Long before botched plastic surgery ruined a movie star’s career, they were the original showbiz victims. Castrati were young opera singers in past centuries castrated to preserve a high-pitched voice ...

Cecilia Bartoli could have followed the path of least resistance. When the Italian mezzo-soprano burst onto the opera scene in the early '90s with a standard repertoire of Rossini and Mozart, she ...

Historians and scientists have exhumed the remains of the legendary castrato Farinelli in Italy, to study the anatomical effects of castration carried out on young boys to turn them into high-pitched ...

Everyone knows what a toll the rock-star lifestyle can exact. Drugs and alcohol are de rigueur, sexual promiscuity often comes with the territory, and loss of hearing is yet another occupational ...

No one paid a higher price for celebrity than the male soprano of the 18th-century, those greatest of European stars, whose fame in their own time was proportionally greater even than that of George ...

1562 The Sistine Chapel choir accepts its first castrato member. 1607 Claudio Monteverdi writes Orfeo, the first major opera, with several roles for castrati. 1737 Farinelli, the most celebrated of ...

To play this content JavaScript must be turned on and the latest Flash player installed. Jacek Laszczkowski is one of a tiny handful of men who can sing the parts originally performed by castrati, ...

As opera left its toddler years behind, it grew more restrictive and extravagant at the same time. Around 1700, a new style called opera seria began to dominate. It was, as the name implies, "serious ...