Talk:Castrato

What I'd like to know

What were the physical implications for these guys. I heard their limbs would never stop growing and they became twisted. Throw in a picture please. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.79.229.75 (talk • contribs)

I think they were fairly normal, except they didn't mature sexually. See Castration for more information. Limbs continuing to grow definitely is not a side effect of castration, though. Mak (talk) 18:35, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm quite sure your wrong. the absence of testosterone meant that the limbs (and all bones for that matter) grew indefinately, probably up until death. I also heard that it was normal for them to develop breasts but this may be false. Apparently the body of the really famous one, Firilli or something like that- anyway his body was exhumed recently so the side effects could be studied. Somebody should write another section on this because i cant be bothered plus ive never written in wiki before.

Um, did you read about castration? It isn't testosterone which causes you to stop growing, anyway. Developing breasts is a side effect of extra female hormones (progestin, estrogen, etc.) not an absence of male hormones. The medical issues should really be dealt with in the castration article anyway, the only medical issue which is really relevant to this article is that their voices didn't break and that they were larger and stronger than boys, but still had high voices (note that their vocal folds didn't continue to grow longer and thicker until they were sub-basses). Mak (talk) 21:39, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes i did, and its poor. A documentry (human mutants) on BBC's channel 4 mention castratos last year stating that 'in the absence of testosterone they grew to gigantic proportions. I think the breasts had more to do with their large lung capacitys. These guys were entertainers who sang before audiences so i think their appearence is relevent. This is the sort of info am into and enjoy reading about. i demand to see freaks and if nobody can find a picture for this page why dont you take one of yourself for us

It is not sexual maturity that stops humans from growing. After all, puberty usually ends a couple of years before you stop to grow. However, serve infections during upbringing makes people shorter. The castration of boys seam to have ended before the breakthtough of antiseptics. Under such conditions only the boys with especialy strong immune systems would have suvived. The infections they inevitably get never become serve, so they may well have become taller then average. If this is correct castrati was not extreamly tall by today’s standards. I see no reason why they would develop breasts since this IS due to female hormones. But it is possible that castrati become fat more often then others: I realy don’t know.

2007-01-08 Lena Synnerholm, Märsta, Sweden.

I remember seeing a documentary on castratos on PBS and they said that the reason that the arms grew to very long lengths is that the testicles are responsible for producing a hormone that stops the hormonal glands at the arm bones' ends from producing the hormone that signals the bones to keep on growing. Anyone know anything about this?24.83.178.11 10:43, 22 May 2007 (UTC)BeeCier

The lack of testosterone in the adolescent male castrato's body prevented the bone-joints (epiphyses) from hardening, and so both the limbs and ribs of castrati went on growing for a much longer time than is usual. The matter of the ribs continuing to grow, combined with a long period of intensive training accounted for the castrati's remarkable lung capacity, since their lungs had to fill a larger space, and their training gave them extraordinary flexibility. The castrati didn't develop real breasts, of course, but, again because of a lack of testosterone, their body fat, like the growth of their hair, came to be on a female pattern. voxclamans 21:50, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Are you sure about this? “Less masculine” does not necessary mean “more feminine”!

2007-05-31 Lena Synnerholm, Märsta, Sweden.

Quite so, but yes, I am sure about this. --voxclamans 20:43, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

I am still suspicious about the connection between testosterone and stopping to grow. Normally, people stop to grow at the age of 18 regardless of when they underwent puberty. Castrati must have stopped to grow sooner or later: otherwise they would have become disfigured. Photos of Alessandro Moreschi don’t show a freak in this sense. They just show a person who seem to lack secondary sex characteristics. (Yes, it is he on the top if this page!)

