Listening to a favorite Bach cantata (Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, BWV 147) got me to thinking about countertenors. These were castrati back in the old days: boys who had been castrated before puberty so they could keep their high, fluty voices to sing alto or soprano parts. This went on for centuries, only ending in the early 20th century. There are still countertenors today but modern-day versions achieve their high voices by other means. Of course, countertenors didn’t dress up like women or try to invade women’s spaces. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to note that the practice goes back a long time, albeit for different reasons.
It’s still a bit jarring to hear such sounds coming out of a man’s mouth. Even though countertenors were not standard in Bach’s world, they have made a comeback and are used in performances of his works in an effort to appear authentic or something. Bach used boy choirs and boy soloists:
In German church music from the Baroque, as women were forbidden in organ lofts and castrati were reserved for the opera house, alto parts were always sung by boys (possibly the older ones on the cusp of adolescence).
Anyhow, here’s a performance by a countertenor of an aria from BWV 147. All the women’s parts in this cantata would have been sung by prepubescent boys in Bach’s time.
Is it just me or does that cellist look like Hillary Clinton?
I think there are 5 well-known counter-tenors in the opera world today. A few years ago we saw a Handel opera at the Met featuring a bunch of ‘em. It really is amazing, to hear this big burly guy break out into a beautiful soprano aria. At first you wanna laugh but then you get used to it.
This is a bit off-topic but are you familiar with edu.medici.tv? It is this huge catalog of concerts, opera, ballet. I access it for free through our public library via Hoopla. They have good performances of Mozart opera, especially The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute. The video and audio quality are top-notch. You can stream it onto your TV from a mobile device.
I am of the belief that those who castrate should themselves be castrated . And if a woman butcher, her women parts should be removed so she goes into menopause .
I know, not the point of your post . However, this kind of evil pisses me off .
Y’know what’s funny: it wasn’t that long ago that everybody was all upset about FGM. We haven’t heard a peep about hat since the transgender crap got ginned up.
Of course these countertenors are not castratti, they’re just guys who are very good at falsetto. But still: I have been anxiously awaiting the moment when some choirboy soprano declares he wants to be castrated so he can continue to give his beautiful voice to God.
What do you think would happen? Will he be confined to a mental hospital? But that Supreme Court case about the chicken sacrifices in Florida holds that we can’t prohibit people from an action they re doing for religious reasons, if we don’t prohibit that same action when done for non-religious reasons.
Besides, the piping li’l tyke can always hitchhike to California and claim he only wants to be a girl.
Little would surprise me at this point. As @Kevin points out, it is the castrators, not the castrati, who are at fault. The poor child should receive treatment for mental illness. Better yet, the mental-illness-inducing policies need to be terminated with extreme prejudice. These include those promulgated by the medical establishment in the guise of gender-affirming care, who are complicit with the pharmaceutical companies to drug children (and adults) at unheard-of levels with psychiatric medication.
Au contraire, if the young gent is dedicated to music, to God, and wants to be a soprano forever—why not? Although…maybe he could get a little mentoring from Iestin Davies first? I mean, maybe he can have his balls and sing soprano too? But that’s interesting, I never thought about whether a guy who was a natural soprano in childhood could easily—or at all—switch over to proficiency in falsetto.
Because this “young gent” is a child. A sane society does not permit children to make important decisions — decisions that have life-long effects — for a reason. The consequences go well beyond being a soprano forever. Do I need to spell out what those consequences are? Voice change is the least important of them. This line of reasoning is exactly what was used to justify the mutilation of thousands of children: if Robert wants to be Roberta forever, why not?
The broader issue is that modernity has adopted the view that individuals should be free of all unchosen bonds. To quote another commentator:
The prime aims of Left ideology (what Deneen prefers to call liberalism), as I often say, are a never-ending and always-increasing demand for emancipation from unchosen bonds (that is to say, unlimited liberty), combined with forced egalitarianism, all in service of creating a utopia. While in an inchoate sense the Left has existed since the Serpent in the Garden, as a political philosophy this dogma only arose with the Enlightenment, which was nothing more than the reification of the most destructive desires of mankind.
