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From the Cantor of Liepzig to the Castrati of Napoli and Christina, the gender bender Queen of Sweden

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On Sunday evening I was hoping for a Proustian moment when i listened to the Magnificat for the first time in 50 years. But I was Baching up the wrong tree…

In the past month I’ve been to two excellent concerts that have awakened my musical curiosity.

At the weekend I went to see my book circle pal, Teutonic Tim, and his church choir sing two Magnificats at the Revelation Church in Hagersten. One by Kurnau who was the cantor at Leipzig before Bach, and then Bach’s own setting.

Big choir, four superb soloists and a full orchestra. It was stupendous and very inspiring.

I am now bingeing on Bach on Spotify and have started reading James Runcie’s The Great Passion, an excellent historical novel about JSB and the writing of the Saint Matthew Passion. It’s told from the perspective of Stefan Silbermann, an eleven year-old soprano who becomes Bach’s star pupil.

Runcie, the Grantchester Hitmaker, is rather an expect on Cantor Bach and has made a documentary and written a play about his life. He seems to be part of a trend to get beyond the legend and get to know the man behind the music.

Many years ago, when I still wore shorts to school and my voice was still a soprano, we sang the Magnificat at Harrow County Boys School. Oh, those childish happy days of pre-pubertal innocence when I was troubled by neither elections nor erections.

I was expecting a great Proustian Moment when I heard the music again but the anticipated sensory tsunami never happened. I guess those moments can’t be planned.

My other memorable concert in March was an excellent evening of Baroque music at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Stoccolma. The tickets were completely free of charge and there was a large and very appreciative audience.

Bravissimo. The evening was a masterclass in how cultural events ought to be. The Istituto should feel very proud. So gloriously European. The new boss of the Kennedy Centre could learn a lot.

On stage were Danilo Pastore and La Estrella Ensemble. Nicola Brovelli on cello, Matteo Cotti on harpsichord and Juan José Francione on lute. And then the wonderfully charismatic Danilo who not only sung magnificent counter-tenor vocals, but was also an entertaining frontman, giving us some background to the music they performed. Each song was delivered with a magnificent intensity which transported us to the opera house of the Baroque Era

Songs by Agostini, Gabrielli, Scarlatti, Pallavicino, Lonati , all new names to me, and then, slightly more surprising, G F Händel and Henry Purcell.

The starting point for the selections in the concert was the love of Italian music of Queen Christina of Sweden, 16 November 1632 – 16 June 1654, who was a great patron of the arts.

The other inspiration for the evening was the artistry of two of the great castrato singers of the Baroque era. Giovanni Francesco Grossi (12 February 1653 – 29 May 1697) better known as Siface and Pasquale Betti (? – 152) , known as Pasqualino.

Danilo’s anecdotes described the time when castrati superstars reigned over the stages of Europe. The sacrifice of their cojones at a tender age meant that these chaps had extraordinary vocal resources and attracted great crowds at the opera houses where they sung, Purcell was so impressed by Siface that he arranged a tune in his honour.

The charismatic castrato came to a sticky end. He was murdered in 1697 on the road between Bologna and Ferrara, allegedly by the agents of a nobleman with whose wife he had a liaison.

Sweden’s Queen Christina was played by Greta Garbo in a very successful 1933 film by Rouben Mamoulian. The plot bears little resemblance to the true story. Christina was famed for her cross-dressing and her fondness for her ladies-in-waiting. She turned down several offers of marriage and eventually converted to Catholicism and moved to Rome.

When I worked as tour guide in Rome in 1979, all my Swedish colleagues had a lot to say about Christina and her tomb in St Peter’s. I’d never heard of her of course.

Ever since the gig, I’ve been listening to counter tenors singing hits from thE Great Castrato Songbook.

So now I’d like to hear about any recent concerts, novels, films, poems, buildings or biscuits that have got your musical tastebuds tingling. Is there anything that has inspired you to explore or re-explore a composer or a musical genre?

Of course, it is not unusual for a thread on the Afterword to remind us of or introduce us to a particular composer. The recent Ravel thread was superb. A big thankyou to @fitterstoke and his Ravelian revellers.

