Today's Stories

Weekend Edition
November 20-22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
CounterPunch Diary
It's Show Trial Time

Gareth Porter
New Light on the Qom Facility

Mike Whitney
The Great Stimulus Debate of '09: Crybabies need not apply

Fred Gardner
Mammography
Pushes Back

James J. Brittain
It's Really a War on the Poor
A War on Coca Nobody Believes

Alan Farago
Bulletin from the Dark Side Florida's Replican Ultras

Jonathan Cook
Rabbi Followers 'Terror Cell in Parliament'

David Macaray
A Hindu Version of the UAW
Labor Strife in India

Binoy Kampmark
The Israeli Exception: Gilo and East Jerusalem

Ben Sonnenberg
Ashes and Diamonds
Retirement Norwegian Style

Ron Jacobs
Judge Roy Bean Takes Manhattan

David Yearsley
200,000 Testicles Offered Up to the Gods of Song

Brenda Norrell
A Border Runs Through Them:
The Struggles of the Tohono O'odham

Ron Ridenour
The Tamils and Equal Rights of Self Determination

November 19, 2009

Christopher Ketcham
The Dumbest Newspapers at the Center of the World

Shamus Cooke
A Fraudulent Jobs Summit

John V. Walsh
Impotent in China

Saul Landau
Dissidents Make Noise--Oops, News

Ralph Nader
Exiting Afghanistan

Nikolas Kozloff
Blackout in Brazil

Fred Gardner
Reputable MDs Buy NorCal Health Care

Charles R. Larson
Voices of the Silenced

John A. Murphy
Nader v. Dodd

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Obama's Gray World

November 18, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Religious Scoundrel

John Ross
Hot Oil!

Conn Hallinan
Strategic Towns: Why Gen. McChrystal's Plan Will Fail

Mike Whitney
Obama's China Junket

Ray McGovern
The Bogus Success of the Surge

Nelson P. Valdés
Cyber Cuba: Internet, Broadband and Foreign Policy

Ramzy Baroud
Globalization Unchecked

Ron Ridenour
Tamil Eelam: the Historic Right to Nationhood

November 17, 2009

Mike Whitney
Let's Get Fiscal

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Double Crossed: War Vets Deported

Brian M. Downing
Do They Subscribe to GQ at the Pentagon?

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Two-Tiered Justice System

Joanne Mariner
A First Look at the Military Commisions Act

Dean Baker
Obama's Nuclear Option on the Yuan

Martha Rosenberg
Pig Hell at Wal-Mart Supplier

Danny Weil
Fear in Nicaragua

David Macaray
Retail Sales as Combat

Laura Flanders
Buried Bonanza for Over-Builders

Walter Brasch
Rush to Judgment on Terror Trials

November 16, 2009

Alan Nasser
Obama's Flawed Case Against Single Payer

Jonathan Cook
Campus Watch Copy Cats

Mark Weisbrot
Obama, China and the Dollar

Carol Miller
We Need Health Care, Not Insurance

Gary Leupp
The Andolan in Kathmandu and the Revolution to Follow

Harry Clark
Justice Goldstone at Brandeis

Ray McGovern
Shining a Light on the Roots of Terrorism

Norman Solomon
California Democrats Urge Obama to Leave Afghanistan

Ron Ridenour
Genocide in Sri Lanka

Norm Kent
Doctors Light Up

Brenda Norrell
Torture Resisters Arrested at Fort Huachuca

November 13-15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
A Man in a Hundred

Patrick Cockburn
Meet Our Afghan Ally: Stealing Money, Selling Heroin and Raping Boys

Tariq Ali
Short Cuts in Afghanistan

Douglas Lummis
Obama, Hatoyama and Okinawa

Vijay Prashad
Can the Major Speak?

