Spotlight on Female Musicians: Cecilia Bartoli
Thursday was International Womens' Day, and through the weekend we will be sharing the stories of female musicians whom we find to be particularly inspiring. [Note: This post was originally scheduled for March 10, 2018.]
Cecilia Bartoli (born in 1966) is an Italian coloratura mezzo-soprano, with an extraordinarily versatile voice. The child of two professional singers, she has been performing since she was nine years old. She rose to prominence very early in her career, and won her first Grammy while still in her twenties. She earned three more Grammy awards for Best Classical Vocal Solo while in her thirties. She was also honored with inductions to national orders of cultural merit in France and Monaco, and performed in opera houses all over the world. At this point in her career, she could have easily coasted, performing popular opera roles and doing recitals of "greatest hit", crowd-pleasing music. But instead, she wanted a challenge. Modern composers were simply not writing tonal music suited to her extremely agile, mezzo-soprano voice. "I thought may be I can do more research, more recording of esoteric works – and keep singing the popular classical repertoire as well."
In the early 18th century, opera was a wildly popular form of entertainment, and the most challenging, dazzling music was written for castrati - young men who were castrated before hitting puberty so that their voices would not deepen, but stay high and grow in strength and agility. Their voices were also prized in churches where women were not permitted to sing. It's estimated that in the 1720s and 30s, at the height of this craze, over four thousand boys were mutilated every year for this purpose. The practice was made illegal in Italy in 1861; steps were taken by the Catholic Church to end the practice in 1878, with a final ban occurring in 1903. The music written expressly for castrati has gone almost entirely unperformed in the intervening centuries. Partly, this is due to the tortuous history associated with it. But there also remains the simple fact that the music was not written for women, and is arguably just not suited to female voices.
In 2009, Cecilia Bartoli released an album and DVD of arias written expressly for castrati, entitled "Sacrificium", which earned her her fifth Grammy and included eleven world premieres (the first recordings ever made of these works). In an interview for The Guardian, she said, "I was interested in castrati because what happened to them was the most criminal thing in the history of classical music. In Italy as many as 4,000 boys were castrated each year for about 100 years. From the families in the south of Italy, where they often had 10 or 12 children, one child would be sacrificed to the knife. They hoped this boy would save the family from poverty. In his time Farinelli was big like Michael Jackson so you can see why they would do it. But what a price! They would be castrated at six to seven to ensure the voice would sound like a female. Most of them became just miserable men. If 3,000 were castrated only 100 would make a career. The rest were rejected by society. Those who succeeded had voices with incredible expressivity. They were able to sing from the lowest to the highest registers." Using her impressive technical abilities and platform as an international opera star, Cecilia Bartoli made an important point. Barbaric cruelty is not required for the exquisite music written for the castrati to be performed and relished. Torture and mutilation are in no way a necessary cost of beauty; beauty, immense and unparalleled, will always shine in the world.