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  3. My partner is from a small village outside Madrid called Belmonte de Tajo (locals know it as the village of the three lies – it’s not beautiful, its nowhere near a mountain and it’s not even on the river Tagus). But we like it. Possibly best of all is it’s five minutes drive from two of the prettiest villages around Madrid, Chinchon and Colmenar de Oreja. Both highly recommended for eating and walking (and where Asteroid City was filmed incidentally).

    Surprisingly Colmenar de Oreja can claim its very own composer, Gaetano Brunetti, 1744-1798. Born in Italy, he spent most of his life in Colmenar and died there. He was a composer in the royal court of Carlos III and IV meaning most of his work wasn’t published widely in his lifetime. He was then completely forgotten for around 200 years until his work was catalogued in 2005. Since then there’s been a trickle of his works recorded.

    I’m not going to claim that he’s an undiscovered genius, but his music is very pleasant. Best comparison would be his fellow (much better known) Italian in Madrid, Boccherini.

    Anyway there’s now a small-scale Brunetti Festival in Colmenar which takes place in its rather lovely 19th century theatre. We’ve always missed it until now, but just this morning I bagged us some entradas. Very much looking forward to it. Particularly as it will be combined with lunch in the main square and a stroll out to the hermitage.

  4. I’m learning a lot on this thread. not least how to spell the name of Bach’s home town.

    Ignore my headline. The correct spelling is LEIPZIG.

    It’s the eighth largest city in Germany and has a very long history. St Thomas School, where Bach was the Cantor, was founded in 1212.

    It was a surprise to read that after his death in 1750, Bach’s music was almost forgotten.

    However in the 1820s , Felix Mendelssohn, while still a teenager started to campaign to bring about a performance of the St Matthew Passion.

    Here’s the full story.

    https://www.classical-music.com/features/composers/how-mendelssohn-helped-bring-bachs-st-matthew-passion-back-to-life

    Wikipedia describes it thus..

    The success of this performance, one of the very few since Bach’s death and the first ever outside of Leipzig,[n 6] was the central event in the revival of Bach’s music in Germany and, eventually, throughout Europe.[43] It earned Mendelssohn widespread acclaim at the age of 20. It also led to one of the few explicit references which Mendelssohn made to his origins: “To think that it took an actor and a Jew’s son to revive the greatest Christian music for the world!”[44][45]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Mendelssohn

    All in all, Felix was rather an extraordinary chap.

    This morning i was listening to a podcast of my favourite Swedish Radio show, Rendezvous presented by Kristjan Saag.

    https://www.sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/crosby-blues-stockhausen-jazz

    He played a track from 1956 by another Leipzig musician, jazz pianist Jutta Hipp, and told her remarkable story.

    Leipzig was in East Germany and jazz was frowned upon. Nevertheless, Jutta became a rather accomplished pianist, managed to get herself a record contract with Blue Note and to relocate to New York where she became a great success.

    Within a few years, it all became too much for and she dropped out of music and became a seamstress. Sadly she never returned to music.

  5. Back to Bach and James Runcie’s novel.

    He has been interviewed several times about his fascination with the Brandenburg Hitmaker.

    This interview from the Church Times is excellent.

    https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2022/14-april/features/features/bach-makes-sense-of-love-and-loss

    LW: What is it about Bach that for you makes him such an extraordinary composer?

    JR: Well, that is the key thing I’ve been wrestling with: why he has a unique combination of a kind of mathematical purity, yet lyrical grace. How can he be both serious and playful, simultaneously? How can he move from being something that might seem purely technical, to something extremely emotional? I don’t quite understand how he does it. Why is his music the music of such consolation in times of grief? For me, that is the nub of it. And I think, maybe, it’s because the more disordered our lives are, the more we turn to the order of Bach.

    If you have 90 minutes to spare, this doc by John Eliot Gardiner is excellent.

    And I’ve just discovered that Gardiner has also written an excellent book about JSB. Music in the Castle of Heaven.