Carl Ginsburg
Cornering the Market on Ambition

Manuel García, Jr.
The Purpose is Pork

Rannie Amiri
The Disastrous Presidency of Mahmoud Abbas

Mary Lynn Cramer
Death By Denial: the Militarization of Mental Health

Fred Gardner
Pot Doc Down

Dave Lindorff
Health Care Reform: DOA

Robert Jensen
How I Stopped Hating Thanksgiving and Learned to be Afraid

David Macaray
Wal-Mart Death Stampede Revisited

Corporate Crime Reporter
Exposing Timberland: Nike Foe Jeff Ballinger Zeros in on a New Target

Ron Jacobs
No More Star Spangled Eyes

David Model
NATO's Chimerical Enemy in Afghanistan

John V. Walsh
Godless China: What Obama Will Find

Jon Mitchell
Beggars' Belief

Stuart Easterling
Blaming the Narcos in Mexico

Dan Bacher
Big Oil Takes Over Marine "Protection" in California

Franklin Lamb
Lebanese Students Advise Obama on How to Get It Right

Farzana Versey
Moderns, Models and Martyrs

Charles R. Larson
War, Peace and Paramilitaries in Colombia

Saul Landau
The Coen Bros. Brutalize Job

David Yearsley
When the Cirque Meets the Beatles

Lorenzo Wolff
At the Side of the Frontman

Poets' Basement
Blaine, Rivas and Cox

November 12, 2009

Robert Weissman
Maniacal Deregulation

Franklin Spinney
The Afghan War Question

Nadia Hijab
After Fort Hood

Afshin Rattansi
Night Vision: Why US Sanctions on Syria Will Kill American Soldiers

Paul Craig Roberts
America's Dismal Future

Ralph Nader
Failing the People on Health Care

Belén Fernández
Tourists of the Honduran Counter-Revolution

Allan J. Lichtman
A National Peacemaker's Day

Dave Lindorff
President Peacenik's War

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Headline of the Year

November 11, 2009

Andrew Cockburn
The Crafting of a Loophole

Mike Whitney
A Small "d" Depression

Rev. Jesse Jackson
Where's the Jobs Stimulus?

Jeff Nygaard
Iranian Irrationality? Maybe Not

Stewart J. Lawrence
Honduran Regime Reneges on Political Deal

James Ridgeway
The End of the Little Red Cars: Memories of East Berlin

Eamonn McCann
Blood on Their Hands

Michael Ortiz Hill
Unbecoming War and Terrorism

Shepherd Bliss
From Oklahoma City to Fort Hood

Walter Brasch
"This is Jenna Bush Reporting ... "

November 10, 2009

Ellen Cantarow
Heroism in a Vanishing Landscape

Dean Baker
How to Raise $140 Billion a Year From Wall Street Banks

Rose Ann DeMoro
The Truth About the House Health Care Bill

Ramzy Baroud
Inch by Inch, House by House: How Israel Won the Settlement Battle...Again

Peter Lee
The Dalai Lama Sticks His Thumb in the Dragon's Eye

Dave Lindorff
Blaming the Workers

Roberto Rodriguez
Running Past PTSD (Or My Susto Profundo)

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Self-Dismembering F-35

Alan Farago
The Rising Tide

Joseph Grosso
The Legacy of Albert Parsons

November 9, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Leave Afghanistan to the Afghans

Linn Washington
Fox Finds a New Black Boogeyman

Carl Ginsburg
To be Young and Unemployed Forever

Jeff Leys
War Funding, 2010

John A. Murphy
Can Lieberman Save Single Payer? Why Progressives Should Back a Filibuster

John Halle
Bard and the Lobby: Final Thoughts on the Kovel Affair

Bouthaina Shaaban
Clinton Dances With Netanyahu

James Ridgeway
Heath Care: Winning a Battle, Losing the War

Dave Lindorff
The Kafka Economy

David Macaray
The Philadelphia Transit Strike

Stephen Fleischman
The Tea Party System

Website of the Day
Cap-and-Trade: The Huge Mistake

November 6-8, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Too Fat to Fight

Mark Grueter
Inside the American University of Iraq

Paul Craig Roberts
The Evil Empire

Patrick Cockburn
Friendly Fire

Gareth Porter
Karzai's Cabinet of Warlords

Mike Whitney
The Battle of Seattle, 10 Years Later

James Bovard
How the Media Enables Government Lies

Dean Baker
Don't Touch the Banks!

