“My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.”
-- William Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up”, Poems (1807)
Carlo Broschi (1705-1782), alias Farinelli, is widely regarded as the pinnacle of vocal virtuosity. Most famously, he was a castrato, a singer who was castrated at a young age, before the effects of testosterone could alter the body, crafted with the precise purpose of having the quality of eternal youth. He is, of course, part of a long tradition, dating back to the Byzantine empire, which manifested itself in Europe during the sixteenth century. It initially spread through scholae cantorum, the choirs of the Catholic Church, and quickly became extremely popular in melodrama. Although the motivations for castration varied widely across time and space, in the case of the castrati the reason for such a violent act was purely aesthetic. Women had no place in Catholic choirs, so the vocal ranges available to choirmasters were quite limited. Furthermore, the voices of young boys were unreliable, as they began to break when testosterone transformed their larynx. In this sense, castrati were at the service of technique. The castrato was also known as a musico, their whole body, and therefore existence, reduced to the function it had been artificially (and violently) crafted for. This complete commodification of the body results in the creation of a sort of Eternal Child, endowed with a pure and supple larynx, far above both male and female singers, the result of a halting of the development of gendered qualities. From the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, castrati were also employed in secular musical practice, particularly in melodrama. If at first the Eternal Child was only a convenient tool at the disposal of choirmasters and composers, the Bel Canto aesthetic developed around it, according to its intrinsic value in virtue of its ideological purity and sensibility.
Crafting the Eternal Child
The style of Bel Canto, although generally associated with Italian romanticism, precedes it by several centuries. Rossini (1792-1868), Bellini (1801-1835) and Donizetti (1797-1848), often thought of as the peak of the style, actually witnessed its gradual decline, living at the time of the Italian Romantic movement. Bel Canto can be said to have developed from baroque and classical vocal technique, of which the castrati represented the golden standard, and to have had a very peculiar aesthetic, from which the romantic one clearly exploded. The unique timbre and virtuosity of the castrati created an uncanny aesthetic, where voices were androgynous and inhumanly flexible. This is how the castrato becomes the Eternal Child: their value is no longer derived from their instrumentality, but rather they are accorded intrinsic value, specifically in virtue of their being a Child, not having yet entered the tainted and vulgar world of adulthood. In striving for a “poetic of vocal wonder [poetica della meraviglia vocale]”, Bel Canto somehow represented a time out of time, as well as unearthly beauty, and it did so by crafting androgynous (castrates producing a tone somewhere between that of a boy and a woman) and extremely virtuosic voices, displayed in either spianato (plain) or fiorito (ornate) style. The Eternal Child and, as a consequence, the character they play, can no longer be immediately read as either a Man or a Woman; the ideological halting of their biological development, gruesomely carried out in the name of aesthetic experience, renders them something in-between, a perfect representation of Humanity as a whole, beyond (or, rather, before) the binary scission of gender and of Divinity itself.
In its crafting of the Eternal Child, Bel Canto crystallises onto bodies the instant immediately preceding their precipitation into the vulgar human condition, with its everyday oppositions of “either/or”, and through using them as machines hoists them up to the level of Universals. Romantic poetics, on the contrary, present alienation as one of the characteristics of adult life, and understand it to be the splitting of reality into opposites, into man and woman, finite and infinite, and so on, each partaking in the other, to be reconciled through aesthetic experience. The Eternal Child becomes sublime in virtue of being the representation of the union of these opposites and the meeting of humanity and otherness (which is why, even after the practice of castration was largely abandoned on humanitarian grounds, it still found numerous defenders). If, in the wondrous aesthetic of Bel Canto, the Eternal Child was crafted by suspension, and existed as that which came before this polarisation of reality, in Romanticism, the reconciliation and synthesis of these opposites must take place on an individual level, and so it becomes an inner struggle: the struggle for unity, for the Absolute, for truth, and so on. Romantic art is essentially representative of this struggle against alienation, and as a result, the aesthetic canon moves toward starker contrasts between masculine and feminine roles, a kind of heightened realism, exemplifying the romanticization of life and the struggle for the Absolute as unity of opposites. And how better to overcome this struggle, than by being ourselves Eternal Children?
Romanticism turns inwards, and instead of materializing the Eternal Child through the violent crafting of living matter, it identifies with it a human capacity to resolve the tension between the earthly and the divine, Man and Woman, the finite and the infinite. Sitting at the apex of British Romanticism, the poetry of William Wordsworth is filled with a sense of wonder and admiration for nature. This inclination toward the beautiful and sublime, Wordsworth seems to maintain, is the common thread of human experience, so that humanity and life itself is unthinkable without this aesthetic predisposition (“Or let me die!”). The apparent scission of reality into opposites, the reconciliation of which is the sole goal of human experience, is not yet ingrained in the Child, who takes ontological precedence over the fully grown Man. Only through aesthetic experience are we able to play with reality. Only by being Children can we learn what it means to be fully human.
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
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