Original subtitles

Your young servant, Silvestro Prittoni,

rejoicing in a voice sufficiently good to practise music,

and wishing to retain it,

begs Your Serene Highness to make it such

that he is without those instruments which would allow the change of voice to take place.

MUSIC: "Cara Sposa" by Handel

During the 18th century,

as many as 100,000 small boys were castrated

to preserve their high singing voices.

Of these, a mere handful became the most famous singers of the age.

The world's first international superstars,

they were perhaps the greatest virtuoso singers ever heard on Earth - the castrati.

But the mature castrato voice didn't sound like a child,

nor did it sound like a woman.

# Cara sposa

# Amante cara... #

'Nothing in the whole of music is as fine as the fresh young voice

'of a castrato.

'No woman's voice has the same firmness, the same strength

'and the same smoothness. '

#.. Pianti miei... #

And it didn't sound like a male countertenor or falsettist.

In this film, we are going to explore the sound and the world

of the baroque operatic castrati,

and in a unique scientific experiment,

will attempt to bring something of this lost voice back to life.

#.. Pianti miei... #

'For the whole of my adult singing life,

'I've been fascinated by the castrati and the music they sang. '

These kings of the 18th century operatic stage

were the richest, the most highly sought-after, the most extraordinarily virtuosic,

the most pursued - in many ways - of all the singers we've ever heard.

And for 200 years now they've been extinct.

The thing that made the castrato voice special appears to be

the effect that that singer had on the audience.

If one can understand something about what the special nature of that sound was,

it will help us understand what it is that communicates from one human being to another.

To do this to a child, when every single moment, every day of their lives would be,

frankly, adversely affected by it -

their physical appearance, their early osteoporosis,

their lack of an ability to reproduce.

It seems to me emotionally not very cost-effective.

They are jealous, despicable, fierce, effeminate,

gluttonous, covetous, cruel,

inconstant, suspicious, furious, insatiable.

They cry like children if they are left out of an entertainment.

The knife has indeed made them chaste,

but this chastity is of no service to them.

Nicholas Clapton, a countertenor and castrato historian,

is the curator of a new exhibition in London devoted to the German composer Handel and his castrati.

Handel was the first great composer to write Italian opera in England.

Handel was absolutely the business as an opera composer,

and as such had enough clout to hire the very finest singers,

including some of the greatest castrati the world has ever known -

Caffarelli, Senesino, Carestini, Guadagni.

The only one he never got hold of was Farinelli.

I'd like you to meet three gentlemen I like to think of as friends of mine -

there's Farinelli,

and Senesino,

and Guadagni by the window.

Farinelli never worked for Handel.

Senesino did, for about 15 years,

and here he is on stage in Handel's Rodelinda,

about to sing the most famous aria from that opera - Dove Sei.

Guadagni was much younger than the other two singers.

He was described as "a wild and reckless singer",

and was accused of quite a few amorous adventures while he was in London. He was such a good actor,

that eventually he was famous as Gluck's Orfeo.

Well, a baroque opera fanatic might like to make out

that castrati were invented to sing lots of notes on an 18th-century stage. This is nonsense.

Castration has been used as a punishment

and as a means of subjugation for thousands of years.

We certainly know of eunuch choirs in a Christian context

as early as the 4th century in Constantinople.

And there they flourished

for more than 800 years, until the time of the Fourth Crusade,

when Constantinople was sacked

by the forces of Western Christendom,

and the castrati who had been singing there with great fame

and considerable scandal

um... suddenly disappeared off the face of the Earth.

But 400 years later, castrati suddenly reappeared in Italy.

In 1589, Pope Sixtus V reorganised the choir of St Peter's.

Castrati would now take the high parts that had previously been sung

by either boys or falsettists.

Falsetto means a little false voice, which is really grossly unfair,

because there's nothing false or unnatural about a falsetto voice -

it's a perfectly normal function of any adult male.

The irony is, however,

that it was the castrati who came to be referred to as the natural soprano - soprani naturali -

which seems very strange to us.

Nobody in Britain understands both the natural and the synthetic human voice

better than York University's electronics professor, David Howard.