Robert Lawless
Empires and the Sullying of Anthropology

Saul Landau
Afghanistan: a War Without Logic

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Black Ops and Fort Hood

Stephanie Westbrook
My Memories of Fort Hood

M. Shahid Alam
How Eurocentric Are You?

Marc Levy
Walking With Mr. Muhammad

Franklin Lamb
Obama's Mid-East Mess

Ron Jacobs
A New Map of Hell

David Ker Thomson
Afternoon With Tulip

John V. Whitbeck
Moment of Truth

Julien Mercille
Drugs and Afghanistan: the UN's Misleading Report

Rannie Amiri
Egypt's Next Unelected President?

John Ross
Legalize It!

David Michael Green
Can You Hear Us Now?

Carl Finamore
Strike One for Hotels in San Francisco

Farzana Versey
The Farce of Fatwas and Political Expediency

Missy Comley Beattie
No to Single Payer, Yes to Prayer?

Charles R. Larson
Business as Usual in India

David Yearsley
Anna Magdalena, Music and the Art of Dying

Kim Nicolini
"Paranormal Activity:" a DIY Horror Film

Poets' Basement
Three Poems by Devreaux Baker

November 5, 2009

Pam Martens
The Fire Sale of America

Vijay Prashad
The Great Heretic

Brian Gallagher
The Soldiers From Standard Oil: Harvard, ROTC and American Foreign Policy

Norman Solomon
The Next Phase in Health Care Apartheid

Nadia Hijab
The Battle for Palestinian Representation

Joseph Shansky
And the Winner in Honduras is ... the United States?

Andy Thayer
Questions and Answers From Maine

Tracy Rosenberg
Pacifica and the Barbarians Who Pay the Bills

Website of the Day
All Folked Up

November 4, 2009

Stan Cox
The Inflated Promise of Natural Gas

Andy Worthington From Gitmo to Palau: Who are the Uighurs?

Robert Weissman
The Medicare-for-All Moment

Susan Galleymore
Of Veterans and Volunteers

Ralph Nader
Hoh's Afghanistan Warning

Michael Leonardi
Italy's Secret Ships of Poison

Bitta Mistofi
Death to No One: Isolating and Taunting Iran Will Only Empower the Regime

Robert Bryce
From Lahore to Copenhagen

Martha Rosenberg
Is Your Doctor's Continuing Ed Funded by Drug Makers?

Dave Lindorff
Democrats Crash and Burn

Website of the Day
Single-Payer Backtrackers

November 3, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
The Delegitimization of Karzai

Mike Whitney
Why the Crisis Isn't Going Away

Franklin C. Spinney
Katrina and the Paralysis of Fear

Laura Carlsen
The Little Coup That Couldn't

Serge Halimi
Don't Blame the Internet

John Stanton
Social Decay in America

Sophia Weeks
A Guatemalan Lament

Dave Lindorff
Country Joe, Kenny Rogers and Obama

November 2, 2009

Steven Higgs
Autism Spikes, Toxins Suspected

Ishmael Reed
White in America: Behind the Scenes at CNN

David Macaray
UAW Members Vote Down Ford; and the Media Attacked the Union

Bouthaina Shaaban
Settler Colonialism: Return to the Middle Ages

David Michael Green
Coming to Get You

David Swanson
The Two Percent Robustness

Ellen Brown
Cutting Wall Street Out

Adam Federman
Trading the Watershed to Trash the Catskills

James McEnteer
Doppleganger Politics: Star Wars, Clone Wars

Stephen Fleischman
Foot in the Door: Capitalism and Health Care

Website of the Day
Secret California Park Giveaway

October 30 - Nov. 1, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Long Gaze of the State

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
Facing Down the Machine: Mike Roselle Draws a Line

Carl Ginsburg
Living in the Shadow of Yankee Stadium

Mike Whitney
Obama Goes Wobbly Over More Stimulus

Joe Bageant
The Iron Cheer of Empire

Gareth Porter
Security By Warlords: the CIA's Afghan Payroll

Saul Landau
The Cuban Embargo

Anthony DiMaggio
Conspiracy, Inc.: Wild Tales From the Reactionary Right

Dave Lindorff
Happy Talk Amid the Wreckage: Stocks Up, Jobs Down

Rannie Amiri
The Spooks of Beirut

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
An Afghan Travelogue

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Who Will Reform the Health Care Reform?

