Long before botched plastic surgery ruined a movie star’s career, they were the original showbiz victims. Castrati were young opera singers in past centuries castrated to preserve a high-pitched voice ...

Everyone knows what a toll the rock-star lifestyle can exact. Drugs and alcohol are de rigueur, sexual promiscuity often comes with the territory, and loss of hearing is yet another occupational ...

Cecilia Bartoli could have followed the path of least resistance. When the Italian mezzo-soprano burst onto the opera scene in the early '90s with a standard repertoire of Rossini and Mozart, she ...

Historians and scientists have exhumed the remains of the legendary castrato Farinelli in Italy, to study the anatomical effects of castration carried out on young boys to turn them into high-pitched ...

1562 The Sistine Chapel choir accepts its first castrato member. 1607 Claudio Monteverdi writes Orfeo, the first major opera, with several roles for castrati. 1737 Farinelli, the most celebrated of ...

No one paid a higher price for celebrity than the male soprano of the 18th-century, those greatest of European stars, whose fame in their own time was proportionally greater even than that of George ...