The voice of a castrato worked in the same way mine or yours works.

SINGS UP A SCALE

This is a medical model of the larynx,

which shows us the basic working parts. This is the Adam's apple,

the part you can feel if you move your finger up and down the throat.

But if we turn it and look into it,

we can see the vibrating structures - the vocal folds -

and as they open and close like this, they would be vibrating.

And these vibrations are very rapid.

SINGING DOWN A SCALE

If this was a boy's larynx,

the length of the vocal folds is about 5mm.

In the case of women it's nearer 8mm,

and in a man it's 1.4cm.

So the boy's voice has small vocal cords. The boy also has a small mouth, or vocal tract, above that,

and he is able to produce a sound

which many would describe as being pure, rather simple.

SINGS UP A SCALE

The woman's voice, with her larger vocal cords,

is working into a mouth cavity which is rather bigger...

SINGS UP A SCALE

.. and so she is able to work with a larger range of acoustic possibilities

in colouring the sound.

Men sing in a range that's roughly an octave lower.

SINGS UP A SCALE

The man also has a vocal tract, or mouth cavity, that's much bigger.

But men are able to sing in the same way as a boy or woman

by using what's known as falsetto.

SINGS SCALE IN FALSETTO

To produce "a falsetto sound" - like that - what I'm doing

is reducing the bulk of the vocal cords that are vibrating.

And I'm doing that

by setting the vocal folds up, so that if you were looking straight into my larynx,

you'd see the vocal folds like this, and they'd be vibrating like that.

we call that full body contact of the vocal folds. But for falsetto,

we pull the bulk of the vocal fold material out of the way

and only the top edges vibrate,

so we have a thin string, and a thin string will vibrate at a higher frequency.

The castrato voice was not falsetto.

The castrati had larynxes of boys,

and therefore their natural pitch range was up there with the boys and the women.

But in addition, they had a man's vocal tract,

so they had all the sonic timbre possibilities of a man and big lungs.

So their power source was huge. They could sing high notes and sing them for a long time.

ARIA WITH VIRTUOSO TRILLS

Of course, what people are really interested in is the operation.

Here we've got three things with which the operation was done -

a lancet, a cauterising iron and a castratori.

This little pair of 18th century secateurs

would have been used to remove the whole of a child's scrotum at one fell swoop.

It could, of course, be heated to red heat as well,

to do the cut and the cauterisation at once.

That was one method.

Another, neater method - if one may use that word - a neater method

was to use a lancet

to make an incision in the scrotum

in order to cut the seminal vesicles...

.. and then this little cauterising iron, which looks like something you might crimp a pastry with.

The consequence of castrating a child before puberty is huge.

Testosterone comes primarily from the testes,

and that loss of testosterone

has innumerable effects - obviously you don't go into puberty properly,

your voice doesn't break, you don't start growing a beard,

genital development doesn't occur.

They tended to grow tall,

because fusion of the growing ends of the bones doesn't occur,

so they would have had very long arms and very long legs,

and the chest goes on growing as well.

They look pale, because testosterone stimulates the bone marrow to produce more blood

and they obviously have abnormal fat deposition -

they don't get the massive muscle enlargement you get with a man who has normal testosterone secretion.

So their whole appearance would have been hugely interesting, unusual.

They have the look of a crocodile, the grin of an ape,

the legs of a peacock, the paunch of a cow,

the shape of an elephant, the brains of a goose,

the throat of a pig and the tail of a mouse.

For Georgian Britain in particular,

the Italian operatic castrati

were a hugely problematic paradox.

Opera in this country has always had a very mixed reception.

It was imported for precisely the same reasons as it was attacked.

It was elitist, it was foreign,

it was sung, it was false.

What is there to fix attention?

Recitative that is not understood

and songs unintelligible from complex sounds and want of articulation.

As the Italian language is looked upon

as a necessary part of polite education,

and therefore, it is to be supposed,

understood by all in this higher rank of life,

and as the Italian opera is established solely at the expense of these,

they who do not understand the language need not go to the entertainment,

nor do they have any right to condemn those who do.

The castrati are the epitome of Italian opera,

and, of course, they are also the epitome of the problems with Italian opera.