2007-06-05 Lena Synnerholm, Märsta, Sweden.

http://www.merck.com/mmpe/print/sec19/ch282/ch282f.html explains this (see the section "Symptoms and signs"). A search under "Klinefelter's syndrome" or "Kallmann's syndrome", two conditions that in some respects at least resemble eunuchism will also reveal further information on this topic. Incidentally, some other images of Moreschi show him to have been very tall in earlier life, as was his colleague Domenico Salvatori. Likewise many cartoons and other caricatures of eighteenth-century castrati, showing them as enormously tall and thin (or fat), were probably not huge exaggerations of the truth.voxclamans 14:28, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Castrati might well have been taller than other men. In other words, tall men was over-represented among castrati. Yet there most have been some point when they stopped to grow. If their growth never stopped they would at first have become oversized and later malformed to the point of physical disability. Such a person would not had been able to work as an opera singer and would had risked to die young. When looking at contemporary portraits of castrati the only unusual thing I see is an oversized chest. Of cause, they could be beatified but if they where physically disabled that would have been visible in the poses they where portrayed. Also, all the listed famous castrati lived at least to the age of 62. About Alessandro Moreschi he died at the age of 63. I have only seen two photos of his as adult that are good enough to be recognisable. Both show only his head and part of his chest so they can’t help me to judge the proportions of his body. However, Franz Haböck who met Alessandro when he was 55 described him as being little shorter than average and having an oversized chest. If Alessandro had been disabled or have had a stoop Franz would have told that. (Franz noted that Alessandro compleatly lacked any facial hair.) In short, castrati where probably only odd-looking: not malformed in the way originally supposed.

2007-06-10 Lena Synnerholm, Märsta, Sweden.

Yes, the bone-joints did eventually harden, and they did stop growing. There are two pictures in my book about Moreschi that show more than head and shoulders - he was never particularly "disproportioned", far from it, though the group picture of the whole Sistine Chapel choir, taken in 1898, does show him looking rather stooped (perhaps from kyphosis, it has been suggested to me). There was a tendency in castrati towards long limbs, large hands and feet, and large rib-cages (and hence lungs), but this was not universal amongst them. It is not statistically true that they had a longer lifespan than other men. I think your remark that the castrati "were odd-looking rather than malformed" is absolutely right, otherwise those thought beautiful would hardly have been the subjects of passionate interest that they certainly were.voxclamans 22:18, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Ultimately, testosterone (etc) accelerate to closure of the epiphyseal growth plates, not cause it. Look at all the castrated animals out there - there aren't cats the size of ponies! (Dlh-stablelights 09:04, 13 June 2007 (UTC))

Maybe the oversized chests of castrati was partly due to castration and partly due to their training. But why would Alessandro Moreschi have suffered from kyphosis at the age of 40!? I think he was just leaning forwards at that photo. If boys castrated before puberty did not stop to grew at the age of 18 as everyone else when did they? I would be pleased to know that.

2007-06-22 Lena Synnerholm, Märsta, Sweden.

Old

Perhaps a list of parts written for/sung by castrati, as at the other vocal music pages? (Caesar in Giulio Cesare and Serse in Serse, for example.) Roscelese 15:23, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

In this sentence "The male heroic lead would often be written for a castrato singer (in the operas of Handel for example). When such operas are performed today, a woman or countertenor takes these roles." shouldn't this read "The female heroic lead ..."? I know nothing about opera, but it seems odd to have a castrato singer playing the male lead. --Lee Hunter 18:09, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

No, it does mean the male heroic lead. Castrati dominated opera at the time. Kinda makes me cringe, but that's the way it was.

Could someone post the MP3 of the last castrato? I think that would be a terrific addition, and it MUST be PD by now if it was done in 1914! -- SJ Zero

What I'd like to know

…is the sort of circumstances in which boys could be castrated for choirs. In what situations, for instance, did their parents allow it? Or were castrati typically chosen from church wards? The article seems to have no information about these details. I would like to better understand the method behind the cruelty. Who, exactly, can we blame for what? —RadRafe 05:13, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

no-one was castrated specifically for church choirs. The church forbade castration but it 'took advantage' of the fashion for castrati by recruiting them into its choirs anyway. Typically boys would be castrated at the instigation of their, often very poor, families in the hope that they would be succesful singers and provide for them. Roydosan 22:23, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

What I'd like to know

Castrato or the male soprano is kool, but what is castration? I hope it isn't what I think it is, because if it is that, then they were wrong back then. Explain that please?

Um, yeah, it's what you think it is. Castrato, from Castration. RasputinAXP _{talk contribs} 22:16, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

To explain it simply: those guys had their balls removed as children. That prevented their voices from ever becoming like that of an adult man.

2007-02-04 Lena Synnerholm, Märsta, Sweden.

