The phallus can play its role only when veiled.
—Jacques Lacan
A
long time ago, when i was first confronted with a high male voice—a countertenor, probably Alfred Deller—i did not recognize it as a man’s voice. As far as i knew, vocal tones above a certain frequency were women’s voices. There were basses and tenors and these were men. Women, and children, were altos and sopranos. When i heard the countertenor, or male alto, i was at a loss. Gender confusion tends to make one nervous.
nowadays, no one is so easily confused on hearing a countertenor—male altos have once again become so widely known that we have learned to dis-tinguish them from female altos. But in the case of male sopranos or sopra-nists, as they call themselves, the confusion continues unabated. What is a sopranist? A castrato? An extremely high falsetto voice? A fraud, for is he a man at all?¹
even in our time the need to categorize a voice according to gender, to assign a sex to the voice, has not ceased. And one can sympathize with the shock experienced by sarrasine, the sculptor in Balzac’s novella, when he discovers that his great love and ideal of female beauty, the singer Zambi-nella, is not a woman, but a man—or in his own words, “a nothing,” for Zambinella is a castrato. The only difference is that today sarrasine’s horror is replaced by a certain excitement.
Voice and gender. Does the voice have a gender? one is inclined to say that it does. After all, in most cases we do hear correctly whether a voice comes from a female or a male body. nonetheless, pop music provides crafty examples of gender-disguised singing. equally in Western art music and non-Western music there are examples that might give rise to doubts as to the “genderedness” of the voice.
i would like to discuss the question of voice and gender in terms of the cas-trato, a special figure in the history of Western classical singing. i take as a starting point a notion of sexual difference central to recent feminist theory:
that gender is constructed, and femininity and masculinity are neither natu-ral nor unalterable, but rather sociocultunatu-rally and historically determined categories, and therefore subject to change. one of the consequences of the theory of gender as construction is that gender—normally regarded as an extrastylistic attribute—can be thought of as a matter of choice, hence of stylistic variation. Thus it can be argued that voice categories (soprano, alto, and so on) are not sexually fixed categories but prone to choice as well. Both the denaturalization of sexual difference and the denaturalization of voice difference make it in their own ways possible to sever the link between sex, voice pitch, and timbre. From this point of view, and on the basis of descrip-tions in musicological discourse, i examine the castrato’s singing voice, ending with a reflection on the casting of castrato parts in modern revivals of baroque opera, whereby gender and voice is put into action as a stylistic option, as choice.
The phenomenon of the voice is a recurring theme in the oeuvre of Roland Barthes. His focus on the physicality of the voice, his preference for what he calls “the grain of the voice,” have become well known. He often mentions the voice in relation to gender and sexuality. When he speaks of sexual dif-ference his aim is always to neutralize the binary opposition male-female at the biological level, in order to escape from a fatalistic essentialism of the sexes. in roland Barthes by roland Barthes he writes:
The opposition of the sexes must not be a law of nature, therefore, the confrontations and paradigms must be dissolved, both the meanings and the sexes must be pluralized…²
Barthes’s dream of plurality, whereby borders are crossed to discover a verita-ble playground of textual and sexual possibilities, can be found in almost all of his works. one of its implications is that we must speak of homosexualities
in the plural instead of the singular.³ We find the most elaborate example of the transgression of sexual difference, however, in S/Z, his analysis of Bal-zac’s novella Sarrasine.4