Castrati were halfway to becoming women.

They weren't quite men.

And women in the 18th century couldn't think for themselves.

They were totally irrational. They needed managing by men.

If the castrati start influencing the young dandies of the day,

it could be appalling for Britain's future.

A curse on this damned Italian pathic mode!

I hate this singing in an unknown tongue.

It does our reason and our senses wrong.

I curse the unintelligible ass who may, for aught I know,

be singing Mass.

Catholicism was a major problem for Georgian England.

In fact, it had been a major source of hysteria since the Reformation.

Castrati, of course, were these great Catholic figures.

There was a charge levelled against them,

that what they sang in these operas

was actually Catholic messages in disguise.

Anyone may see with half an eye

religion is more their business than music.

Despite this widespread prejudice,

Italian opera, and the castrati, had some dedicated champions in Britain.

In the 1770s,

music historian Charles Burney travelled throughout Italy

in search of accurate information about these singers.

But even then, this was a culture shrouded in secrecy.

I enquired throughout Italy

at what place boys were chiefly qualified for singing by castration,

but could get no certain knowledge.

I was told at Milan that it was at Venice,

at Venice that it was at Bologna,

but at Bologna the fact was denied and I was referred to Florence.

The operation, most certainly,

is against the law in all of these places, as well as against nature,

and all the Italians so much ashamed in it,

that in every province they transfer it to some other.

Bologna looks melancholy,

though parts of it are very magnificent and beautiful.

Clergy in very great abundance.

The church is immensely rich.

The church in Italy was one of the first employers of the castrati,

but their attitude to the procedure and the whole business

was very ambiguous, not least because it had to be.

In the church's own canon law, any mutilation - castration included -

was actually illegal, and forbidden,

and anyone who carried out castration

would be punished by excommunication if found out.

And that was a terrible thing.

There's been an often-quoted figure

for how many boys were castrated in any one year

at the height of the craze for the castrati,

say in the 1720s and 1730s.

It was probably about 4,000 per annum.

And this was a craze that lasted, on and off, for a hell of a long time in the 18th century.

So how about at least 100,000 boys castrated in the service of music?

It is generally people of the meanest description

who give their children for such horrible mutilations

in the hope that they may be able one day to support their parents.

The child would have been restrained by several adults

and drugged by what means they had then.

Sometimes they used to give a certain quantity of opium to persons designed for castration

whom they cut while they were in their dead sleep

and took from them those parts which nature took so great care to form.

But it was observed that most of those who had been cut after this manner died by this narcotic.

They pressed the jugular veins,

which made the party so stupid and insensible

he fell into a kind of apoplexy,

and then the action could be performed with scarce any pain at all to the patient.

Well, maybe even the church wouldn't have been a big enough power

to drive this gruesome operation for several centuries on its own.

But it's an extraordinary coincidence of musical history

that at the same time as the castrati were first coming to prominence in Italy

we have the birth of that great baroque form of opera.

It was in opera, the most spectacular cultural form of post-Renaissance Italy,

that castrati were really to make their mark.

And Bologna boasts the country's oldest functioning public opera house -

the Teatro Comunale, built in the mid-18th century.

You can feel from this acoustic

what a wonderful place it must have been to sing in.

You're a singer, aren't you? Why don't you test it for yourself?

# Ombra mai fu... #

Oh, yes, that works. That's great!

La voce viaggia!.. Viaggia! Yes.

And of course, not only do we have amazing things up here, this space,

but there's some pretty amazing things downstairs, below the stage.

In the bowels of the theatre.

Stage machinery that is over 200 years old is still preserved

in the theatre's basement. But the origins of opera itself

go back another two centuries, to the 1590s.

It started from court entertainment

in such places

as Florence or Mantua.

And then it swiftly turned into

a fully staged entertainment

with recitative, arias

and ballet,

and scene design - it was, as the Germans put it, Gesamtkunstwerk.

Very rapidly,

public paying theatres opened in Venice, during Monteverdi's lifespan,

and the process was completed from Orfeo, court opera,

to the paying opera in Venice - from Orfeo to L'Incoronazione Di Poppea.

