Letting Go of “My Castrato”: The Making of “Songs and Arias Ornamented by Giovanni Battista Velluti, the Last Operatic Castrato”

By Robert Crowe

NB: This is not really a scholarly article. As P. G. Wodehouse wrote in the preface to The World of Mr. Mulliner, “I am writing as funny as I can, and I can only hope there will be no ill results.” “Funny,” that is, within the bounds of musicology—ours is not a discipline particularly given to hilarity.

Giovanni Battista Velluti (1780–1861), or Giambattista, or even Gianni, as some of his friends seem to have called him, has been my constant companion since 2011. Back when I thought Angus Heriot’s 1956 The Castrati in Opera was a good, reliable source (was I ever so young?),[1] Velluti’s wild, Tom-Jones-without-the-full-equipment life (Fielding’s eponymous adventurer, not the Welsh sex bomb), full of saucy stories of flirtations—and more—with divas both operatic and aristocratic, of narrow escapes from their jealous boyfriends, of improbably witty badinage with emperors, queens, and skeptical policemen of all descriptions, was highly entertaining. But what really piqued my curiosity was his life and all of its collisions with the surrounding world—a stranger in a strange land—dragging all the accoutrements of the eighteenth century with him, deep into the nineteenth. Stared at, gossiped about, closely observed (very closely, going by some caricaturists’ fascination with his fancy trousers and their contents), lied about, mythologized, lionized, “monstered”—all while he was walking the same streets with those who were busily rewriting—and redrawing—his existence.

The cartoon in figure 1 was published in 1825 and caricatures the London aristocracy’s fawning reception of Velluti. Note, however, the skepticism of two of the society ladies as compared to the general delight of the men—one lady with two enormous feathers sits just in front of (probably) the Duke of Wellington. (The hero of Waterloo was a big Velluti fan). The other, far right, is training her opera glasses, apparently, upon Velluti’s trousers. They are not taken in. Note the trousers. Note them closely, because those two ladies clearly have. Where a man should probably bulge at least a little, Velluti does almost the opposite. The frilly fly, the strange, almost . . . well, let’s leave it at strange . . . decorations on the thigh: this is typical of 1820s English humor. Unsubtle. Note also that the puns are helpfully underlined, so that one knows they are puns. Other tentative identifications: far left foreground, Maria García (later Malibran), who shared many of these 1825 concerts with Velluti; the other officer in uniform, Lord Burghersh; the infatuated lady next to him, Lady Burghersh. If the cartoon is at all representational—given the accompaniment of flute and spinet—this is likely a performance of the “Romanza” from Tebaldo e Isolina—a frequent concert piece for Velluti, especially in the 1825 London concert season.

At the end of Velluti’s London period, a teenaged Felix Mendelssohn was terrified and disgusted just by seeing the castrato walking outside his window; at another point, the by-then aged Velluti’s singing caused the poor young German to collapse and be carried out of the theater “half dead.”[2] Though I have grown to love the music, art, and literature of the Romantic—an unexpected event for a singer who has spent decades in the land of the baroque—I must confess a lingering impatience with all that swooning. Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1816, running, screaming, out of the room for no apparent reason other than being overcome with a sudden vision (of a skeleton lady—really, Percy?), or E. T. A. Hoffmann’s playing a passage in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and being scared out of his wits by the master’s audacity. Their hypersensitivity to the passions and wonders of the world all seems a bit much: a series of mises-en-scène staged for a friendly audience to assert the noble, delicate sufferer’s romantic bona fides, confirming their rightful membership in the Natural Aristocracy of the Artist. On the other hand, the above were all wildly accomplished artistic greats. Perhaps we moderns don’t swoon enough.

In 2011 I decided to enter fully into musicology as a discipline, rather than just something that I occasionally visited, looting unsuspecting archives for new concert material. I was told that if I wanted to get into a doctoral program, I had to write a “significant scholarly document.” In a short conversation over coffee with Joshua Rifkin, my future, invaluable Doktorvater (neither of us knew this at the time), he simply recommended I “write something I’d want to read.” Dangerous Advice, which I have seldom truly followed. A sixty-plus-page paper on G. B. Velluti in London (1825–29), something I would likely not want to read, was the result. During my time at Boston University, I tried to write, if not a life, then at least a complete account of Velluti’s time in London. The sudden appearance of a castrato in the heart of the romantic literati of London, already a pretty spooky bunch, caused all kinds of phantasmagoria to be written into existence, encouraged by the real phantasm in their midst. “[H]is whole appearance, his every look, and every motion . . . gave him, to my imagination at least, a preternatural effect. He looked like a being of another world.”[3]

