For a solid portion of musical history, castrato singers or ‘castrati’ had a prominent role in operas, churches and courts across Europe. But why were young boys forced to undergo the gruesome ...

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The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Tuesday 13 April 2010 An editing change had us saying that Michael Maniaci and Radu Marian are both to ...

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. In The Castrato and His Wife, Helen Berry explores 18th-century marriage, gender and celebrity through the ...

In 1775, Dorothea Maunsell and her new husband, William Long Kingsman, went to court to show that they were indeed legally married. They had already had two wedding ceremonies (one in Italy, the other ...

Although this book is described by the author as a "microhistory", it is crammed with so many unexpected surprises that it almost seems it should be a work of fiction. In The Castrato and his Wife ...

Castrati, boys castrated before the onset of puberty to preserve their high-pitched voices, played heroic male leads in Italian opera from the mid-17th to late 18th centuries. Farinelli, born Carlo ...