The German Castrato

The decline of the castrato has received significant musicological attention in its Italian, French and British contexts, whether to the cross-dressing women, prima donnas or tenors that replaced them in various ways; or the association of the castrato with the ancien régime. The reception of the castrato in German lands certainly intersects with these developments, and shares some of the celebrities (Crescentini and Velluti in particular). But in this article, I chart the specificity of German engagement with the last generation of operatic castrati, including those in the employ of German courts, such as Tombolini in Berlin, and Sassaroli in Dresden. While texts such as Friedrich Schiller’s Kastraten und Männer (1782) show a similar association between the castrato and absolute monarchy, German engagement with the castrato voice occurs in the context of the anxieties and efforts of music critics to create a national operatic tradition and define —and gender — the heroic German voice. Focussing on the first singer around whom this idea really crystallises, Pauline Anna Milder (1785–1838), I show how the discursive figure of the castrato is used to shape the German operatic voice in the years around 1800, beyond the familiar oppositional rhetoric of German vs Italian opera. While it was central to Milder’s reception that she was different from the Italian school, in terms of the metaphorical field explored, and gender ambiguity implied, Milder is positioned by critics within a lineage of singing established by the castrato.