And already in Orfeo we have castrato. Correct.

In the prologue of Orfeo there's a castrato, not a woman as it would be today. Yes.

# lo la Musica son

# Ch'ai dolci accenti

# So far tranquillo

# Ogni turbato core

# Et hor di nobil ira et hor d'amore

# Posso infiammar

# Le piu gelate menti... #

By 100 years later, we have the operatic form, opera seria - literally, serious opera -

completely developed, completely fixed,

with long, showy arias and with recitative to tell the story.

The classic opera seria plot was drawn from myth, legend or history.

and the leading man, or primo uomo, whether king, warrior, hero or lover,

was invariably sung by a castrato.

# How silently, how slyly

# When once the scent is taken

# The huntsman tracks the spoor...

# When once the scent is taken

# The huntsman tracks the spoor... #

'I think the castrati satisfied this request after advice.

'All that form of art,'

in all of its complements, is highly artificial -

incredible, unlikely stories.

Lofty sceneries, mechanisms like this,

allowing sudden appearances or disappearances...

People flying through the air! People flying.

A factory of dreams, like cinema today.

Special effects - they were terribly clever at that.

Yes, and the castrati were the most artificial beings within this artifice.

# Pack up your worries

# Lay down your head

# Venice will comfort you... #

Excuse me, that's a girl! Don't you wish!

That's a girl. If I know anything, I know girls, and that's a girl.

You're on the turn! There's hope for you yet! Pretty practice.

Fine performance. Thank you, sir. I'm told you're from Bologna.

Just outside, sir.

I thought you reached those notes with perfect... Oh, go on! You're a girl, aren't you?

Go on!

You can tell me!

I'll take that as a compliment on my voice, sir. Oh, but you're a girl!

I was inspected by the bishop. Well, the bishop's been celibate 53 years. He wouldn't know the difference!

I won't tell anyone. Just admit it. Perhaps you find me attractive, sir.

The ambiguity of sex - they made sexual objects both for corrupted noblemen,

and...

equally corrupt noblewomen!

No wonder that the ladies pay They take it out another way

For though they lose the power of harm

The women know they yet can charm

The footman, he may make 'em swell

Or beaux may all their secrets tell

But here each night the amorous maid

Securely sins, of nought afraid!

'I don't want to be deeply boring, but I'm slightly dubious of stories'

that we're told about these people,

because we know now that libido is hugely affected

by testosterone secretion.

We know the level of testosterone needed to have normal sexual function,

which is not up to the normal level but actually halfway down,

so that if you have less than half the normal concentration of testosterone,

sexual function is seriously interfered with.

So the stories of them being lovers of various aristocratic women -

I think the aristocratic women may not have liked making love as much as perhaps others, I don't know!

But they got a lot of kudos, perhaps, from having these people around their bedrooms,

like in Der Rosenkavalier, perhaps,

but I don't know whether they were... I can't believe it's as effective as we're led to believe. It's a story.

As they were unable to father children,

the castrati were denied marriage by law.

Social norms also denied them any satisfying emotional relationships.

Bologna's favourite adopted son, the greatest castrato of them all, Farinelli,

left a touching record of falling in love with a young ballerina.

Look, there. Ah! 1733. "Cupido... "

Oh, yes!

"Cupid again has me bound in his chains. "

And here, he says, "God knows when I will be set free. "

And he talks about those chains being extremely sweet. Yes.

Typical, er, romantic language of the period. Yes.

It's typical libertese. Yes. In your excellent translation something gets lost,

and these are the rhymes and the rhythm.

Um, it's like a part of a libretto.

HE READS THE ITALIAN

Exactly, it could be an aria. Like he was singing.

He was unhappy in Italy, in Bologna. Really? Yes. He was unhappy here?

I think so. Because he had no power... Yes. And he was alone.

Even if the villa is always filled with people.

Yes, visitors. Visitors, relatives, friends, but he was alone.

Farinelli died, immensely wealthy but alone,

at the age of 78.

Soon after, his original grave was destroyed.

Although his great-niece arranged a re-burial,

nobody knew where this new grave was, until recently,

when a remarkable discovery was made in a Bolognese cemetery.

