Alessandro Moreschi And The Castrato Singers Of Rome
- Apr 30, 2024
- 8 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
On 21 April 1922, a centuries-old Western musical tradition quietly died with a 63-year-old man in an apartment near the Vatican. Alessandro Moreschi was the last castrato, the final surviving link to a practice that had, at its peak, seen thousands of boys a year castrated in Italy purely to keep their voices from ever breaking. He's also the only castrato whose voice survives on record, a handful of scratchy early recordings that are, depending on who you ask, either a genuine window into a lost sound or a poor last echo of something that had already largely faded by the time anyone thought to capture it.
What Exactly Is a Castrato?
A castrato is a male singer whose voice sits in roughly the same range as a soprano, achieved by castrating a boy before puberty so the physical changes that would normally deepen his voice simply never happen. Without testosterone, a castrato's body developed in unusual ways: unusually long arms and legs, an elongated ribcage that gave them exceptional lung capacity, and vocal cords that stayed at their childhood size for life. The result was a voice with the power and lung support of an adult but the range and flexibility of a child, a genuinely strange, hard-to-categorise sound that audiences found either magical or eerie depending on the era.
How the Practice Began
Castrati may have existed in Byzantine church choirs as early as the 9th century, but they don't show up clearly in Western musical records until the mid-16th century. Demand grew out of a piece of scripture, Corinthians I 14:34's instruction that women keep silent in churches, which pushed sacred music toward all-male performance and created an opening for a voice type that could hit female registers without involving actual women.
By 1558, the Sistine Chapel choir already had documented castrati among its ranks, including a Spanish singer named Hernando Bustamante who became, by most accounts, the first genuine castrato star, eventually the highest-paid singer in Ferrara. In 1589, Pope Sixtus V formally reorganised the choir at St. Peter's to include castrati, and from there the practice spread fast, first into church choirs and then onto the opera stage, where roles originally written for women were routinely handed to castrati instead. Stars like Farinelli and Senesino became genuine celebrities, commanding huge fees and audience adoration on the level of modern pop stars, even as critics noted the strange gap between their extraordinary voices and their often awkward stage presence.
One 1755 review captured the contradiction bluntly: audiences flocked to hear Farinelli's voice while wincing at what they saw.
Moreschi wasn't the only castrato to earn the nickname "the last castrato," and it's worth untangling why. Giovanni Battista Velluti, born in 1780, was the last great operatic castrato, the final performer of his kind to headline the opera stage, retiring from theatre in the 1830s as tastes shifted toward tenors like Gilbert-Louis Duprez. Velluti's own castration wasn't even done for singing. A local doctor performed it when he was eight, ostensibly to treat a cough and high fever, and it was only afterward that his father, who'd originally planned a military career for him, redirected him toward music instead. Moreschi's claim to the title is different and, in a way, more literal: he wasn't the last operatic castrato, but he was the very last castrato of any kind, church or stage, and the only one whose actual voice survives to be heard today.
The Brutal Machinery Behind the Voice
At the practice's peak in the 18th century, as many as 4,000 boys a year were castrated in Italy for this purpose, with estimates putting the total number of boys castrated for singing, across the roughly three centuries the practice lasted, in the tens of thousands. The operation itself killed some of them outright, whether from accidental opium overdoses meant to dull the pain or from surgeons applying too much pressure to the carotid artery while trying to knock a boy unconscious beforehand.
The hypocrisy sat right at the centre of the whole system. Castrating a boy was technically punishable by excommunication, and in some jurisdictions even death, yet the very church whose choirs the practice existed to supply never openly acknowledged sanctioning it, while quietly employing the results for centuries. Families and surgeons covered their tracks with the same handful of excuses, most commonly blaming an accident with a horse or a wild boar attack, or, as in Moreschi's own case, a supposed medical need to treat an inguinal hernia, a condition castration was wrongly believed to cure. The 18th-century historian Charles Burney spent years trying to track down exactly where in Italy boys were being castrated for this purpose, only to be sent in a circle from city to city, each one blaming the next, never quite admitting the truth was happening somewhere close to home.
Philosophers of the era weren't fooled. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing in 1779, was blunt about where the blame belonged, condemning the parents who handed their sons over for the procedure as "inhuman fathers."
Alessandro Moreschi's Path to Rome
Moreschi was born in Monte Compatri in November 1858. The official story of his castration blamed an inguinal hernia, the same convenient excuse used for countless other talented boy sopranos of the era, according to musicologist Martha Feldman's research into the castrato tradition. Given that Moreschi had already been recognised as an unusually gifted boy soprano at the chapel of the Madonna del Castagno, it's far more likely he was deliberately castrated around age seven or eight specifically to preserve that voice.
A talent scout for the Sistine Chapel Choir named Nazareno Rosati, himself a former choir member, spotted Moreschi's ability and brought him to Rome to join the choir around age 12, in 1870. He trained under composer and organist Gaetano Capocci at the scuola di San Salvatore in Lauro, and within three years had risen to First Soprano at the St. John Lateran Papal basilica.
