1. A Voice From 1902: The Only Solo Recordings of a Castrato
The recordings were made in Rome in two sessions for the Gramophone & Typewriter Company: on 3 and 5 April 1902 by Will and Fred Gaisberg, and again in April 1904. The first session produced eighteen usable "sides" of Sistine Chapel Choir members, four of them solos by Moreschi [3]. Moreschi, born in 1858, would have been 43 at the first session.
That detail matters. Critics disagree about how to hear these discs. Some find them of little interest beyond preserving the voice of a castrato, while others hear a talented singer who was already past his best [3]. So the recordings are real evidence, but they are not a sample of the great stars of the 1700s, whom no one ever recorded.
So where did a voice like Moreschi's come from? The story begins centuries earlier, with a problem in church choirs.
2. Why Church Choirs Needed High Voices That Boys Cannot Keep
In many Catholic churches, women were not allowed to sing in the choir. Wikipedia's summary points to an old rule based on a line from the Bible: women should keep silent in churches [4]. Pope Pius X later wrote the same principle into law: singers in church have a liturgical office, and women could not hold it [1]. So who sang the top melody lines, the soprano and alto parts? Boys.
But boys are a short-term solution. At puberty the voice box grows and the vocal cords get longer and thicker, so a boy's voice often drops a lot, sometimes by about an octave. A choirboy can spend years learning to sing beautifully and then lose the high voice almost at once. (Our note on soprano voices and vocal cords shows how length controls pitch.)
Opera added another push. In Rome and the Papal States (the lands the pope ruled), women were at times also barred from performing on public stages, according to music historians [7], so someone else had to sing the high roles. That rule did not apply everywhere in Europe, but Italian opera spread everywhere, and so did its star singers.
In short, churches and theatres in Italy wanted high, strong, grown-up voices that could be trained for years. Here is how some people tried to create those voices.
3. Why Were Some Boys Made Castrati, and Why Did Italy Outlaw It?
A castrato was a male singer who had undergone an operation before puberty so that his body never went through the usual voice change. It was done to boys, often by decision of adults around them, and it is now understood as a harmful and wrong thing to do to a child. We say this plainly, and we will not go into medical detail.
Castrati were singing in the Sistine Chapel by 1558, and by about 1680 they largely replaced other male voices in leading opera roles, a position they held for roughly a century [4]. One scholar dates the "golden days" of the castrati to about 1650–1750 [2].
What did they sound like? Descriptions say the voice combined a child's small vocal cords and high range with an adult's lungs and chest. Wikipedia's summary of that research also mentions long ribs and bones as a possible factor [4], but this is a hypothesis, not settled science. With no recordings of the greatest stars, we cannot hear exactly what listeners praised.
The custom was eventually outlawed. After Italy was unified in 1861, the operation became illegal throughout the new country, though not every region applied the law at once [4].
4. Farinelli: The Most Famous Castrato Who Left the Stage to Sing for a King
The best-known castrato was Carlo Broschi, called Farinelli (1705–1782). He came to London in 1734 and his success helped keep an opera company in business. In the summer of 1737, while still under contract there, he was invited to the Spanish court [5].
He went, left the stage, and spent about 22 years serving the Spanish royal family, until 1759. He gave private evening recitals for King Philip V, and later organized court operas and festivities under Ferdinand VI [5]. Britannica's summary says his singing eased Philip's deep gloom [6].
A popular story says he once held a note longer than a trumpeter in a contest. Wikipedia reports that this story is unverified, and that no known piece he sang has a soprano aria with trumpet part [5]. His range is usually given as about F3 to D6, but we treat that figure as approximate. The story has been repeated for centuries, but there is no solid evidence for it.
5. 1903: When the Pope Decided High Church Parts Belong to Boys
On 22 November 1903, Pope Pius X issued a document called Tra le sollecitudini ("Among the concerns"), a set of rules for church music. One passage says that whenever a church wants "the acute voices of sopranos and contraltos," those parts "must be taken by boys, according to the most ancient usage of the Church" [1].
The document does not mention castrati by name. But historians describe it as the point where their role in church music ended [4]. Reportedly, earlier popes had already stopped approving new ones [4]. Moreschi stayed at the Sistine Chapel until about Easter 1913, when he qualified for a pension after thirty years of service [3]. He died in 1922.
So the 1902 recordings were made just before a rule that helped end the tradition. If the Vatican had not been visited by a recording crew that April, no castrato's solo voice would be known at all.
6. Who Sings the Castrato Roles Today?
Mostly countertenors. A countertenor is a man who sings in the high range, and most use a method called falsetto, a light head voice, for the upper part of that range [8]. In the twentieth century, the singer Alfred Deller made the voice famous, and the composer Benjamin Britten wrote the role of Oberon in his 1960 opera A Midsummer Night's Dream for him [8].
Many roles originally written for castrati, such as the title roles in Handel's Rinaldo and Giulio Cesare, are now sung and recorded by countertenors [8]. That is not the same sound as a castrato's. The method is different, and nobody can say how close the match is. But you can hear the same music sung in a new way.
7. How to Explore This Yourself
Try a gentle experiment: with a quiet voice, slide from a low note up to a high one, like a slow siren. Many people feel the voice "flip" at one point. The part above the flip is closer to falsetto. Keep the sound gentle, and stop if your throat feels uncomfortable.
Then, with a parent or teacher, look in a library or music app for a historical-recordings collection that includes Moreschi's 1902 discs, and for a countertenor singing Handel's Giulio Cesare. Listen to both, and ask: what is the same, and what is different?