[
UK
/kɑːstɹˈɑːtəʊ/
]
NOUN
- a male singer who was castrated before puberty and retains a soprano or alto voice
How To Use castrato In A Sentence
- Such escape tactics, in which the image of the castrato is wrenched from the sound of his voice in the name of delicacy or comfort is significant both to the study of the castrato specifically and to the study of image/sound relations in romanticism more generally. Sounds Romantic: The Castrato and English Poetics Around 1800
- Thus, while sound has been, and continues to be, understood as too material, not fully able to decouple from the realm of the material, fantasies of a disembodied voice increasingly defined the imagination for the castrato singer on the part of English listeners and readers. Sounds Romantic: The Castrato and English Poetics Around 1800
- In many ways, the castrato is the corporeal manifestation of Longinus 'theory of the sublime, in which hypsous requires a synthesis of nature and art that cannot be reduced either to capacity or to will. Sounds Romantic: The Castrato and English Poetics Around 1800
- Ispahan is mine own country and I have there a cousin, the daughter of my father’s brother, whom I loved from my childhood and cherished with fond affection; but a people stronger than we fell upon us in foray and taking me among other booty, cut off my yard58 and sold me for a castrato, whilst I was yet a lad; and this is how I came to be in such case. — The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night
- For, the castrato is not found but made (and self made), made to be extraordinary. Sounds Romantic: The Castrato and English Poetics Around 1800
- His falsetto voice captures the chimerical sound of the castrati with eerie accuracy, something that becomes clear when we hear a scratchy recording of the last castrato, Moreschi, made at the turn of the 20th century.
- From the late seventeenth century the central male operatic role (primo uomo) in opera seria was sung by a castrato.
- I thought he was a 'castrato' who, as is the custom in Rome, performed all the parts of a prima donna. The Complete Memoirs of Jacques Casanova
- The recital concludes with a rarely heard aria with cello obbligato from Arianna, written for the soprano castrato Carlo Scalzi.
- The sole extant example of the castrato voice dates from the dawn of recorded sound, and the singer in question was advanced in years at the time.