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Soprani, Castrati, Falsettisti and the Performance of Late Renaissance Italian Secular Music

This essay investigates the definition of ‘soprano’ in Italy in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in the context of a critique of recent historiography. Powerful drivers in the humanities at large have affected the telling of the story of women’s position in early modern music-performance culture by reinforcing (ironically) received and anachronistic ‘truisms’ about the association of high (soprano) singing with a normative female default. Even in recent scholarship, adult male sopranos – falsettists and castratos – have been cast as the unnatural but pragmatic solutions to the ‘problem’ of covering the cantus lines of polyphony, deployed in church or the theatre as substitutes for ‘real’ female sopranos, only (it is argued) because of contemporary mores preventing women from singing in mixed church choirs. Meanwhile the apparent emergence of ‘professional’ female sopranos from the sequestration of North Italian courts and onto the opera stage has been seen as a process of an emancipatory rebalancing of an apparent natural order; similarly, it is now commonplace in histories of the genre, to attribute developments in the composition style of the Italian madrigal directly to the phenomenon of the ‘new’ professional female soprano. Detailed readings of a series of literary portrayals of men and women engaged in singing, and the evidence of treatises by professional musicians of the period, reveals, however, that ‘men singing soprano’ was possibly so normal as to have attracted almost no hint of such differentiation or ‘problematizing’. Indeed, where comparisons between male and female soprano singers are made, it is the women, rather than the men who are more likely to be ‘othered‘ as exotic. The implications of this investigation set the scene for a number of re-considerations of vocal music of the Monteverdi era in print and performance, as well as for the cultural history of early modern singing.