There he is! My word.

At last we find him. How very wonderful.

And it was a great discovery,

because nobody... Nobody knew anything about it.

So where actually is Farinelli's body?

Er, is here. It's actually there? Yes, it will be here.

And there is a project for opening the grave,

for palaeopathologic... Oh, yes, palaeopathology.

So you will measure his bones and see whether he really was long and tall?

Yes. How very interesting.

SOLEMN CHURCH MUSIC

Well, a castrato in the 18th century was successful on the opera stage,

but there wasn't room for all of them.

There were so many that a lot of them found employment in the church.

# Lacrima-a... #

As a result of that, you get a repertoire that's exactly the same.

This Porpora aria could easily be one of betrayed love from an opera.

The Catholic church's ambiguous attitude to castrati continued throughout the 18th century.

In 1748,

Pope Benedict XIV

considered banning them completely, but didn't.

Castrati were so popular - they were the major reason why a lot of people came to church at all,

so they realised that no castrati, no congregation.

And this extraordinary, seductive voice still fascinates today.

Twelve years ago,

the lost sound of the castrato reached an international audience

with the release of the blockbuster film, Farinelli.

HE CONTINUES TO SING AMIDST CHEERING

The film had to convincingly recreate the voice of the world's greatest castrato.

To do this,

scientists at IRCAM in Paris painstakingly spliced together

the voices of a soprano and a countertenor,

giving the higher notes to the woman's voice, and the lower to the man's.

But how successful was it?

They looked at it pretty well note by note,

not a trivial exercise at all,

cos you have to get all the levels right and make it sound as if it works.

The consonants have to be lined up, so a huge job, and a very satisfactory outcome, I think,

in terms of the film soundtrack. Yeah, but completely different from what we think a castrato really was.

We have a female voice at the top end, a falsetto at the bottom end and a castrato voice was neither.

Absolutely. You could argue that putting a female voice anywhere near a castrato is a strange thing to do.

So for this film,

using all the resources of contemporary acoustic science,

David Howard is going to develop a new method of recreating the castrato voice.

At one level, trying to synthesise the castrato voice

is one of those endless experiments that never stops.

Because unlike most scientific investigation,

we don't know what the final sound should sound like.

Imagine a voice that combines the sweetness of the flute

with the animated suavity of the human larynx -

a voice that leaps and leaps, lightly and spontaneously,

like a lark that flies through the air and is intoxicated...

This supernaturally beautiful voice cannot be compared with that of any woman.

There can be no fuller and more beautiful in tone...

.. He sang with the purity of a bell, up to E above the treble stave...

.. Amazing swell from pianissimo to an almost unbelievable degree of sonority.

Now, whether we ever get the computer to produce the sound which will engage with my soul

and I will suddenly swoon at the desk, I think is unlikely,

but I suspect I might get a sense of when we're moving towards it.

The peculiar physiology of a castrato allowed them to do things with their voices

that no other singer could do. One of Farinelli's arias has a phrase that lasts for just under a minute.

In parts of that phrase, notes are going past at the rate of 1,000 per minute,

and no other voice could keep up with that.

To build up a precise picture of the voice, David Howard must understand

all the elements that formed it. Central to that

is the castrati children's training.

What exactly these boys sang - what notes came out of their mouths -

we cannot say.

SINGS A SCALE

A very famous singing teacher like Nicola Porpora, who was as famous as a teacher as he was as a composer,

would have taught, probably, very simple exercises.

One can be taught intensely a very few things,

very well.

One of the most extraordinary things they had to do was to be able to sing

with a technique called the "messa di voce" - messa from mettere, the Italian verb meaning to put -

and it literally means to put the voice on the breath -

in other words, to start as quietly as you possibly can...

.. to sustain it for several seconds to as loud as you possibly can...

.. and then to get quieter again, equally slowly, to a disappearing point.

And it was always regarded at the time as the ultimate accomplishment for a singer.

Not being able to sing millions of notes and do those sort of clockwork nightingale trills,

but to sustain one note beautifully.