Barthes shows cunningly and persistently that the characters in the novella cannot usefully be classified according to their biological sex, and that they should instead be divided into the categories active, or castrating, and pas-sive, or castrated. Having the phallus, or being the phallus, not having the phallus, or not being the phallus, are all positions that can be taken by both men and women. Barthes’s purpose is to disconnect the stereotyped link-ages man-active-phallic and woman-passive-castrated, and in his reading of Balzac’s novella it is the castrato Zambinella with whom the process of disconnection starts. in Barthes’s vocabulary, the castrato is either the neu-ter, a negative qualification, as neither man nor woman; or he is positively qualified as a composite, as both man and woman, in fact as androgyne. As a neutral or composite center in the middle of polar extremes—that is, on the one hand, the active, castrating Mme. de Lanty, and, on the other, the passive, castrated sculptor sarrasine—he, Zambinella, as Barthes says, “is the blind and mobile flaw in this system; he moves back and forth between active and passive: castrated, he castrates…”5
in her article “Dreaming Dissymmetry: Barthes, Foucault, and sexual Dif-ference,” naomi schor points out that denaturalization of difference does, of course, make sense:
Feminists have long sought to break down the assignation of fixed sexual roles to biological men and women and claimed for women but also for men the possibility of oscillating between activity and passivity.…6
There is a catch, however, according to schor, because Barthes’s disconnec-tion is illusory. His definidisconnec-tion of masculinity, although not necessarily tied to a male body, is based on the traditional view of masculinity. And in the same way, Barthes’s femininity, in whatever body it appears, does not escape the clichéd view of women. schor argues that in describing Mme. de Lanty as “endowed with all the hallucinatory attributes of the Father: power, fas-cination, instituting authority, terror, power to castrate,” Barthes still clas-sifies her as a woman, only with reversed features. As a result, “she has been reclassified,” according to schor, “as that most fearsome of female monsters:
the castrating woman, the phallic mother with all her terrifying attributes of superpower.”7
in schor’s opinion, there are two reasons why Barthes’s strategy is essen-tially reactionary:
first because it lends credence to a phantasmatic construct of maternal superpower, second because it is merely a reversal, which leaves standing what Barthes was to call some years later the “binary prison” of sexual classification.8
such a reversal becomes counterproductive: it undermines Barthes’s actual intention for a plurality of the sexes, freed from any typology. schor con-cludes that we should be on our guard when attempts are made to under-mine sexual classification, because
[d]enied sexual difference shades into sexual indifference and, following the same slippery path, into a paradoxical reinscription of the very differ-ences the strategy was designed to denaturalize.9
she considers Barthes’s fascination for the figure of the castrato as a “neuter”
as a refusal to deal with the question of sexual difference in a serious man-ner. in addition she quotes Jane Gallop, who characterizes the wish to escape sexual difference as “just another mode of denying women.”10
schor’s and Gallop’s discourses are both part of the feminist debate on the classical view on the androgyne. Here, male interest in the androgyne has been unmasked as a strategy of annexation, as a one-sided appropria-tion of the female by men. For only male subjects can enrich and complete themselves by adopting female properties. As soon as women show male characteristics they are, in dominant male discourse, immediately classified negatively, that is, as castrating women and phallic mothers. This is true even of Barthes, as we have seen in his description of Mme. de Lanty.
so far this discussion about sexual difference and the castrato has only referred to his physical appearance, whereas the very reason for his exis-tence—his voice, more precisely his singing voice—has not been questioned.
And this makes sense: Zambinella is a literary figure and no more than a few lines are devoted to his voice. These lines, in which Barthes puts for-ward some remarkable views on the voice of the castrato, are nonetheless extremely significant. i would therefore like to draw the voice itself, and musicological research on the historical castrato, into the discussion.