Rev. William E. Alberts
God's Favorite Team (and Nation and Religion)

Alvaro Huerta
The Abominable Mr. Dobbs

Martha Rosenberg
Marketing Drugs to Psychoneurotics

Binoy Kampmark
Don't Give Us Your Wretched: Refugee Policy in OZ

Norm Kent
Not Just Zig-Zag Any More: Medical Marijuana Goes Mainstream

Charles R. Larson Roth's "The Humbling:" Nothing Like a Novel From an Old Pro

Ron Jacobs
One Man's Truth, Another Man's Lies

David Yearsley
Not Loud Enough by Half

Lorenzo Wolff
The Vulnerability of Lauryn Hill

Kim Nicolini
"Big Fan:" Football, Class and Sexuality in America

Poets' Basement
Davies, Heyen and Orloski

Website of the Weekend
Coal Country Music

October 29, 2009

Michael Neumann
Criticism of Israel: a Wonderful Hiding Place

Mike Whitney
Housing Rebound? Not So Fast

Gary Leupp
Matthew Hoh Speaks Truth to Power

Conn Hallinan
Roman Roads and Modern Emperors

Marshall Auerback
Obama's Bogus Populism: Pay Curbs and Bank Loans

Laura Flanders
Palin's Pet Doug Hoffman Has Taliban Ties

Eamonn McCann
The War Criminal Vote: Blair or Karadzic for EU President?

David Macaray
Strange Invaders: Can Ignorance and Arrogance Win Hearts and Minds?

Mark Weisbrot
When Small Countries Lead the Way

Stephen Soldz
Psychologist Complicity in Torture Challenged

Christopher Brauchli
Will the Pope Bring the Taliban Into His Flock?

Website of the Day
The USS Liberty Affair and the Problem of Truth in History

October 28, 2009

Moshe Adler
How to Reduce Unemployment, Rebuild the Middle Class and Free Ourselves From Wall Street

Dave Lindorff
America's Drug Crisis: Brought to You by the CIA

Frank Joseph Smecker
Agaisnt Prometheus: an Interview with Derrick Jensen on Science and Technology

Alexandra Early
What a "Jobless" Recovery Means for Young Workers

M. Shahid Alam
Israeli Exceptionalism

Vijay Prashad
Sahelian Blowback: What's Happening in Mali?

John Ross
Three Years Later, Brad Will is Still Dead

Franklin Lamb
A Rare Victory for Lebanon's Palestinians

Gregory Travis
The Dismal Science: Elinor Ostrom's Nobel

Susan Galleymore
Peace Cycle to Palestine

Website of the Day
Newspaper Decline, a Graphic Display

October 27, 2009

Mike Whitney
Black Tuesday and How We Got Out of It

Patrick Cockburn
Bombs Will Go Off in Baghdad, Whether the US is There or Not

Stewart J. Lawrence
Honduran Coup Myths Dispelled

Alan Farago
Power Plays in Florida: Rate Increases, Nukes and Deception

Ralph Nader
Obama: Form Letters and Business as Usual

Dave Lindorff
Pentagon Dirty Bombers: DU in America

Bouthaina Shaaban
The Danger of Towing the Line Behind Israel

Brian M. Downing Elections in Afghanistan, the Second Time Around

Iain Boal
How You Can Save Pacifica

Carl Finamore
Hotel Workers and the Law of Momentum

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Here Comes That Third Party: Palin and the Constitutionalists

Website of the Day
How Bank of America Charges for Perfect Credit

October 26, 2009

Bill Quigley /
Deborah Popowski
When Gitmo and Abu Ghraib Come Home

Paul Craig Roberts
Are You Ready for the Next Crisis?