Modern castrato?

I wonder whether any doctor has gone on record admitting that he performed this operation on Michael Jackson? I wouldn't put it past his father to do the act himself, but it's fairly evident that plastic surgeons are not the only scalpel-wielders who've excised a piece of him.

Uh, no. He clearly has a chest voice. He just now speaks and mostly sings in his falsetto. A lot of people seem to confuse the concept of falsetto with the idea of castration, but that is completely and entirely false. Mak (talk) 14:59, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

I have no reason to believe that Michael Jackson is a castrato. If I understand it right castrati had voices similar to that of pre-pubertal children. Michael’s voice does not sound very childlike to me: he sounds more like a man imitating a woman. The falsetto voice is probably a part of his androgynous style. Maybe even an image he cultivates… (laugh)

2007-01-09 Lena Synnerholm, Märsta, Sweden.

Ambiguities

“…only approximatly 1% of fully or partially castrated boys developed into successful singers.” Was that partly because so few boys survived the castration? Without antiseptics or anaesthesia any surgery was very dagerous. I have heard that less than 20% survied castration under such circumstances. Anyone who know the real number?

Furthermore, I wonder what “fully or partially castrated” means. I can imagine three degrees of castration that could have been preformed in those days. The first degree means that you just open the scrotum and take out the tests. At the second the degree you cut off the whole scrotum. The third degree include the removal of all outer genitals. Can’t the autor express him- or herself more clearly?

2007-01-30 Lena Synnerholm, Märsta, Sweden.

I agree. If you excise all but a small part of a testis... that part compensates by producing extra androgens, so effectively, although the individual is sterile, the secondary sexual characteristics are unchanged. The mortalitiy rate doesn't have to be that high either - today, a lot of farm animals are castrated without benefit of anything other than local anaesthetic (which obviously has no impact on survival, just making it safer for the vet!) and a sharp knife. There would have been some mortalities, but castration in pre-pubescent individuals is relatively easy, as the blood supply to the testes is relatively poor - heamostasis can usuall be ahieved simple with twisting and torsion of the spermatic cord/artery bundle. In addition, the smaller the testes, the easier the operation. Indeed, it used to be the case (no longer legal, at least in the UK) where cats were castrated simply by crushing the testes within the scrotum, without anaesthetic or even a blade, just using (strong) fingers. Apparently a similar method was also the practice with very young boys in Babylonian times. (Dlh-stablelights 09:13, 13 June 2007 (UTC))

As I understand it the boys where drugged with opium to make it easier for the “surgeon”. However, humans have a much weaker immune system than other mammals. My idea was that many castrated boys would have died from infections. Also, intentional bleeding was long used as an universal treatment to most diseases. Even if the blood loss from the surgery itself was not to large the bleeding “treatment” to the following infections would have added to that. As such accumulated blood loss may have killed even more boys. In short infections combined with their misdirected treatment would have killed most castrati: a death rate of 80% or more seams quite reasonable.

What is the medical consequences of having the tests crushed? Where such men normal except being sterile? Anyone who knows?

2007-06-22 Lena Synnerholm, Märsta, Sweden.

References supplied

I've just done a big edit on this page, and supplied references, which I hope are sufficient for this page to get "upgraded" to one with proper citations. I'll add some images soon.--voxclamans 23:34, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Signs

I don’t think there was any written signs saying “here boys are castrated” in the time of Charles Burney. Remember, there was no compulsory education in that time. People who could read and write belonged to one out of two categories: those who needed it in their work and those who grew up in the upper classes. Almost everyone else was illiterate. Furthermore, people who owned any property to talk about usually not only wanted it to be inherited by their sons but also their grandsons. Parents who wanted their sons to be castrated most likely had no such property and where illiterate. So persons performing the surgery must had announced it in some way that did of the ability to read unnecessary. Maybe they had a picture at their doors showing the surgical instrument used. If that was too blatant for the Catholic Church they may have used sings based on animal analogies or Italian wordplay. It is even possible that they relied on hearsay to get patients. I really don’t know.

2007-06-22 Lena Synnerholm, Märsta, Sweden.

