‘Castrati were even said to know the ‘secret des Lesbiennes’ when it came to giving women sexual pleasure, cheerfully making up for their cruel loss with improvised dildos made of wax.’
Helen Berry’s The Castrato and His Wife, a broadly biographical study of a castrated Italian opera singer named Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci, describes the sexual potency a eunuch could pose, or at least be considered to pose, in eighteenth-century England. While castrati (castrated men) were hardly rare in Italy at this date — it was estimated that 4,000 Italian boys were castrated each year to keep their voices juvenile for operatic training — in London they remained a curious, if not entirely rare, exotic import. Samuel Pepys wrote that he did not ‘dote of the Eunuchs’. For other Englishmen, and even more so Englishwomen, however, they were a source of fascination and were often considered with high regard.
Tenducci received a mixed reception. Born into a servant family in early eighteenth-century Italy, he was probably only 11 or 12 when a priest advised his parents to operate to expand his horizons. Unlike the many boys who died in the operation, or survived only to find their angelic voices could not make the cut, Tenducci rose to become one of the most famous and vocally admired opera singers of his era. There was certainly no shortage of roles for him to play. Monteverdi’s L’Orpheo, for instance, had readymade the role of a castrato for its eponymous lead.
In the interest of the general reader, however, the focus of Berry’s book is not so much Tenducci’s operatic career, but rather the saucy scandals in which he became embroiled in late Georgian England. Drawing on sources as diverse as Aristotle, Galen, and eighteenth-century female novelists, Berry illuminates why a eunuch like Tenducci could prove sexually attractive to women in this period. Since castration was thought to have made men ‘colder’, and thence more effeminate, they seemingly struck a less threatening chord with genteel women than their testosterone-bristling counterparts.
She adduces some intriguing arguments for why highborn women should have professed love to eunuchs at all. Since these men could not fulfill full sexual arousal, she suggests, they offered women a loophole to the prevailing sexual double standard of the time — an affair without the consequences of pregnancy or legitimate charge of adultery.
As it transpired, however, that loophole could easily be used and abused. Berry’s tale is of a one-time husband and eternal virtuoso. For all the ridicule the married Tenducci met with in the press, he emerges from the surviving sources as a feisty character, well versed in convincing others not only of his musical prowess, but of his sexual virility as well.
This book is a little dense in places, but it is rarely narrow in focus. Through the preserved snippets of lads’ talk of the day, we learn as much about Casanova, for example, as we do about Tenducci. Apparently blissfully unaware that male sexuality had any limits whatsoever, Casanova is recorded as having been convinced by Tenducci’s self-alleged ability to father children through a ‘third testicular gland’.
Berry’s book will possibly be more useful to historians than the more general reader, but there’s a lot to be said for micro-histories with such a focused, accessible, and fascinating source base. I’d like to have been more frequently lost in a lyricism of prose equal to that of the operas it described, but that criticism is minor to the task fulfilled.
Comments