Castrato Phantoms: Moreschi, Fellini, and the Sacred Vernacular in Rome (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781945861130)

A new mapping of castrato afterlives in modern Rome

Around 1830, opera houses stopped using castrati, and Rome and the Vatican became home to their glorious singing, engineered by surgery and intensive vocal training. Castrati were long mired in secrecy, obfuscations, and lies about their origin and conditions, not least the last of them, Alessandro Moreschi. Musicologist Martha Feldman declines to accept these deep-seated mysteries and concealments. After a decade and more of digging through archives and family histories comes her exciting transdisciplinary and quasi-cinematic account of Moreschi, whose recordings preserve the only sonic trace of a solo castrato.

Yet Moreschi's story extends far beyond him. It opens up intrigues, politics, and histories of the Vatican, everyday histories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Rome, the world of Roman opera, the city's unique mélange of sacred and vernacular tropes, and representations of Rome by iconic film director Federico Fellini. Moreschi and Fellini turn out to have been related by marriage, but also to share synergies grounded in Rome's persistent inclination to vernacularize the sacred. Far from telling of one anomalous figure, Feldman's gripping history convinces readers that Moreschi, like Fellini, can be read as an improbable index of Roman consciousness, both during his own life and well beyond.

Author: Martha Feldman
ISBN-10: 1945861134
ISBN-13: 9781945861130
Publisher: Zone Books
Language: English
Published: 02/10/2026
Pages: 480
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 2.03lbs
Size: 9.06h x 5.98w x 1.57d