The Today programme this morning played a sound clip of the only castrato known to have made phonograph recordings. It's a voice that combines the sweetness of a boy's treble with the belting-out power of a man's lungs. An eerie experience - a bit like watching footage of a Tasmanian Tiger or other extinct creature, something that was around in (just) living memory but is now forever out of our reach. The voice belonged to one Alessandro Moreschi, who sadly is more famous for being the only castrato known etc. rather than his actual singing, which apparently wasn't very good. A shame, because you can't help feeling that if someone does that to you, you ought to get at least something out of it.
Castrati, apparently, arose out of a seventeenth century ban by the Catholic Church (there's a certain world-weary "who else" attached to that, isn't there?) on women singing in the theatre. Why? Well, who knows. It probably relates to the well known fact that men are driven into uncontrollable passions of sin at the slightest sign of a woman in public and it's all her fault. ANYWAY the way around this was to start, um, creating castrati, i.e. gelding young boys, which of course is so much more the moral course.
This somehow reminds me of a comment I once heard - from a member of guess which organisation, but I believe it's not their official position - that in vitro fertilisation must ipso facto be wrong because you need sperm for it, and the only way you can get the sperm is by masturbation, which ... and so on.
Some people really were just born to miss the point.
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