In England they were also foreigners, representing unwanted and dangerous foreign behavior. Their existence was governed by several stigmata because of their failure to adhere to the male norm.

Being a castrato was certainly no easy life. Does the voice alone merit the label third “third gender”? No, I think not.ĢTo understand why their contemporaries categorized them as neither male nor female we also have to consider such things as their bodily features, their behavior, contemporary perceptions of gender, their choices (or lack of choices) of profession, religious and cultural believes, and the rules and laws of paternal society. Today the beautiful singing of counter-tenors, sopranos and altos may well try to fill their stage parts, much to the delight of their audience, but the sound that ravished nations in the eighteenth century was different. After all, it is hardly likely that we, today, will ever hear a castrato voice that has been trained in the eighteenth-century Italian tradition. 3 The tales of their vocal powers have taken mythical shapes, partly because the very reason for their fame is elusive to us. For us, it is difficult to comprehend the power of seduction that their voices seem to have held, or, for that matter, the mass hysteria that some of them inspired – a hysteria that, in some cases, bordered on blasphemy. 2 For their contemporaries they were idols as well as monsters, music machines and seducers of both men and women. 3 In an engraving by William Hogarth called The Rake’s Levée, a poem on the floor depicts the female (.)ġToday, the concept of the castrato is usually connected to the ‘vocal phenomenon’ - a golden age of singers that spanned approximately one hundred years, between 16.2 For a comprehensive history of the vocal castrati as a phenomenon see: John Rosselli, “The Castrati (.).

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