    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/30/music-castle-heaven-js-bach-john-eliot-gardiner

    Bach might be John Eliot Gardiner’s godfather, a few centuries removed. Gardiner actually grew up under the eye of the bewigged Lutheran cantor: a portrait of him had been entrusted to Gardiner’s parents – who raised their brood with sung graces at mealtimes and traditional country dances afterwards – for safekeeping during the war. On his way upstairs to bed, the young Gardiner always flinched from the zealot’s “forbidding stare”.

  6. On the subject of counter-tenors, at the beginning of this month we went to see the students of the Cambridge University Opera Society perform Monterverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea. We approached with some caution, this being a near three hour early music opera. I have no idea how the young people do it, but it was absolutely tremendous. ( Aside from the brilliant performances, design and playing, you had to admire their energy. We went to the 2 till 5 matinee. This was followed by an 8 till 11 evening show).

    Anyway, to the matter in hand, this being a show from 1643, the bulk of roles were written for a mixture of 5 sopranos ( women and male castatrati) and 2 contraltos, with 2 tenors and 2 basses in support roles. The students actually fielded 4 counter tenors. Paradoxically, they actually cast a young woman as Nero, and she was fantastic, as was the first year student singing Poppea in her first ever opera.

    Here’s the closing number, taken from a professional performance, a duet between Nero and Poppea, the pair having succeeded in getting rid of Nero’s wife. No morality play this.

    • SCOOOOORRRCHHIIOOO

      That duet is something else, @ernietothecentreoftheearth.

      If the Admins find out that we are posting that kind of thing on this thread, I suspect I’ll be in hot water.

      Thank you for your very interesting comments on the problems of staging Early Music works in 2025 when there are so many parts written for castrati.

      Having a female soprano singing Nero was an excellent solution. But of course having two woman singing that very amorous duet gives it a completely different feel.

      Thanks for mentioning Philip Glass. I’m sure he’s not the only modern comoser writing for counter-tenors

      That Akhnaten clip is breath-taking.

      • I think the students cast a woman as Nero as she was both the best singer and actor. The counter-tenors were first rate, but perhaps not quite the verve and menace to play the 1980s Miami Vice style mobster they wanted as Nero in this production. Anyway, her ( their?) name is Myriam Lowe, as seen here with four siblings tackling a rather more serene Handel

        • A star is born @ernietothecentreoftheearth.

          What a magnificent voice. Great ensemble too. The Lowes are a talented family.

          The Cruel to be Kind Hitmaker should book them as support band for his next tour.

          I read about the production you saw. It sounds wonderfully imaginative.

          https://www.cmp.cam.ac.uk/events/event/item/lincoronazione-di-poppea-2025-02-27/

          here’s an interview with Edie Behr.

          https://www.caths.cam.ac.uk/centre-stage

          They even did a workshop with Rob Howarth, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s resident continuo player,

          https://www.cmp.cam.ac.uk/events/event/item/monteverdi-lincoronazione-di-poppea-workshop/

          Robert was also Music Director for Claire van Kampen’s play Farinelli and the King in London and New York. As a harpsichordist Robert has performed concertos with The Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment and The Avison Ensemble, as well as numerous solo and lecture recitals across the UK. With Steven Devine he is Co-Principal Keyboard Player at the OAE, as well as having played with many of the main UK and European Early Music Ensembles. He will gladly bore you stiff talking about tuning and temperament.

          • Thank you, I had missed the stuff about the workshop.

            Even the trailer was imaginative, albeit perhaps a little too much so, given as it actually gave no clue as to what was actually in store. Still you have to admire the chutzpah and ambition as Fortune, Virtue and Love compete in Goddess Top Trumps.
            https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1KsYX6XVv8/

            In any event, I am glad you found something of interest in my suggestions, as I did in yours.

            • That trailer is wonderful, Ernie. I’m sure it got punters very curious to see the show.

              I’m putting that LOWE ENSEMBLE clip on my Facebook page. Very impressive.

              Their FB and INSTA pages are interesting.

              I read that they go out and play in schools to get school kids interested in Baroque music.