Uri Avnery
A Tsunami Called Goldstone

Mike Whitney
Will the Dollar Remain the World's Reserve Currency in Five Years?

Michael Snedeker
The Execution of Cameron Willingham

Shamus Cooke
Obama's Dirty War on Immigrants

David Michael Green
Paranoia for Breakfast

Martha Rosenberg
Gagging Michael Pollan

Patrick Bond
Gridlock on the Way to Copenhagen

Binoy Kampmark
Heading for the Tiber

Website of the Day
Goldman Sachs Abandons Kittens

Weekend Edition
November 20-22, 2009

200,000 Testicles Offered Up
to the Gods of Song

Great Castrati of the 18th Century

By DAVID YEARSLEY

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 Clooney, Madonna, Brittany Spears or of those opera singers’ most direct modern descendant, Michael Jackson. Conspiracy theories still swirl that he was a castrato, gave up his balls to preserve his voice.

Even before modern media culture saturated the globe and the mind, the leading men—their numerous detractors would have called them half-men, geldings, or eunuchs—of the 18th-century operatic theatre commanded salaries as high in relative terms as those of the best paid Hollywood stars. They were feted and often ennobled by heads of state, not merely given hollow titles like that of Sir Ian or Dame Judy, but estates and power and the diverse accoutrements of vast prestige.

Answering to the highest bidders among royal theatres across Europe, from St. Petersburg to London to Naples, these stars moved about the civilized world in immeasurable luxury.  Rather than the suspiciously gold-plated statuettes handed out by fellow actors at the behest of a couple of thousand Hollywood insiders, the brightest stars of the 18th century received real gold from real kings and real queens: jewels, rings, swords, snuff boxes, and countless other artifacts of worldly glory, not to mention Old Master paintings, rare and ornate musical instruments, huge yearly stipends, palaces, and sculpted monuments to their immortality.

As is the case with our present stars, these singers were looked upon by both beau monde and rabble with a paradoxical mixture of reverence and loathing, those two sides of the coin of celebrity. Then as now, the opposing forces of disgust and admiration, awe and jealousy, fascination and repulsion fueled great fame and fortune. Like our movie star-obsessed popular culture, that of the 18th-century was similarly propped up by the tabloid press and free-flowing celebrity money.

Castration  was an officially illegal operation often carried out at the behest of poor families to preserve a promising soprano voice from the hormones that would change it and thereby prevent an operatic career. A fall from the horse or an attack by a goose were the usual stories told, and these were accepted, if at all, with a wink.  Like today’s poor kids who dream of an NBA contract, the overwhelming majority of castrati were not gifted with enough voice or talent or luck to make it in the super-competitive world of opera.  Most ended up leading a marginal existence as singers for the church or as sex workers catering to specialized tastes—or both. The failed film actors of today are more likely to make a lateral move to the porn industry than to the monastery.

Like Brazilian soccer stars, castrati were usually known by a single stage name adopted in honor of a patron or a place of birth or another famed singer. Carlo Broschi, aka Farinelli, was the most famous castrato of the 18th-century—indeed he was the most famous musician of the age, and held universally to be its greatest most affecting performer. He took his name from a Neapolitan magistrate, Farina, whose sons had sung with the Broschis and who supported the young singer. Farinelli’s three octave range (quite similar to that of the aforementioned Michael Jackson), huge dynamic scope (from a nearly inaudible pianissimo to a massive fortissimo), agility of voice that could out-duel instrumental virtuosos, and lunge power that could sustain notes and phrases at unprecedented lengths—all these gifts made him rich and famous.

Like most great male singers he made his debut in Rome in drag in a female role, and then went on to portray a string of great heroes, both mythic and historic. After conquering London in the mid-1730s he was, so to speak, optioned by the Spanish Royal house, and spent more than a decade singing his most celebrated arias every night for the melancholic King Philip V.

