“A book that leaves the reader awestruck. Feldman’s meticulous documentation traces an extended search for connections between the castrato voice and its penumbrae in Italy, from recording technology’s uncanniness to Federico Fellini’s filmic obsessions, from biography to kinship and its meanings, touching on forms taken by the sacred, and extending from centuries past to the present. Feldman has written a non-linear, time-traveling history that departs from a gravitational center—the historical figure of Alessandro Moreschi, ‘the last castrato’—to reach outer orbits in psychoanalysis and the spectral before returning to the icon at its center, then turning outwards again. In this extraordinary and moving tour-de-force, the writing itself is singing.”
—Carolyn Abbate, Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor, Harvard University

“In Castrato Phantoms, Feldman ponders the artistic resonances of the improbable link between Moreschi and Fellini to provide an immensely erudite, imaginative, theoretically sophisticated account of the ways the long-suppressed phenomenon of the castrato echoes through Italian culture. Readers interested in histories of Catholicism, singing, popular culture, and even colonial fantasies of twentieth-century Italy will find the book invaluable, and a great read!”
—Suzanne G. Cusick, Samuel Rudin University Professor in the Humanities, Emerita, New York University

“Castrato Phantoms is microhistory at its best. Feldman’s virtuosic reconstruction of Moreschi’s life deploys the historian’s tools — genealogy, philology, and storytelling — to poetic ends, producing a textured reflection on anachronism and the aporias of time. Refracted in the material traces of Moreschi’s life are the sounds and images of a twilight Vatican still gripping Rome in the form of what Feldman brilliantly calls the ‘sacred vernacular.’ Closely observing relationships between Moreschi and Fellini, Feldman seamlessly weaves the afterlife of opera to the history of film.”
—Giorgio Biancorosso, Professor of Music, University of Hong Kong

“A meditation by one of the most gifted and heartfelt cultural historians of her generation on the resonant entanglements of what we presume to call ‘the past’ and ‘the present.’ As the book’s fascinating stories unfold, woven effortlessly across several centuries and many registers of cultural criticism, they gradually converge around a central question: How do we, as historians, navigate, sound, and tell the truth while confronting the many silencings of history?”
—Elisabeth Le Guin, Professor Emerita of Musicology, University of California, Los Angeles

★A new mapping of castrato afterlives in modern Rome.
★With an artist’s alertness to the inner life and a historian’s zest for the archival chase, Feldman takes readers on a wild ride through the twilight of the castrato phenomenon. The journey begins in a belt shop on the bustling via del Corso in Rome, owned by the great-grandchildren of Alessandro Moreschi. They have an uncle, Federico Fellini, whose cinematic commitment to the past as lost fragments flows through the book. Feldman’s excavation of the Vatican’s complicity in making castrati offers a model for recovering histories still being obfuscated today. New insights into psychoanalysis explain how humans navigate massive cultural and political transformations.

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, not least the last of them, Alessandro Moreschi. Musicologist Martha Feldman declines to accept these deep-seated mysteries and concealments. After a decade and more of digging through archives and family histories comes her exciting 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, everyday histories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Rome, the world of Roman opera, the city’s unique mélange of sacred and vernacular tropes, and representations of Rome by iconic film director Federico Fellini. Moreschi and Fellini turn out to have been related by marriage, but also to share synergies grounded in Rome’s persistent inclination to vernacularize the sacred. Far from telling of one anomalous figure, Feldman’s gripping history convinces readers that Moreschi, like Fellini, can be read as an improbable index of Roman consciousness, both during his own life and well beyond.

Martha Feldman is the Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor of Music at the University of Chicago. She is the author of three awarding-winning monographs: City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice; Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy; and The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds.