One of the most complete bars to the authentic performance of both baroque opera and some renaissance polyphony is the current unavailability of castrati. There isn’t much to be done about it of course, but we might regret that we can no longer hear a sound which, at its best, fascinated all who did hear it. And we don’t know what that sound was. The two famous and unique recordings of Alessandro Moreschi, made in old age in 1902 and 1904, give us some clues, but can hardly represent the sound of the greatest 18th-century practitioners.
There are some pointers in contemporary reports. Gounod went to the Sistine Chapel in 1839 and got hooked on the sound of Palestrina being sung by a choir that included castrati: ‘This austere, ascetic, passionless music, with an intensity of contemplation that bordered on ecstasy,’ he wrote, going on to refer to the ‘firm attack, verging on harshness of those special voices …I returned again and again until at last I could not stay away’.
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