Mary Shelley, fresh from dramatizing her Frankenstein for the stage, adored him. Leigh Hunt, still in penurious exile in Florence, thought he probably might adore him and, without having met him, wrote a 378-line poem, “Velluti to his Revilers,” to defend him against the slings and arrows of the monstering press, the Times of London foremost among them.[4] Later, after Hunt returned to London, and after he had presumably had a chance to get to know Velluti and his art, he seems to have decided that, on balance, he didn’t adore the castrato all that much. He suppressed his ode to Velluti for nearly three decades.

Fig. 2. Detail from “Velluti as Armando d’Orville,” The Parthenon (9 July 1825), in the collection of the author and reproduced by permission; Anonymous, review of Il crociato in The Examiner (London) 4 July 1825. (Note the “most injudicious bow of white satin ribbon,” as the Examiner writer opined, that holds his helmet in place. The mustache, obviously false, was also a focal point in mocking cartoons that appeared over the next year.)

That didn’t happen to me with Velluti. I got to know him, first as a newspaper figure, a caricature, then slowly I found more and more sources that dug more deeply in the man himself. My interest deepened, and my fondness grew (though not—reflecting poorly upon my romantic bona-fides—ever blossoming into adoration). What I found, in retrospect unsurprisingly, was that the apparently real, technicolor Velluti whom Heriot so vividly had portrayed was, in the primary sources, not really in evidence. (Please note, however, that, from the standpoint of style, I hold the writing of Angus Heriot in high regard.) I found in that Velluti’s place an apparently chaste, nervous, intense, arrogant, proud, handsome, extremely intelligent, extremely foolish, at times ludicrously pompous artist. Just before the opening curtain of the London premiere of Meyerbeer’s Il crociato in Egitto, he was shown a vicious attack upon him, printed that morning in the Times. “He drew himself up to his utmost height, his fine dark eyes glanced fire, he placed his hand on his bosom, turned towards the speaker [who was reading the article to Velluti] and merely said with all the dignity he could so well assume, ‘SON[O] VELLUTI.’ His friend skulked away, with a feeling between the sense of the sublime, and the ridiculous.”[5] How could you not like this guy?

Letters from Velluti—what did he think about the furor surrounding him?—are few, not terribly revealing and, at that time, not available to me anyway. (My thanks to Will Crutchfield, who this past spring gave me copies of most of them.) Where was his own voice—was it in his ornaments? I already knew of his ornamentation; J. Q. Davies has reprinted and analyzed his most famous treatment, that of the “Romanza” from the “lugubrious” (in John Ayrton’s view) Tebaldo e Isolina of Francesco Morlacchi.[6] Velluti gave this piece to Manuel García fils to be printed in his successive vocal treatises in the 1840s and 1850s. Here, and in many other treatments, Velluti reveals himself as a thinker, a wildly creative improver of other people’s landscapes. He didn’t simply add a few flowers or paint a smiley face on the sun (a characterization which, unsubtle and polemical though it may be, might well be applied to the ornamentational treatments of several of his contemporaries). He repainted these works—often mediocre daubs by now-forgotten composers—and created masterpieces of vocal-poetic illumination, where words once merely serviceably set now leapt off the page and into the imagination.

Although I spent comparatively little time on Velluti’s ornaments in my dissertation, the years spent writing it were also spent collecting as many different treatments of his as possible. This led to me to Belluno, Italy, one cold week in May—it snowed on us as we crossed the Alps, both coming and going—where I spent a few hours in the Fondo Velluti, actually held the manuscripts Velluti had held, and tried to decipher the many-times-crossed-out ornamentations and re-ornamentations he had added to his personal copy of the famous “Otto variazioni sul tema ‘Nel cor più non mi sento.’” Over the course of the next year, I came as close as possible to completing my collection—though true completion is impossible for a task who boundaries are unknown. Who knows how much is still out there, miscataloged, uncataloged, lying in a steamer trunk, wrapped around a leg of mutton, etc.? With trepidation, but also with a great deal of misplaced self-confidence, I approached A-R Editions. How hard could it be to do a critical edition? I asked myself. (Very hard, it turns out. Very rewarding, too, but hard.)

