Castrato per amore: Casanova, Salimbeni, Farinelli e il misterioso Bellino

The figure of the castrato has always been considered in a middle position between male and female gender. Even if they were biological males, the surgery suffered during their childhood, in order to preserve a high pitch voice, had also caused them such an hormonal imbalance as to oddly transfigure their bodies; in many cases their appearance seemed so femminine as to make their contemporary society to doubt about their true gender. Giacomo Casanova reports in his Memoires a very peculiar case of a biological woman singer taking advantage of the gender ambiguity of male castrati: Teresa Lanti, a female soprano who disguised herself as a castrato in order to get better recruitments and salaries. But most of all this deceit would allow her to live with the famous castrato Felice Salimbeni. Even if the love story between Salimbeni and the false castrato “Bellino” was only a literary fiction, it could have been inspired on similar love stories between a castrato and a woman: the marriages between Bartolomeo Sorlisi and Dorothea Junghansen or Ferdinando Tenducci and Dorothea Maunsell are well documented examples. However, both of them did not last long because of the catholic conception of marriage that ruled in modern Italy: even if some castrati were not sexually impotent, they could never father a child, as the marriage required. Another interesting love story involving castrati is the one between Giovanni Battista Minelli and Antonio Pasi: in this case they were able to live together and maintain a life long homosexual relationship because they were both men. Applied to Salimbeni’s relationship, it was the external change of gender from Teresa Lanti to “Bellino” to allow it, and it was only possible because of the similarity of pitch of their voices. This paper analyses the possible degree of reality in Casanova’s story and at the same time it shows the difficulties that castratos had to face in order to have an intimate and stable relationship with another person, regardless of the gender. It also focuses on the privilegiate position of castratos compared to women singers during the XVIIIth century and summarises the laws and customs that prevented women to perform both in roman theatres and in churches. Casanova’s approach to the private life of these singers reveals how castratos did not only have ambiguous gender position in XVIIIth century operatic roles, but also had to deal with this ambiguity in their real gender roles assumed or assigned by their contemporary society: this controversy shows itself to be in certain ways a precocious manifestation of the contemporary debate of gender inside and outside the scenes of nowadays operatic performances.