Table of Contents

Preface Note on Textual Transcription, Translations, Lexicon, and Musical Nomenclature PART ONE. Reproduction 1. Of Strange Births and Comic Kin Appendix to Chapter 1 2. The Man Who Pretended to Be Who He Was PART TWO. Voice 3. Red Hot Voice 4. Castrato De Luxe PART THREE. Half-light 5. Cold Man, Money Man, Big Man Too 6. Shadow Voices, Castrato and Non Acknowledgments Abbreviations Notes Bibliography List of Illustrations Index

About the Author

Martha Feldman is President-Elect of the American Musicological Society and Mabel Green Myers Professor of Music, Romance Languages and Literatures and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. She is the author of City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice and Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy and coeditor of The Courtesan's Arts.

Reviews

"Rich in scholarship and filled with subtle analysis." -- Colm Toibin London Review of Books "This is a remarkable book... An impressive achievement." -- Nicholas Clapton Early Music "Meticulously researched, beautifully written and richly illustrated ... In this book, as erudite as it is gripping, there is little to criticize." Cultural History "?Feldman's high-mindedness? ... ?allows her to investigate this most easily sensationalized of topics with subtlety, taste and doses of scholarship that are not suffocatingly encyclopedic?... ?If you love singing there's every reason to read The Castrato?.?" -- Tim Pfaff The Bay Area Reporter