 3 I expand on this view of opera seria in Feldman (Opera and Sovereignty esp. ch. 1, 2, 6). I wish to thank Professor Joachim Küpper for the invitation to the conference and DS Mayfield for his expert conception, organization, assistance, and editorial input. Their solicitation encouraged me to think about a connection within my work which I myself had not explicitly made—namely the connection between the performative and rhetorical nature of the castrato singer and the condition of eighteenth-century opera as a fundamentally rhetorical form and institution. I am especially grateful to Kathy Eden for fascinating ideas about the ornatus problem and to Katherine Crawford for pressing me to think more about the gender connection. Thanks also to audiences at Vanderbilt University and La Sapienza, Università di Roma. Martha Feldman, University of Chicago ©2017 Martha Feldman. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. Martha Feldman puzzle in all of this is how the castrato who operates at the highest echelons could at once function as a sensational stage star, marked as a virtuoso, while still maintaining the Ciceronian precept of decorum; and how the tension between virtuosity and decorum was raised by increasing critiques of both castrati and rhetoric itself in the later eighteenth century. Let me lay the groundwork for approaching these questions by exploring the téchne of musico-vocal oration: for if the most indispensable tool of the orator was the voice, then no operatic figure was better equipped for the task than the castrato.4 From a very young age, most had had their voices cultivated at high levels, while singing as boy sopranos in cathedral and church choirs—and in ways girls could not have had, because they were not allowed to sing in church. Fig. 1: The castrato Nicolini (Nicolo Grimaldi) performing the role of Marciano together with soprano Lucia Facchinelli (called “La Becheretta”) singing the title role of Salustia, in Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s opera La Salustia (Teatro San Bartolomeo, Naples, Winter 1731).5 .. 4 For a fuller discussion of the téchne of the performer discussed in this section, see Feldman (The Castrato esp. ch. 3). 5 By Anton Maria Zanetti; holding institution: Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice; public domain: The Castrato as a Rhetorical Figure With such training, a top boy singer could emit a glorious timbre from quite a flexible apparatus. The best of them were plucked out of local choirs precisely in order that their high, nimble voices might be preserved and mature into adulthood, which was the chief consequence of castrating boys testicularly before puberty. After castration, with growth and intense regimens of further training, a castrato could develop an adult musculature in the diaphragm, thorax, and larynx, which strengthened as the ribcage expanded—indeed, owing to growth abnormalities, many seem to have had chests that reached far larger sizes than normal (see the image of Nicolini with a prima donna in Fig. 1). In addition, the cartilage seems to have remained soft and the whole system of muscles, cartilage, and ligament thus became increasingly agile and powerful with age and training. All in all, then, an ideal castrato body had an unsurpassed ability to produce a piercing high sound with great vocal nuance and with massive projection into the vast public spaces of Europe’s commercial theaters, as well as its churches and oratories. Anecdotal descriptions from the seventeenth century warrant this fact, portraying a singer whose vocal machinery was marked by amazing sophistication, achieved through a combination of inherent physical attributes with training regimens. One of the key witnesses was Giovanni Andrea Angelini Bontempi. In his Historia musica of 1695, he described the grueling rigors of the private schools in which castrati studied, and also described one remarkable outcome: that of his Perugian compatriot, the castrato Baldassare Ferri. About Ferri’s breath control, Bontempi wrote glowingly: In addition to the clarity of his voice, the felicity of his passaggi, the beating of his trills, the agility with which he arrives sweetly at whatever pitch he wishes, after the extension of a very long and beautiful passaggio in a single measure, he had no need to take another breath. He began, without taking a breath, a very long and beautiful trill, and from that passed to another passaggio longer and more vigorous than the first. (Bontempi Historia musica 110; trans. mf; emph. added)6 .. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nicola_Grimaldi_detto_Nicolino_con_Lucia_Facchi nelli,_detta_%C2%ABLa_Becheretta%C2%BB,_che_interpret%C3%B2_La_Salustia.jpg. 6 “Poiche egli, oltre la chiarezza della voce, la felicità de’ passaggi, il battimento de’ trilli, l’agilità d’arrivar dolcemente a qualsivoglia corda; dopo la continuatione d’un lunghissimo e bellissimo passaggio, sotto la qual misura, altri non havrebbe potuto contener la respiratione, Egli prorompeva senza respiro in un lunghissimo e bellissimo trillo, e da quello passava ad un’altro passaggio assai più lungo e più vigoroso del primo, senza movimento alcuno ne di fronte, ne di bocca, ne di volta, immobile come una Statua”. Martha Feldman Not only was Ferri able to project the text with this astounding breath control; he could do so with a nobility of bearing, unmarred by any labored or extraneous physical movements that might distract his audience—“without any movement of the forehead, the mouth or the face, immobile as a statue” (Historia musica 110; trans. mf). Ferri carried this off with the highest level of self-assurance, no matter the difficulty, by making the descent by trill from half-step to half-step without any insecurity, and with a voice lightly reinforced from the high octave of a’’’ and g’’’ to the same a’’ and g’’ of the Tetrachord [an octave below]—an operation [that], if not entirely impossible, at least was of very great difficulty for any other excellent singer—[but] was nothing to Ferri, since from this he passed without taking a breath to other trills, passaggi, and marvels of the art. (Bontempi Historia musica 110; trans. mf; emph. added)7 To understand the implications of Bontempi’s description, it is important to recognize that there is virtually no evidence for low male or women singers performing at this level of difficulty and degree of ease before the second half of the eighteenth century; and certainly none performed at the technical level of the top castrati. Two systematic singing treatises issued during the eighteenth century—the first of their genre—describe how to begin to attain such Olympian levels of rhetorical fluency: the first is Pierfrancesco Tosi’s Opinioni de’ cantori antichi, e moderni (1723), the second Giambattista Mancini’s Pensieri, e riflessioni pratiche sopra il canto figurato (1774; revised edition as Riflessioni pratiche sul canto figurato, 1777). Importantly, both singing masters were themselves castrati, and Tosi’s earlier treatise was almost entirely directed at castrato pupils. Read in combination with anecdotal writings, they show remarkable consistency as regards the performative musico-rhetorical equipment required. The chief factor continued to be consummate control of the breath, which was as essential to good rhetorical phrasing in music as pacing and delivery were in speech. Often breath control was described in terms of the art of legato singing—that is, the binding of note to note—albeit with varied, nuanced demarcations of both passing (or “nonessential”) and more structural kinds. .. 7 “Il discendere con un trillo da hemituono in hemituono senza alcuna incisura, e con voce leggiadramente rinforzata dall’ottava acuta della … (aaa) e … (ggg) alla stessa … (aa) e … (gg) del Tetracordo…; operatione, se non affatto impossibile, almeno di grandissima difficultà a qualsivoglia altro valoroso Cantore; al Ferri era un nulla; poiche da quello passava senza respire ad altri trilli, e passaggi, e maraviglie dell’Arte”.

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