SUSTAINS NOTES SINGING UP THE SCALE

'The whole process of singing training, at the larynx level,

'is firstly to develop a very wide pitch range... '

.. secondly to develop a way of vocal cord vibration

that is efficient in the sense that the cords come together and stay together for a long time in a cycle

before coming apart and coming together again

and that ensures that the sound comes out through the mouth

and does not disappear between the vocal cords down to the lungs,

and thirdly, to develop the ability to bring the vocal folds together rapidly.

And it's the rapid closures that produce a very wide frequency range in the output.

That wide frequency range gives a sound the brightness and the brilliance

and if you then colour that brightness and brilliance

using a concept known as resonance - a bit like singing in the bathroom, getting that enveloping sound -

but to do it in a special region of frequency between about 2,000 and 4,000 hertz

gives the voice projection or resonance.

To demonstrate this area of resonance,

called the singer's formant,

David Howard has developed a new piece of software.

This display down here is showing the frequencies on this vertical axis

and as I'm speaking, you can see the display scrolling in from the right, going towards the left.

So, for example, I go, "p-p-p",

and we can clearly see the sound is emerging from the right, moving left.

And the frequency scale between 2,000 and 4,000 hertz -

this is the magic region that singers use to project above the orchestra. Uh-huh.

Now, perhaps if you did me a demonstration of what I might call a naive sound and a projected sound,

we should see this area light up in the spectrograph. OK.

# Aah... #

And now the trained version.

# Aa-aa-aah! #

And there we see very clearly how your trained version lights this up,

but the untrained version didn't light it up at all.

Now, let's try going in and out, see what that shows up. Yes.

# Aah...

#.. AA-AA-AAH...

# Aa-aah... #

This frequency region will be particularly important

in David Howard's operatic castrato recreation.

Early 20th-century science has bequeathed us a unique treasure

that should be central to his research.

In the early 1900s,

a recording was made of the last Papal Chapel castrato, Alessandro Moreschi.

# Ave... #

Castrati continued to sing in the Catholic Church

for about 100 years after they had disappeared from the opera stage.

This is not the voice of an operatic soloist.

So how much can the recording tell us

about the sound of his 18th-century castrati ancestors?

It is always wonderful to have something from the past one can go back to.

As a scientist, one does one's best to find out what we can use from it.

Here we have a 1904 recording of Moreschi,

and he would have done this onto a wax cylinder machine with a horn -

he would have had his head in a horn. That system removes the high frequencies,

and those high frequencies are in the singer's formant band, and when we look at that,

most of it is filled with the noise of the recording

and what we do not have are the harmonics of Moreschi's voice.

It means that the complete voice is not there.

Part of the problem for us with Moreschi

is that his style of singing is very foreign to modern taste.

And the rather cloying sentimentality of a lot of the music

sounds to many modern ears rather distasteful.

I think one thing we've got to be careful of is that we have absolutely no reason to believe

that we would have liked an 18th-century castrato singing any better. We might think we would,

but we have no evidence to prove it.

If the Moreschi recording is not the definitive guide in this search,

will David Howard find any clues in other, more contemporary voices?

JAZZ PIANO MUSIC

# All of me

# Come and take all of me... #

Jazz legend Jimmy Scott was born with the hormonal disorder Kallmann's syndrome,

which means his voice never broke.

Here, we've got a fantastic singer with a wonderful instrument,

which in classical terms is not trained at all,

but does absolutely everything he could ever want it to do in that style.

But he's singing like a female jazz singer. That's what, to me, comes over when you first hear this -

female jazz singing. So, stylistically, we haven't got castrato singing going on at all,

even though the instrument is more or less the same - it could be essentially a castrato instrument.

# You took the heart

# That once was mine

# Why not

# Take a-all

# Why not take a-all

# Of me? #

But sometimes a remarkable coincidence of physiology and musical style presents itself.

The baroque music world is just beginning to wake up

to the voice of the extraordinary young soprano, Michael Maniaci.

'I call myself a male soprano, because my voice seems'

to most naturally sit in a soprano register.

And when I went through puberty and my voice changed,

though my cords did lengthen and thicken somewhat,

they didn't to the extent that most men experience.