With his titles and immense wealth Farinelli then returned to Italy for his last decades, constructing a villa outside of Bologna and filling it with his treasures and the still bright aura of his fame. He was of course, without issue, but as one English visitor put in 1771: “he has a sister and two of her children with him, one of whom is an infant, of which he is dotingly fond, though it is cross, sickly, homely, and unamiable.”  Like the last years of nearly all stars, those of the castrati are almost always cast as sad ones, since they are always represent the end of their own line.  There would be no Farinelli, Jr., no Farinellino: the castrato’s immortality can never be biological. The need for love and intimacy even with visitors and with children again recalls Jacko-lino.

Not all castrati were plucked from the underclass.  The notorious Caffarelli, who often treated other members of an opera’s cast as competitors to be humiliated by means of outlandish one-upman’s-ship or derisive mimicry, came from a wealthy background.  Yet his musical promise was so great that he sacrificed — or was made to sacrifice — his testicles for the great career he eventually pursued across Europe. In spite of the operation, he apparently cut a wide sexual swathe through the boudoirs of Italy, England, and France. There is continued debate on the real sexual prowess of castrati, but those who went under the knife near puberty seem to have retained their erectile function and the powers of pleasure that led to so many erotic conquests, or at least to the rumors of them.
    
Casanova describes how he fell in love with a singer nicknamed Bellino. Like Farinelli, Bellino had been singing a female role in an opera in Rome. Later, in an intimate moment, Casanova grabbed for the singer’s crotch only to discover that the soprano was wearing a false penis, and was actually a women impersonating a male castrato so as to avoid the Roman ban on females on the opera stage. One could imagine not dissimilar hijinx in Hollywood.

With the rise to prominence in the recent years of a number of brilliant countertenors, the high heroic roles of Handel’s operas have again been performed by powerful and virtuosic male singers, returning to these long-neglected or maltreated works their dramatic and musical power. But even countertenors of the caliber of the current class of the field, David Daniels, probably only approximate the qualities and skills of the castrati of yore. The only recordings of a castrato—those made in the first years of the 20th century of the papal singer, Alberto Moreschi, the so-called Angel of Rome—eerily conjure only a distant sense of the glorious voices of Farinelli, Senesino, and the other members of their illustrious pantheon.

Over the past decade some excellent CDs devoting to the repertoire of the castrati have been made: David Daniels, Andreas Scholl, and most recently the Frenchman Philippe Jaroussky’s  2007  release on Virgin Classics of a disc dedicated to the legacy of Carestini, who sang oratorios for Handel and operas for his chief rival, the Neapolitan Nicolo Porpora. Carestini also starred for two of the greatest theatrical composers before Mozart, Johann Adolph Hasse. All of these composers are represented on the recording. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000VLR0JM/ref=cm_rdp_product_img/176-2866580-1947018. Jaroussky can sing fast and light; he makes the difficult sound easy, tossing off astounding passage work with sprezzatura. His voice must not have the richness of the great male sopranos of the 18th century. But it is infinitely nuanced and expressive. Detractors favoring the more powerful approach of a David Daniels might call the sound boy-like. Indeed, Jaroussky doesn’t quite achieve that paradoxically macho effect of the castrato, but there is real complexity behind the deceptively pure impression his voice makes. Though Jaroussky can and does use naiveté as a compelling musical topic, that is only a slender part of his huge affective range. On the cover he stands in a black suit without tie, hands in his trousers. He wears a black butterfly mask meant to conjure mystery, Venice, ambiguity: it is an image that plays lightly with its own theatricality.

The same cannot be said of the most recent Castrato blockbuster, Sacrificium, which appeared a couple of weeks ago from Decca (http://www.amazon.com/Cecilia-Bartoli-Sacrificium/dp/B002GYGSXG/ref=pd_bxgy_m_img_c) and is in the top twenty of all records on Amazon. This time it’s a woman with an extraordinary voice—Cecilia Bartoli—who does battle with fifteen classic castrato arias, eleven of which have never been recorded before. A bonus disc includes three famous tracks, among them the outlandishly difficult Son qual nave, the surging cresting vocal lines meant to evoke a ship tossed on the waves. Written by Riccardo Broschi for his brother Farinelli, the piece became the star castrato’s most popular suitcase aria, to be shoehorned into any opera on any stage across Europe, regardless of plot or circumstance.