              • I was reading about the Lowe Ensemble and that led me to the FB page of the Continuo Foundation who have provided them with some funding.

                https://www.facebook.com/continuofoundation/?locale=da_DK&_rdr

                Definitely an organisation to keep an eye on.

                They led me to Franziska Fleischhanderl, a talented Austrian musician who plays the salterio, an instrument that was very popular in the Baroque period in Italy.

                From Colmenar de Oreja to Leipzig to New York to Cambridge. Thus thread is knocking up some airmiles.

                Next stop is Edinburgh. This afternoon I stumbled across Scottish singer, Brian Bannatyne-Scott, who has written a series of SINGER’S’ GUIDES to the different voices. Bass, tenor, alto, soprano, counter tenor, mezzo-soprano etc-

                https://www.edinburghmusicreview.com/blog/tag/A+Singer%27s+Guide+to+Voices

                He is a little long-winded and opinionate and the world’s worst name-dropper, mentioning all the amazing people he’s worked with. But he’s been singing professionally all his life so he really knows what he’s talking about.

                Here he is talking about counter-tenors.

                https://www.edinburghmusicreview.com/blog/countertenor

                Here’s a quote….

                The modern history of countertenors starts with Alfred Deller, who, almost single-handedly, brought this voice to mainstream attention. Before I write about Deller, it is important to remember (or simply understand) that the countertenor was a constituent part of every cathedral choir, certainly in England, for centuries. As women were forbidden to sing in cathedral choirs, the equivalent to the alto part in, for example, four-part harmony would be sung by a countertenor.

                He knows his onions..

                Over the years, several countertenors emerged, who wished to push back the boundaries of repertoire for the voice type. Many wanted to explore the vast amount of songs, originally written for women, and this opened up a whole new world for singers, who created a sound quite different from the traditional “church” countertenor. I remember an amazing black American countertenor at the Britten-Pears School in Aldeburgh in the late 70s (sadly, I can’t now remember his name), who astonished us all by singing Schumann’s ‘Frauenliebe und Leben’ in a German song class. He had an extraordinarily fruity tone and was utterly convincing in his interpretation, although I’m not sure that Peter Pears was too thrilled.

                In the 90s, I sang several times with the amazing American/Japanese countertenor, Brian Asawa, who similarly enjoyed stretching the frontier of repertoire for countertenor. He was a fine singer, with a mellifluous tone, and featured on several recordings in the 1990s. I recorded ‘Messiah’ with him, and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. For me, his Oberon was not ethereal enough, although superbly performed, but certainly worth listening to (and there is the obvious advantage of hearing me as well!). Sadly, Brian died in 2016, at the age of 49.

  7. I stumbled across this article in today’s Guardian.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/28/the-guardian-view-on-20th-century-composers-play-it-again-maestro

    There’s a lot of food for thought about introducing new composers to audiences-

    It may be that “total immersion” – the phrase Radio 3 applies to its Boulez offerings on Sunday – is the only valid way to approach new music. The way not to do it is the one chosen by many concert promoters: sandwich a 20-minute new work in between Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto and Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony. Audiences generally won’t listen to it and might even resent its presence in a concert of familiar classics. There has to be context, explanation, self-belief. All music was new once.

  9. After that concert at the Italian Cultural Institute, I became curious to know more castrati.

    This very comprehensive article was enlightening.

    https://historicaltenors.net/articles/shore/castrato.html

    Some interesting facts ….

    AT their peak there were 4000 boys between the age of 7 and 9 castrated per year.

    The young castrati would be dressed as cherubs to accompany funerals.

    All castrati came from poor families – except for Farinelli, whose father was governor of Maratea and Cisternino.

    The castrato Senesino was paid 3000 pounds guineas for a season in London.

    All the countertenors/falsettists were replaced by castrati in the Sistine Chapel Choir, as they could sing higher and louder.

    The castrati loathed their parents and families for allowing the operation. Domenico Mustafa’s family told him that when he was a child, his testicles were eaten by a pig, and he always swore he’d kill his father. Castrato Loreto Vittori, according to books written about him in past centuries, told his father, who asked him for money, that all he owed his family was an empty purse.

