So many desperate parents willingly castrated their little boys.Īs a result, back-alley castrations flourished. If they dropped out, Churches would quietly ordain them as priests when they grew older and give them decent jobs. Parents simply could not feed them all, and were relieved to send them to a choir in the big city and let the church raise them instead.Īnd even if the boys couldn’t hack it as singers, joining the choir earned them lifelong benefits. Families in Italy were often huge back then, especially on farms. Still, you might be wondering: why on earth would parents allow this to happen to their children? In a word, money. Church officials reasoned that, yes, individual boys might suffer, but their beautiful voices promoted the greater glory of God. A few claimed that wild pigs or even wild geese had attacked them and gobbled their testicles up.īut despite the ban on castration, churches happily-if hypocritically-accepted the castrati for choirs. Whenever castrati boys showed up for choir practice, they always had some cockamamie excuse about, say, falling off a horse or a hunting accident. And surgeons faced severe punishments if they were caught performing the operation. Now technically, the Catholic Church banned castrations pretty early on. After that, the testes withered away naturally. Or, more safely, they could simply snip the blood vessels that supplied the testes with nourishment. They could cut out the testicles completely. Next, they knocked the boys out with opium, or else squeezed their necks until they passed out.įrom there, the surgeons had two choices. As for the castration itself, historians don’t know how exactly surgeons performed the operation, but we can hazard some guesses.įirst, surgeons probably soaked the boys in a warm bath, to soften up their tissues. The demand for castrati singers began in the 1500s in Italy and accelerated over the next few centuries. As a result, their voices would remain high-pitched and pure. Without testicles, these so-called castrati would not go through puberty. So, someone-we don’t know who-came up with a dastardly solution: just castrate the boys. They’d spend years training some little fellow, molding and crafting his singing-and the week before a big Christmas concert, his voice would start cracking. They shoot up into oily, smelly teenagers, and when they do so, their voices get deeper. The only problem was, little boys don’t stay little boys. So they trained little boys to hit the high notes. ![]() But choirs still needed sopranos for some songs. That is to say, the Angel of Rome owed everything in his life, good and bad, to the fact that he’d been castrated.įor centuries and centuries, women were banned from signing in Catholic churches. ![]() Moreschi could sing like that because he was a castrati. There’s just one catch-that this trick is pretty drastic. ![]() So how did Moreschi get a voice like that? What was his trick? Well, what if I told you that this same trick can also make you taller, and will extend your lifespan? It prevents baldness, too, and can make you rich and famous. In person, he would have sounded much better. Keep in mind, too, that this was crude recording equipment. He’s an Italian singer who recorded this track on a wax cylinder in 1904. His name is Alessandro Moreschi, the so-called Angel of Rome. But believe it or not, that’s not a woman singing there. That, of course, is the Ave Maria, one of the most famous songs of all time. So what’s the secret behind the voice? What was his trick? It turns out that his trick can also make you taller and prevent baldness. In this episode of The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean talks about Alessandro Moreschi, the so-called “Angel of Rome.” His voice earned him fame and money.
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