This insanely demanding workout is attacked at supersonic tempos by Bartoli and the Italian baroque orchestra Il giardino harmonico that backs her up. Led by Giovanni Antonini Italian soprano, the band takes a ballistic approach to 18th-century music, an attitude reflected in the cover to their recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons which shows a bullet exiting a shattered Stradivarius. The guys in Il giardino harmonico are the baroque music equivalent of the killer posse in a Spaghetti Western. To paraphrase Tuco in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: “When you have to play, play don’t talk.” The effect is gritty, macho, violent, with amorous detours to the brothel for a whiff of perfume and a caress of flesh: when it comes to love—arias of seducation and longing—the band knows how to go through the motions. I’m just not sure that Vivaldi, Handel, Popora or even Broschi would be that impressed by the gallop of hooves and the spray of Winchesters in their gallant arias of martial and marital conquest.

Alongside this showstopper, Son qual nave, is the evergreen Ombra mai fu by Handel, a piece that like several others on the two discs, allows the singer to demonstrate the command over a single long held note, another remarkable musical skill of the castrati, whose hormonal imbalances often created much chest cavities, as caricatures of Handel’s leading man, Sensino, show.  What the best of these pieces prove—and there are none better than Ombrai mai fu—is that with the swells and shadings on pitch more can be expressed than in the most spectacular fireworks.  The real pay-off for castration came in the most intimate musical moments’ not in the most spectacular.

As for Bartoli, her technical command is beyond impressive, it is downright unbelievable: she sings loud and fast and hits every difficult note across her three-octave vocal range. Renowned for her Rossini, Bartoli disports herself on these showpiece arias with superior bravura. These must be the hardest things she’s ever sung, and she does so without a slip, at least after the digital scalpel has been wielded by the boys at Decca. For the pyrotechnics and pathos of big-screen, 18th-century opera this disc sets a new standard.

What is less appealing than these musical heroics is the packaging. The title Sacrificium is meant to commemorate what the uncredited writer of the 150 page booklet claims were 100,000 boys sacrificed to the surgeon’s knife.  By my count that’s 200,000 testicles offered up to the gods of song, though the number might be marginally higher if you want to believe the legend surrounding the castrato Tenducci. He claimed to have had three, and kept one somehow hidden from the surgeon.

The cover of Sacrificium, shows the Bartoli’s head, with its moistened black curls falling onto the marbel shoulders classical nude, veined with cracks and streaked with carrera gray. The crotch of undetermined anatomical correctness is visbile at the bottom right corner. Most of the booklet is devoted to the “Castrato Compendium” with entries ranging from biographies of famous singers to “the procedure” to “X-rated.” Among the prose are historic images of the operation and photos of castrating tools. And there are still more photo-shop nudes with a literally sculpted Bartoli, the most egregious of which comes on a page with block letters “Evviva il coltellino!” (Long live the knife). Opera audiences would shout the phrase after a particularly compelling demonstration of the castrato’s art.  On this page the dot above the “i” in “Evviva” is placed itself right over the penis, the testicles bunching just below. That’s the closest we come to an anatomical confrontation with the emasculated singers of yore, whose stratospheric art came at such a cost. By having the grandiose and titillating consort so promiscuously in these pages the motivations for making Sacrificium appears ridiculous. Here is a case where music speaks much louder than words. I’m not here to quibble with excellent idea of cross-dressing with a Roman marble, ersatz or otherwise, but merely to take issue with the self-presentation of the diva as the Patron Saint of Fallen Testicles.

The drama and hype of our movie elites pales against the colorful world of 18th-century star culture. By comparison to the castrato’s down payment, a facelift is a small price to pay for fifteen more minutes of fame.

David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. He is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London”, has just been released by Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu

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Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont