For a solid portion of musical history, castrato singers or ‘castrati’ had a prominent role in operas, churches and courts across Europe. But why were young boys forced to undergo the gruesome ...

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Castrati, boys castrated before the onset of puberty to preserve their high-pitched voices, played heroic male leads in Italian opera from the mid-17th to late 18th centuries. Farinelli, born Carlo ...

Listen to the "last castrato", Alessandro Moreschi, recorded in 1902. The castrato's voice was prized for its combination of pitch and power - an unbroken male voice able to reach the highest notes, ...

Castrati were the singing superstars of the 18th Century. But, as a new exhibition illustrates, theirs is a tale with some modern parallels. They look rather innocent in the museum display case - like ...

Over 250 years after Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice presented opera in a new way, an acrobatic staging aims to do the same. Iestyn Davies, whose Orpheus will be amid the tumblers, dancers and acrobats, ...

Along with its many acts of musical patronage, the Roman Catholic Church perpetrated one appalling musical outrage. By banning women's voices from places of worship, the church fostered an economic ...

In 1775, Dorothea Maunsell and her new husband, William Long Kingsman, went to court to show that they were indeed legally married. They had already had two wedding ceremonies (one in Italy, the other ...