'Il soprano e veramente l’ornamento di tutte l’altre parti': soprani, castrati, falsettisti and the performance of late Renaissance Italian secular music

Wistreich, R. (2012) 'Il soprano e veramente l’ornamento di tutte l’altre parti': soprani, castrati, falsettisti and the performance of late Renaissance Italian secular music. In: Der Countertenor: Die männliche Falsettstimme vom Mittelalter zur Gegenwart. Schott Campus . Schott Music, Mainz, pp. 71-85. ISBN 9783795707934

Abstract

The wealth of recent scholarship concerning women singers in late Renaissance Italy has assigned to them an importance and ‘visibility’ in our image of the musical practices of the most culturally sophisticated institutions (notably courts) that has far-reaching implications for our understanding of their wider meanings. However, despite all we now know about particular performances at specific places and moments, as well as the identities and reputations of numerous ‘sopranos’, there are still many unanswered questions about the performance of the cantus parts in vocal music of all kinds, both secular and sacred. Recent scholarship has also both re-evaluated and added to our knowledge of the other sorts of sopranos in sixteenth-century Italy – falsettists, boys and girls (although they have as yet received little attention) and, of course, castratos. It is now clear that professional castrato singers were to be found from at least the middle of the sixteenth century employed not only at the Papal chapel, but also in courts throughout Italy and Spain, but also in France, Germany and the Low Countries (albeit in small numbers). The surviving sources are, however, extremely sparse and mostly have little or nothing to say about everyday musical practice. One possible reason for this, I argue, is that those involved in professional music-making simply did not share our modern preoccupation with castratos as utterly different from all other singers. It is apparent that the idea of men singing soprano (or cantus) parts in madrigals using their falsetto voices was possibly very ubiquitous and thus similarly unremarkable. Indeed, ‘men singing soprano’ was possibly as normal in sixteenth century Italy as it is unusual today. Drawing on a variety of sources which describe the technical skills and working practices of both ‘star’ and rank-and-file singers, including Zacconi’s Prattica di musica, Francesco Patrizi’s praise of the virtuosa Tarquinia Molza, in L’amorosa filosofia, and the unparalleled information about rank-and-file court singers in Luigi Zenobi’s letter to a prince, written around 1600, this chapter constructs a general account of professional soprano singing in North Italian courts around the turn of the sixteenth century. This pragmatic approach to the phenomenon of male sopranos – castratos and falsettists – allows in turn suggests a revision of some wider ideas about the composition and performance of secular vocal ensemble music.

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