Głos utracony - kastrat jako fenomen fizjologiczny, artystyczny, kulturowy

ENThis article is an extended version of the postdoctoral lecture of the Authoress delivered at the Faculty of History of the Warsaw University in March of 1998 and docs not set up claims to originality, being mainly a compilation of all results of the research pursued by other European and American researchers, only occasionally complemented by the conclusions based on the own examinations of the Authoress. In the Polish musicology, however, this is the first attempt of such extensive depiction of the problem for the music of capital Baroque - it is an attempt to describe the phenomenon of castrato, an artist nowadays extinct forever, though once a conditio sine qua non of the Italian dramini per muska, oratorios, cantatas and other genres of vocal-instrumental Baroque music, today being revived in increasing numbers. The Authoress presents the figure of castrato in a comprehensive way, beginning with the reception with which these artists met at various times and in different countries of Europe, and in addition - expressed in diverse forms, also artistic ones, among others literary and painterly. At the same time she attempts to answer the question of when, where and why the practice of castration for musical purposes began to spread in Europe, and when and why the castratos disappeared from the musical world. Yet the main part of the text is devoted to description of castrato as a phenomena: physiological (surgery and its physical effects), artistic (voice attributes, performing style, opera roles, education, Farinelli “castrato of castratos”), and cultural (social and national origins of the castratos, variable in time and space number of castratos, their social and financial standing).Furthermore, the Authoress presents the sketch summarising the castratos’ activity in the musical culture of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, from as early as 1595 (therefore the Polish court of King Sigismund III would be the one of the first extra-Alpine European musical centres cultivating this kind of singing), till the last years of King Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski (Italian operas seria in the repertoire of the Warsaw National Theatre). The Authoress takes into consideration not only the accomplishments of imported - i.e. Italian virtuosos (including such celebrities as Baldassare Ferri, Domenico Annibali, Ventura Rochetti, Luigi Marchesi, Domenico Bruni, etc.), but also pays attention to contribution to the national history of music of Polish castratos, meritorious for both the court culture (Stefan Jaroszewicz as a singer of the Polish band of King Augustus III), and Church culture (Piotr Polakowski as a singer and bandmaster in the Pauline Monastery of Jasna Góra at Częstochowa). A final issue addressed in the present article are the contemporary ways of recreating the voice of a castrato in increasingly numerous stage, concert and studio realisations of the musical compositions that were composed for specific qualities of the voices of castratos - special and exceptional artists in the history of music, and today entirely - fortunately - extinct.