# Exultate

# Jubilate

# O vos animae beatae

# O vos animae

# O vos animae beatae

# Exultate

# Jubilate... #

'My voice comfortably goes to a soprano high C,

'and I feel most comfortable singing within a two-octave range

'from about the high C down to a middle C.

'I guess, compared to a countertenor, my voice would sit about a sixth higher. '

When you sing you are not using falsetto, which surely allows you much more flexibility. Yes.

One problem with a falsetto singing high is that most of us find it difficult to sing quietly. Right.

And to sing sweetly. Right.

And to avoid forcing, quite often.

Cos I know sopranistas who can sing right up through high C, high E flat, even.

But it tends to be one colour, one dynamic... Loud and hard... through the extremes of the register.

But you can sing piano, high As and high Bs and high Cs. Yes.

I envy you that. I can sing piano high Fs, but not high As, Bs...

I envy you everything you can do at the bottom of your register. Fair enough.

# Alleluja-ah

# Allelu-ujah... #

'What a wonderful sound Michael makes when he sings.

'You hear this voice soaring up well above the range of countertenors. '

But is he today's castrato?

I think there are two reasons why he's not.

The first is physiological.

His voice has partially transformed.

He speaks with a voice that is not a boy's - it is lower in pitch.

'And if we couple that with the fact that his training as a singer

'has not been from the Farinelli school of castrato singing -

'it's been from the modern school of operatic singing production -

'with what we understand of baroque singing added to it,

'but we do have an absolutely fascinating and intriguing modern musician interpreting this music

'in a very special way. '

# A-allelujah

# Allelujah, allelujah

# Allelujah, allelujah

# Allelujah

# Allelujah, allelujah

# Allelujah

# Allelujah! #

Armed with the evidence,

David Howard can now start work on his new method

of electronically synthesising the sound.

The key to the castrati, as far as I can see, is we have boys' vocal folds - a boy's larynx -

and a man's mouth and nose - a man's vocal tract.

Now, to recreate something which uses those elements,

we need to get a recording of boys singing,

and get a recording of a man singing,

so that we can take them both apart and reconnect them

as a boy's larynx singing into the man's vocal tract.

The source recordings are made in the anechoic room at York University.

If you look round the walls, you'll see all these foam wedges that stick out,

and the way it works is that any sound that is made in here,

when it reaches the wall,

will hit a wedge and remembering that sound is reflected off at the same angle,

it will then go into the next wedge, and disappear right into the wall or the ceiling.

We're going to record in here

and we have a set of wedges between the singer and the microphone,

such that any reflection from the floor will be taken care of by this set of wedges,

and of course the walls and ceiling are covered in wedges anyway.

That way, we get a clean recording which is anechoic - no echo.

# O-mbra mai fu... #

Three boy trebles from the Minster Choir have been chosen for this recording -

but for this project David Howard needs to capture

more than just their acoustic signal.

We're going to record with a device round the necks of the singers,

called a laryngograph, monitoring what the vocal folds in the larynx are doing.

The laryngograph will allow him to separate larynx information

from vocal tract information.

#.. Soave piu. #

A MAN SINGS

# O-o...

# Ombra mai fu... #

The adult vocal tract information comes from a young tenor, Darren Abrahams.

# Di vegetabile... #

He has agreed not only to sing the aria an octave low -

that is, in the normal tenor register -

but also to see if it is possible to sing at the boys' pitch.

# O-ombra mai fu... #

He can't use falsetto, but has to push HIS voice

to the absolute extreme of high tenor register.

# Cara ed amabile So... #

Oh... no! I'll lose it.

Sure we were on an E? I think we're on F.

Are we? Gonna go for that "cara",

starting on E?

# Cara ed amabile

# Ombra mai fu. #

It's really hard, isn't it? It's going into falsetto now.

# So...

# Soave piu-u!

# Soa-ave piu-u. #

Staggering!

The choice of Ombra Mai Fu as our exemplar was very easily made.

It's a very well known tune.

It's also an example of the aria di sostenuto -

the sustained tune -

which was to show off the castrato's powers of... long legato line,

which is every bit as important as endless semi-quavers.

