For the first installment of a thread on the online platform Rorotoko, Martha Feldman describes her new book, Castrato Phantoms: Moreschi, Fellini, and the Sacred Vernacular in Rome. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full piece. An excerpt appears below:

“Castrato Phantoms traces the afterlives of the storied founders of bel canto singing. Turning to the last castrato Alessandro Moreschi (1858-2022) and his forebears and descendants in Rome, the book constructs a nonlinear history of the castrato phenomenon at its end stages, including their reverberations across the twentieth century, showing that castrati were always embedded in the secreted and the untold.Here the “secreted and untold” refers to numerous forms of concealment: about how castrati (plural) were chosen (by agents, churchmen, and patrons), how they were made (by surgeons), and how they ended up removed from families, installed in church schools, and displayed in chapels and salons; but also the ways their tales were bracketed in family histories and suppressed in Roman discourse and consciousness.”