You certainly make a very good point about the high level of illiteracy during the eighteenth century. However, it must be remembered that not all castrati came from poor (and therefore, as you remark, presumably illiterate) families; this was the case, for example, with Farinelli and Caffarelli. The rumour of at least one such advertising sign in Rome survived into the second half of the nineteenth century. As to inheriting property, it should also be remembered that large families were the rule (or at least, desired) in all strata of Catholic society during the eighteenth century. Little is known about how surgeons (or others) who performed the castrations advertised their services: since castration was forbidden under Canon Law and punishable by excommunication such people would, officially at least, have found it necessary to keep their activities clandestine. The Church is itself known to have had a hand in some castrations, for example, paying for the operation - for Senesino, amongst others.--voxclamans 21:43, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

The typical family in preindustrial Europe had five children out of which three survived until adulthood. Why would a rich couple want to have one of their sons castrated? Was it not equally important for sons to marry, have children and pass on the family name? Such questions might seem stupid to you, but I have quite hard to find out the motives of others.

2007-07-10 Lena Synnerholm, Märsta, Sweden.

Why would such questions be regarded as "stupid"? Far from it. I would be very interested to know where you found the statistic about "the typical family in pre-industrial Europe", please. The facts about Caffarelli are that, at the age of ten, he was given the income from two vineyards owned by his grandmother "that he might ... give attention to Music with the utmost propriety, towards which the said Gaetano is said to have a large inclination, desiring to be castrated and to be made a eunuch." (Translated from E. Faustini-Fassini, Gli astri maggiori del bel canto napoletano, in Note d'archivo 15, (1938), p12.) Why Caffarelli wanted this, I do not know, and we cannot ask him. As far as I am aware, it is not known for sure why Farinelli was castrated. voxclamans 09:26, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

My point was that most people did not have loads of children before Industrialism. How many children did you think they had? Also, did not the majority of castrati have illiterate parents? In that case written signs would have been inefficient at best.

2007-07-25 Lena Synnerholm, Märsta, Sweden.

Contradiction?

This article seems to contradict itself. In the section "Castrati in the European Classical Tradition" it says "In 1589, by the bull Cum pro nostri temporali munere, Pope Sixtus V re-organised that choir specifically to include castrati, and in 1599, they were first admitted into the Pope's personal choir of the Sistine Chapel...". This clearly seems to indicate that the Pope accepted the use of castrati in church choirs. But then in the section "Castrati in Opera" it says "Castration 'for music' was an almost totally Italian practice, and under the Catholic church's Canon Law, strictly illegal: it was mutilation, and thus punishable by excommunication." How could castration be "strictly illegal" if the Pope had specifically asked for castrati in his choir? Or is the church just that hypocritical? —Edward Tremel (talk) 17:40, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes, they really were that hypocritical. Mind you, there is a quote in Isaiah somewhere about there being a special place in heaven reserved for eunuchs, or something like that, so perhaps they used that as justification. Then again, other parts of the old Testament (specifically Deuteronomy AFAICR) are quite castrato-hostile. I guess that's just the RC Church for you. Moreschi ^{If you've written a quality article...} 17:50, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

New to Wiki, noticed bias

Because of a misreading of the first canon of the Council of Nicea of 325 directed at clergy alone and, no doubt, based on the Mosaic ban against "castrated" priests mentioned in Leviticus 21:20 that is currently translated as "herniated," many Italians errouneously assumed (as many people still erroneously assume) that castration was and is a forbidden act of mutilation for all men by the Catholic church. This general ban would not only directly contradict a highly rational interpretation of Wisdom 3:14, 15; Isaiah 56:4, 5; Acts 8:26-40; and the teachings of Christ found in Matthew 5:29, 30; 18:1-9; 19:12 and Mark 9:42-48, it would make Rome look ridiculously hypocritical. It would also look blatantly hypocritical since castration is an ancient and internationally recognized aid to sexual purity, a clearly stated goal of Catholic holiness. In addition to the practices of the Vatican involving the castrati and its exultation of the scriptures just cited, Rome still considers Origen to be a Greek Father of the Church in spite of the strong belief that he castrated himself. Those who wish to protray Rome as violating its own teachings regarding castration clearly need to cite their sources for the alleged prohibition.

Thats super biased. Definitely not encyclopedic voice.