    The last castrato performance in opera was in London 1825. It was castrato Giovanni Battista Velutti, performing in Il crociato in Egitto by Meyerbeer (he died of old age in 1861 – a relic of a past that could not be resurrected).

    The last castrato to appear in England on stage was Pergetti in 1844. They survived a while longer on the continent, at catholic electorates, kingdoms in Germany, and at the Vatican, until in 1922 Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato, died in Rome, witness of a world long gone.

    I was more than surprised to read how much eunuchs appear in popular culture.

    Here’s a mega-list from wikipedia.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunuchs_in_popular_culture

    for example…

    Three best-selling crime novels by Jason Goodwin, The Janissary Tree (2006) and its sequels, The Snake Stone and The Bellini Card, are set in Istanbul in the 1830s, chronicle the investigations of Yashim Togalu, a Turkish eunuch detective to the Sultan’s royal court, in the Ottoman Empire of the 1830s.

  10. When I started a thread that mentioned Bach, I hadn’t realised what a ginormous task I had taken on.

    Benny Andersson is an enormous fan and listens to JSB’s music every evening.

    https://www.classicfm.com/music-news/videos/benny-andersson-abba/

    Did you know that Bach’s youngest son relocated to London where he was rather successful.

    https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/sep/15/jc-bach-was-the-darling-of-georgian-london-will-his-forgotten-opera-shake-off-the-shadow-of-his-celebrated-father

    Interesting article……

    London is about to recognise the significance of one of its greatest composers. But rather than being a British genius, he is a long dead German whose surname is already very famous. The work of Johann Christian Bach, once lauded as “the London Bach”, has been largely overlooked by the city he made his home from 1762.

    This is despite the string of popular operas he created and his early influence on an eight-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whom he met and performed with in London.

    His illustrious lineage – he was the youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach – was initially Johann Christian’s passport to the musical hotspots of Europe, but it has since come to overshadow his own work. Never mind that he once taught music to the children of King George III and went on to run some of the first public concerts in Britain, at Carlisle House in Soho Square and then at Hanover Square – today his works are rarely staged.

  11. Over supper this evening here in Bagis, Mrs KFD asked me to tell her about what I’d learnt about counter tenors and castrati.

    I was suddenly very glad that i had chosen not to serve delicious Swedish meatballs.

    Anyway, she then went on to mention breeches roles where a male character in an opera is written to be sung by a female singer. It’s a long tradition .

    There exhibit notes from the University of Buffalo have some good illustrations and useful comments.

    https://library.buffalo.edu/exhibitions/pdf/genderroles.pdf

    “Breeches parts,” or “pants roles,” in which a woman dresses as and sings a male
    role, occur in opera today for several reasons. Many of the parts originally written for
    castrati in seventeenth and eighteenth century Italian opera are today sung as pants roles.
    In addition, the practice of writing the leading male part for a high voice continued
    through about 1850, past the decline of the castrati in about 1800, thus, these parts were
    originally intended as pants roles. Another, distinct, tradition involves casting women to
    sing the parts of children and adolescent boys. Such parts were written as pants roles
    from the earliest times, and it is these pants roles which are among the most famous and
    frequently performed.

    Wiki elaborates further on this and also mentions the opposite of breeches roles namely skirt roles.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeches_role#:~:text=In%20opera%2C%20a%20breeches%20role,a%20mezzo%2Dsoprano%20or%20contralto.

    A closely related term is a skirt role, a female character to be played by a male singer, usually for comic or visual effect. These roles are often ugly stepsisters or very old women, and are not as common as trouser roles. As women were not allowed to sing on stage in the Papal States until the end of the 18th century,[3] although not elsewhere in Europe,[4] many female operatic roles which premiered in those areas were originally written as skirt roles for castrati (e.g. Mandane and Semira in Leonardo Vinci’s Artaserse). The Madwoman in Britten’s Curlew River and the Cook in Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges are later examples. The role of the witch in Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, although written for a mezzo-soprano, is now more regularly[citation needed] sung by a tenor, who sings the part an octave lower. In the same opera the “male” roles of Hänsel, the Sandman, and the Dewman are however meant to be sung by women.

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