HISTORY'S LAST CASTRATO IS HEARD AGAIN

By HAROLD C. SCHONBERG

Alessandro Moreschi (1858-1922) was the last castrato singer, the sole remaining
specimen of a great line that flourished as early as the 16th century and that came to
fruition in the 18th century with a pair of castrati who arguably could have been the
greatest singers who ever lived—Farinelli and Pacchierotti. Early in the 19th century,
a castrato named Vellucci was active. He was the last of the great operatic castratos.
His successors sang mostly religious music. By the time Alessandro Moreschi joined
the Vatican Choir, castrati were employed only by the church— as they had been as
early as the 15th century.

Castrati came into the church because women were not allowed to sing there. St.
Augustine had forbidden it. In the 18th century, castrati were the prominent singers
of opera houses everywhere in Europe. Most of them had been ''sold'' by poor parents
to singing schools. The parents hoped that the child would develop a good enough
voice to become rich and famous. Those boys were castrated (although officially it
was against the law) and sent to a school where they were put through a rigorous
regimen of vocal and musical studies. They grew up to become freaks, but a handful
of them have come down in history as, most likely, the supreme singers of all time.
Their vogue died out around 1840; the newer composers—Verdi, Wagner and the
others—were not interested in writing for them.

Moreschi was the only castrato ever to have recorded. Thus we have an idea, no
matter how dim, of what the castrati may have sounded like. Greater singers by far
than Moreschi have made recordings ever since 1902, but it is safe to say that his
disks are unique. Up to now, only a handful of collectors have had access to the rare
Moreschi recordings. Now all of them—his solos and several other pieces in which his
voice can be heard through the Vatican chorus—have been put on an LP disk (Opal
823).

Musically, the disk is negligible. It has two songs by Tosti and a good deal of inferior
religious music by minor Italians whose names will be unknown to most music
lovers. It also has the Bach-Gounod ''Ave Maria,'' Mozart's ''Ave verum'' and two
versions of the Crucifixus from Rossini's ''Petite Messe Solenelle.'' As a bonus, the end
of Side 2 has the voice of the 93-year-old Pope Leo XIII, taken from a Bettini cylinder.
The transfers to LP are necessarily noisy; there are no mint copies of Moreschi
records. But, especially in the 1904 recordings, the sound of the soloist is clear and
penetrating. Those old disks have a good deal of information on them, and modern
technology can dig far more out of those venerable grooves than the original makers
could have begun to believe. Nevertheless, don't buy these under the impression that
they are high fidelity recordings.

Although known as ''The Angel of Rome,'' Moreschi was probably not a great singer to
begin with. He certainly was not a tasteful musician; his singing is afflicted with a
constant sobbing quality that he thought was expressive. The production generally is
unsteady, sometimes painfully so. Nor did Moreschi always sing on pitch.
And yet, in its way, his vocal textures have a curiously moving quality. The voice has a
timbre that does suggest the warmth and sweetness that 18th-century audiences were
raving about in the work of the famous castrati of the time. Thus, through this disk,
we can get an idea of the authentic castrato sound. It is not a countertenor sound. The
voice of, say, an Alfred Deller, not to mention his successors, is much thinner than
Moreschi's voice.

For castrati had voices of women with the lungs of men. They were trained by famous
teachers who were hard taskmasters, and they were capable of vocal feats that never
have been duplicated. This statement is not guesswork. Too many top musicians and
connoisseurs of the time have left detailed reports of the singing of the castrati - of
the sweetness of the sound, of the power when power was needed, of the incredible
breath control (up to 60 seconds in one phrase), of the absolutely secure technique, of
the ingenuity of ornamentation, of the evenness of scale. It takes one look at the
castrati vocal parts as left by Handel, Rossini and Gluck to realize that those
composers were writing for a species of singers who were vocal machines much more
efficient than anything to be found since then.

Some of this comes through the Moreschi disk. With all of his flaws, he was a trained
singer who had no trouble going up to a high B (though Farinelli could take an E in
full voice when he wanted to). Nor is the voice sexless. The cool Nellie Melba, that
flawless vocal technician, was a much more sexless singer than the castrati were. The
castrato voice, if Moreschi has provided some kind of accurate reference point, was
peculiar. It was a woman's sound but with a difference - something deeper, fuller,
richer. There has been no exact vocal equivalent.

No wonder that castrati, who had this unusual vocal quality coupled to unparalleled
virtuosity, were the first superstars of music. They took Europe by storm. Rich, vain,
ungainly, they commanded any opera house in which they appeared. They moved
among nobility on equal terms. And they attracted women, especially high-born and
decadent women on the lookout for something exotic and titillating. Nor did their
mistresses have to worry about bearing children to them.

Their love affairs were the talk of Europe. Some, like Domenico Cecchi, had
homosexual affairs. Giovanni Grossi was a well-known lady-killer. Gaetano
Guardagni had mistress after mistress. The famous Caffarelli narrowly escaped death
from a jealous husband in Rome. The equally famous Senesino eloped with a girl of
good family and ended up in jail when her furious parents prosecuted him. Luigi
Marchesi got involved in a great scandal in London when a lady left her husband and
children to live with him. Pacchierotti had an affair in Naples, and the woman's lover
laid plans to have him assassinated. Vellutti chased women all over Europe and in
Russia lived for a while with a Grand Duchess.

This hectic activity may come as a surprise to many. Castrated males are not
supposed to be sexually active. The late Dr. Meyer M. Melicow, in several articles
about castrati for medical journals, speculated that the type of operation practiced on
the boys did not prohibit the manufacture of testosterone. Thus they could, and all
too apparently did, grow up to enjoy sexual relationships.

Moreschi apparently never did. He is described as a short, plump man, and his life
appears to have been unexceptionable. He sang, he conducted the Vatican Choir, he
left a handful of records, and not much more is known about him. But those records
afford a tantalizing glimpse into a world that otherwise lives only by legend.