Beyond his church duties, Moreschi performed in Rome's high society salons, the main venues outside churches where the Pope's own singers were permitted to appear. His 1883 performance as the Seraph in Beethoven's Christus am Olberge earned him the nickname that stuck for the rest of his life: l'Angelo di Roma, the Angel of Rome. Not long after, following a formal audition, he secured the position of First Soprano in the Sistine Chapel Choir itself, a post he'd hold for the next three decades.
Life Inside the Sistine Chapel Choir
The choir's signature piece was Allegri's Miserere, a work so tightly guarded that for centuries only three authorised written copies existed, its ornamentation and performance style passed down almost entirely by oral tradition. That secrecy famously broke in 1770, when a 14-year-old Mozart heard it once during a Wednesday service and transcribed the entire piece from memory afterward, a story doubted for years before family letters confirmed it really happened. Mozart gave a copy to Charles Burney, who brought it to London for publication in 1771, and further transcriptions eventually followed from composers including Mendelssohn and Liszt.
When the choir needed a soprano capable of handling the piece's demanding solo line, Domenico Mustafa turned to Moreschi, whose voice proved more reliable than any of the choir's other members at delivering its famous repeated refrain. Moreschi took on real administrative responsibility too, likely becoming Director of Soloists after senior castrato Giovanni Cesari retired in 1886, then serving as the choir's day-book keeper starting in 1891 and as maestro pro tempore, effectively its day-to-day administrator, from 1892 onward.
The ground was already shifting under him, though. The Cecilian movement, a reformist push back toward Gregorian chant and older polyphony, gained real momentum through the late 19th century, and the 1898 appointment of composer Lorenzo Perosi as joint Perpetual Director signalled which way the wind was blowing. Pope Pius X's 1903 decree phasing out castrati followed a few years later. Moreschi technically stayed on the books until 1913, long enough to qualify for a pension, but Perosi's opposition to the castrato voice had effectively already ended his working career.
The Recordings, and Why They're Disputed
Moreschi's voice survives thanks to a handful of recording sessions. An 1900 cylinder recording by Bettini captured him singing Pratesi's Et incarnatus est, and in 1902 the company that would become His Master's Voice recorded him properly, partly to preserve the sound of the old chapel choir before it changed forever, and partly to capture the voice of the elderly Pope Leo XIII, who died the following year. Over the next two years Moreschi made 18 recordings total, as both a soloist and choir member, though it's unclear how well they sold outside Italy.
What those recordings actually prove about the castrato voice is genuinely contested. Ida Franca, who wrote The Manual of Bel Canto and had heard Moreschi perform live around 1910, spoke well of his voice while still ranking him below the best castrati she'd heard. The recordings themselves divide listeners further. There's real lung capacity and legato on display, along with the unearthly quality of a not-quite boy soprano, but also a questionable technique, an odd habit of sliding up to notes from as much as an octave below, and a heavy use of the sobbing ornamental style more associated with tenors of the era. It also doesn't help that they were made with primitive recording technology unlikely to capture the true tone of his instrument, at a point in his career when his range and power had already started to fade with age, a decline that comes for the shelf life of a soprano castrato faster than for most singers.
A Life Lived on the Outside
Moreschi's castration shaped more than his voice. He was short, broad-chested, and permanently youthful-looking, unable to grow the heavy beard fashionable for Italian men of his era, a detail that mattered more than it might sound: it left him publicly celebrated as an artist while simultaneously viewed by Roman high society as somehow less than a full man. He was famous and adored, and never fully accepted.
A 1891 change to choir membership rules made it possible for him to marry, and he did, to a woman named Guendalina Rinaldi, though obviously without the possibility of children. The marriage didn't last. Within a few years Moreschi had left her for another man, and Rinaldi, left behind, spent his money and sold off his art collection. Forced into retirement by the Vatican's policy shift, Moreschi spent his final 15 years living in an apartment near the Vatican, and died of pneumonia in 1922 at 63, closing out a tradition that had shaped Western sacred and operatic music for roughly 500 years.
The Sound Nobody Can Fully Recreate
Because Moreschi's own recordings capture a voice already past its prime, using equipment too primitive to do it justice, the actual sound of a castrato in peak condition is something modern audiences have never really heard. That gap is exactly why the 1994 film Farinelli, about the most celebrated castrato of the 18th century, had to invent its lead singing voice from scratch rather than simply cast someone. Sound engineers recorded a soprano, Ewa Malas-Godlewska, and a countertenor, Derek Lee Ragin, separately, then digitally blended and phase-shifted the two recordings together, note by note, to approximate something no living performer could produce alone. The result became a genuine crossover hit, selling hundreds of thousands of soundtrack copies and introducing a whole generation of listeners to castrato repertoire for the first time, even though what they were hearing was, strictly speaking, a piece of digital fiction. Moreschi's real, imperfect recordings remain the closest thing anyone will ever get to the genuine article, however far short they fall of what the castrati at their absolute best were once capable of.
