Martha Feldman (Chicago) talks with James Q. Davies (Berkeley) about Feldman’s recently published book, Castrato Phantoms: Moreschi, Fellini, and the Sacred Vernacular in Rome, which explores how the legacy of the castrato voice shaped Rome’s religious and artistic imagination.
Around 1830, opera houses stopped using castrati, and Rome and the Vatican became home to their glorious singing, engineered by surgery and intensive vocal training. Castrati were long mired in secrecy, obfuscations, and lies about their origin and conditions — which was especially the case for the last practicing castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, who is at the center of Feldman’s study.
Feldman declines to accept the deep-seated mysteries and concealments around the figure of the castrato. The product of extensive archival research, Castrato Phantoms is a transdisciplinary and quasi-cinematic account of Moreschi, whose recordings preserve the only sonic trace of a solo castrato. Yet Moreschi’s story extends far beyond him. It opens up intrigues, politics, and histories of the Vatican, the world of Roman opera, and representations of Rome by iconic film director Federico Fellini, who shared with Moreschi a grounding in Rome’s persistent inclination to vernacularize the sacred.
Martha Feldman is Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago.
James Q. Davies is Class of 1957 Chair in the Department of Music and director of the Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley.
Cosponsored by the Department of Music