To complete the sophisticated voice synthesis,

David Howard travels to Stockholm

and the Royal Institute of Technology's renowned Speech, Music and Hearing Department,

where he will work with the world's most revered voice acoustician,

Johann Sundberg, and his colleague Sten Ternstrom.

Here we go to the top.

That's not an "ooh" any more, it's an "aah".

'Why is it, when we listen to computer speech,

'why is it we know it's a computer? What do we have to do to make that sound

'as if it's come from a human being?

'The synthesis process'

is a long, slow process, but we are making progress.

We've moved on now to sounds

that are not a female, they're not a child,

but they're in their range, so at least we're in the right area.

And there's a lot that we can change.

That's not the profile you'll get from a strong sound, is it?

You've got less of this first partial here... Yeah, yeah.

.. if I play that again. OK.

Now, that's quite different, isn't it? Yeah.

Our scientists have only a few days

to reconstruct a sound that became a museum piece two centuries ago

when the baroque world gave way to post-revolutionary romanticism.

But strangely enough, it was the human voice itself

that ultimately sealed the castrato's fate.

The real coup de theatre came in the 1820s,

when, at the end of the 1820s, a man called Domenico Donzelli, a tenor,

appeared on the scene, having worked out how to make a much more dramatic tenor sound

than there had been in the 18th century.

# 'Na lavannara... #

And this man worked out that if he kept his larynx down low,

he could belt right up to high C.

A bit scary, a bit dangerous, but very exciting.

#.. O sole mio Sta 'nfronte a te... #

After five days in Sweden, a number of voice morphs have been developed

and now David Howard needs to reduce his shortlist to one.

So that's an interesting effect,

but I'm not quite sure if it's what we're after here.

No, and I'm not convinced that's what we're after either,

because what you get with that, to my ears, is it's very difficult to lose the childlike qualities.

If we have a notion that we're trying to get away from the childlike quality,

I'm not convinced we've achieved it there.

I do have one other which changes that again,

and we made a recording of the tenor, Darren, singing the piece in the true pitch.

Yes, this is more in the direction that I think we're looking for.

It does have that more powerful, brash quality to it that I think we're after.

For me, it also opens the vowels up,

it makes them brighter and rather more Italian, in a way,

in terms of their brashness, which seems to be a quality people talk about.

I vote for this latter one. Yes, I think I will too.

When this preferred morph is complete,

David Howard brings it back to our music location in London.

The ultimate test for his virtual voice

will be the reaction of the music professionals at its premiere performance.

We've worked from the principle that if you think of the castrato as somebody

who was effectively endowed with a boy's larynx, but with a fully-fledged male vocal tract,

the question is, can we recreate that synthetically?

MUSICAL INTRODUCTION PLAYS

# Ombra mai fu...

# Di vegetabile

# Cara ed amabile

# Soave piu

# Ombra mai fu

# Di vegetabile

# Cara ed amabile

# Soave piu

# Cara ed amabile

# Ombra mai fu

# Di vegetabile

# Soave piu

# Soave piu. #

Well, that sure is extraordinary. What do you think, Michael?

I think the most successful portion of it is the very beginning -

on the extended note.

It's a very strange and rather spooky sound.

It's a bit difficult to accompany, because there's not a human element,

you cannot hear the breath.

Spooky is the word. I think spooky is a very good word,

cos it is something other, and that is an essential thing that we knew.

We did know we were after that.

One of the things I think is important

is we get away from a soprano sound - I don't think we're listening to a soprano, nor to a feeble chorister.

Nor a countertenor. Nor a countertenor.

So we have moved into a different domain. Oh, yes.

So at least we've achieved that part of it, but I'm not sure we've arrived.

Perhaps it's fitting that this telling but ghostly reconstruction

is as close as we can come to this dead voice from a lost age.

But what we are left with is the music that these singers made,

and the human voices that can still sing it -

sounds of enduring and ravishing beauty.

# Ombra mai fu

# Di vegetabile

# Cara ed amabile

# Soave piu. #

# Ombra mai fu

# Di vegetabile

# Cara ed amabile

# Soave piu. #

# Cara ed amabile

# Ombra mai fu

# Di vegetabile

# Cara ed amabile

# Soave piu

# Soave piu. #