For a solid portion of musical history, castrato singers or ‘castrati’ had a prominent role in operas, churches and courts across Europe. But why were young boys forced to undergo the gruesome ...

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Castrati, boys castrated before the onset of puberty to preserve their high-pitched voices, played heroic male leads in Italian opera from the mid-17th to late 18th centuries. Farinelli, born Carlo ...

1562 The Sistine Chapel choir accepts its first castrato member. 1607 Claudio Monteverdi writes Orfeo, the first major opera, with several roles for castrati. 1737 Farinelli, the most celebrated of ...

When Alessandro Moreschi died on 21 April, 1922, the world thought it had felt the last stubbleless kiss of the voice of an angel on Earth — the boy castrato. The castrato tradition dictated that the ...

The following content is purely satirical and entirely fictional. The Princeton TestosterTones, the University’s premier and only all-castrato a cappella group, made a splash Monday night at their ...

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. In The Castrato and His Wife, Helen Berry explores 18th-century marriage, gender and celebrity through the ...

Peter Whelan, Director of the Irish Baroque Orchestra, writes for Culture about their latest recording The Trials of Tenducci - A Castrato in Ireland, recorded in St. Peter's Church, Drogheda, and ...

You're a young boy living in poverty, and your parents don't know how they're going to keep you fed. If you're growing up in the Dominican Republic in 2009, they may pray that a baseball scout will ...