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In Reply to: Close encounters of the fourth kind: Male-Castratto choir... posted by mutant on November 26, 2002 at 17:58:21:
Hi-Choir, I think not. Castrati were soloists. The last one was Moreschi, and Boris Goldovsky, whom I knew, when I was young and he was old, had heard him. Said Mr. Goldovsky (who with his mother walked out of Russia to Berlin after the October Revolution): "He sounded like a chicken."
Castration was usually involuntary. The earlier posts about making a decision were pretty off base as far as my long-ago studies indicate.
And let us not pat ourselves on the back too hard. Cassius Clay is a functional vegetable, yet his daughter to great media attention wishes to follow his example. Justify that.
Or even soccer players who die early deaths from years of heading practice. Lyle Azedo and countless American football players, the list goes on. Look around 360 degrees before we put ourselves on a higher moral plane than Roman Emperors.
Follow Ups:
on THAT team!
...than the ancient romans or anyone else? Obviously not. What fascinates me about the minds of those times is how they simply "gave themselves away." If they really wanted to do something in their own society then they did it more or less openly, and if it was about the castration of boys for music's sake or whatever, it somehow got done openly. In more puritanical societies badness goes on but it is simply more hushed. My opinion is that a certain type of liberty exists in an open society and that this sort of openness will always allow for the ample flourishing of ideas in public - both good and bad ideas. It is part of the monstrously unselfconscious rendering of the self that characterizes men when expressive powers are the least constricted. In the West's most open periods, Mozarts and Beethovens and Handels flourished right along with slavery and castration, but not because they were more hypocritical than us, for example. This enigma is what has drawn my interest in this post toward the castrati. I am fascinated with anything that those societies might have considered a worthwhile pursuit. I do not think that all of these "flourishes" were good. But, looking back it is interesting to compare them to our own more covert manifestations.
r
...I don't mean to downplay the overall tragedy of the matter. Quite the opposite, in fact...
Just about any retired NFL lineman. Many of these guys are virtual cripples by the time they're 50.
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