My plan was for an edition of thirty or so arias and songs that Velluti had either composed or, in truth, by other composers whose work he had then recomposed, almost always to the benefit of both the work and the original composer. John Fane, Lord Burghersh, an amateur composer, founder of the Royal Academy of Music, diplomat, and Velluti’s fan and protector, was one of the chief beneficiaries of the castrato’s reconstructive art. A-R accepted my proposal, and I began one of the more difficult processes of my life. My editor, Esther Criscuola de Laix, and I marched through the well-over 100 original sources, literally scores of scores, battling the chaos: barring, numbering, attribution (not everything with his name on it is really by him), flat or sharp or natural, and—most vigorously discussed—how to quantify undefined groupings of sixteenth notes which simply didn’t, couldn’t, and wouldn’t fit into the measure Velluti had assigned them. After many long months, we finally arrived at a mutually agreed-upon final version. At the same time, together with my long-time concert partner Joachim Enders (piano in this case, but also organ and harpsichord), I finished recording what is really the companion to this edition: a CD of my favorite six or seven Vellutian songs and arias (and eight variations—YIKES! Those things were hard to sing! The most difficult four are also completely unmarked in Velluti’s own manuscript copy—the others are heavily annotated in pencil, layer upon layer of ornamentation—leading me to believe he might never have actually sung them). For this, we were honored with the Noah Greenberg Award in 2019. All was finished, edited, mastered, etc., and both the CD (with Toccata Next of London) and the critical edition were set for summer releases just a few weeks apart.

COVID-19. Like a drunken, half-naked, beer-bellied boor, the pandemic crashed my personal Velluti party. Both releases went forward, but, aside from a release-event/concert with fifteen widely socially distanced guests, all further concerts were canceled. I know that people have heard the CD and, more importantly for the purposes of this short essay, have seen the edition—thanks for your words of approbation and encouragement—but the fully vaccinated, still-masked me has had a bit of trouble letting go. The lack of finality makes it difficult to realize that my decade with Giambattista is more or less at an end. (I still don’t know him well enough to call him Gianni.)

Giovanni Battista Velluti was, during the period of his life that most interested me, and during the period in which he made the greatest impact upon the musical and literary world around him, an aging singer, fighting a multi-front battle with the press, parts of the public, and his own physical limitations—his failing voice and fragile health—all to keep producing music. (And to keep earning money: we shouldn’t romanticize him too much. He was an excellent businessman, and his heirs, via his nephew, still live in the palazzo—the Villa Velluti, in fact—that he purchased with the money earned during his first period of fame.) His art fascinated me. His behavior embarrassed me. His treatment by his enemies—no other term for them is really appropriate—infuriated me. They all still do. But his life, his music, his creations are not mine. Helped in some small part by this edition, and by the companion CD, my wish is that he and his art will find the secure place in the story of the early Romantic that they truly deserve.

Robert Crowe is a musicologist, voice teacher, and male soprano with nearly ninety operatic and dramatic oratorio roles, four solo discs, as well as numerous opera and oratorio recordings to his credit. The first male soprano in history to be a national winner of the Metropolitan Opera Competition, he has performed concerts and operas in venues in Europe, North America, and India. In November 2019 he was awarded the Noah Greenberg Award by the American Musicological Association. Robert’s four solo CDs, two with Bavarian Radio and Hänssler Edition, one with Toccata Classics, and one with Toccata Next, contain repertoire ranging from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century solo motets to songs and arias for castrato of the early Romantic. A new CD of solo and duo motets of Isabella Leonarda, with soprano Sandra Röddiger, will be released in late 2021/early 2022. In 2017 he completed his Ph.D. at Boston University with Joshua Rifkin, writing about the literary portraiture of the castrato Giambattista Velluti in 1820s London. In addition to contributions to 19th-Century Music, Early Music America, and Cor Donato’s Complete Works of Barbara Strozzi, his critical edition of songs and arias ornamented by Velluti was released in late summer 2020 with A-R Editions. He is artistic director of the Festival für Alte Musik in Aalen as well as for Kultur in der Villa Stützel, and teaches at the Teachers’ University of Schwäbisch Gmünd. He lives together with his partner in the Swabian Alb in a converted, mid-nineteenth-century brewery and, in his spare time, cooks, hikes, and paints watercolors—amateurish daubs of which he is nevertheless inordinately proud.