How do musicologists describe the castrato? it is striking that they all use terms like “androgyny,” “hermaphroditism,” and “sexual ambiguity,”
for images that correspond with the common image of the castrato, for instance, in literature. Their discourse also conveys the idea of the neuter,
the suggestion of “the empty spot,” “the void” upon which all sorts of fanta-sies can be projected. As musicologist Dorothy Keyser says in an extraordi-nary article on the castrato:
to baroque society they appear to have been perceived as blank canvases on which either sexual role could be projected, in real life as on the stage.…
in a society that prized virility in its men and fertility in its women, the ambiguous figure of the castrato was endlessly fascinating.”11
some musicologists stress femininity rather than ambiguity in their descriptions of the castrati as “feminine men,” “perfect nymphs,” “more beautiful than women themselves.” others report their extreme weak-ness, as John Rosselli mentions from early sources: “Castrati tended to have weak eyes and a weak pulse, lacked fortitude and strength of mind, and had difficulties in pronouncing the letter R.”12 Ultimately the castrato is effec-tively excluded from the category of humanity at all. He is called “angelic,”
“mechanical,” “constructed,” “artificial,” “a singing machine.” in the words of Paul Henry Lang: “The castrato had neither sex nor natural personal-ity; he was an instrument of prodigious versatility and perfection, but still a musical instrument and not a living character.”13 Ambiguous, feminine, weak, or nonhuman—these are the terms musicologists use when describing the castrati of bygone days. But as soon as the voice of the castrato enters the descriptions, a more complex image arises, and a fresh element can be detected in scholarly discourse. so long as pitch is the exclusive subject of dis-cussion, again the “unreal and artificial character of the voice,” the “ambigu-ous,” “sexless,” and “angelical” are stressed. However, there is more to a voice than merely pitch. The tension of vocal chords, larynx, and pharynx—that is, the physical effort involved in producing a tone—is just as characteristic.
The same is true for resonance cavities.14 in other words, what you hear is not simply a certain pitch, you also hear a body. As Barthes would say: you especially hear a body.
This explains why the voice of a castrato, despite a comparable range to either the female soprano or contralto, was not perceived as a woman’s voice.
earwitness accounts—some of which are quite recent, for castrati existed up until this very century—discerned significant differences. As musicologist Kurt Pietschmann states:
The voice…combined the timbre and range of boys voices—soprano and alto—with male lung capacity and chest resonance…Amongst their excel-lent features are a wide range…and the fact that their voices lasted longer than women’s voices. Because their larynxes remained supple, some of them could perform up into their seventies.15
The voice of the castrato is depicted as powerful and strong; it penetrates the accompaniment, it rises above all instruments. it is hard, dry, with an enor-mous range and a remarkable loudness. The voice is piercing like a trum-pet, can handle large intervals, has tremendous staying power, and, in some cases, can produce coloratura “mit der Brust gestossen” (belted out with the chest). in short, the castrato voice has an “unusual vocal power and range.”
As castrato expert Franz Haböck suggests, “no one could surpass the castrato in force, flexibility, penetrating quality, and fullness of voice and breath con-trol.”16 With these terms of power, force, persistence, and the piercing qual-ity of the voice, a totally different image of the castrato is evoked than the one that emerges from descriptions of the castrato as a person. And it is not only the sound descriptions that have contributed to this alternative image.
Myths of castrato achievements convey this same image of power. some cas-trati were able to gather large fortunes through their singing—which is also true for Balzac’s Zambinella. The neapolitan castrato Farinelli is said to have cured the depression of Phillip V of spain through his magnificent voice.
in other words, when musicologists describe the features of the castrato’s voice, the qualifications they deem appropriate are male connotated. As a result it seems justifiable to regard the voice of the castrato as a male voice, a high male voice to be precise: a male treble, or a male alto. A closer look at the various descriptions seems to suggest that the castrato’s virility, the phal-lus, has been displaced into his voice.
Under the heading “The Voice” in S/Z, Barthes refers to this phenomenon of displacement and the phallic character of the castrato voice:
italian music…connotes a “sensual” art, an art of the voice. An erotic sub-stance, the italian voice was produced a contrario (according to a strictly symbolic inversion) by singers without sex: this inversion is logical, as though, by selective hypertrophy, sexual density were obliged to abandon the rest of the body and lodge in the throat, thereby draining the organism of all that connects it. Thus, emitted by a castrated body, a wildly erotic frenzy is returned to that body: the star castrati are cheered by hysterical audiences, women fall in love with them.17
one comes across this phallic, virile capacity of the castrato’s voice in Bal-zac’s tale Sarrasine. of course, it is the writer who provides the castrato Zam-binella with his voice, but the correspondence between the phallic capacity of Zambinella’s voice and that of the historical castrato is obvious, and has
been underlined, as we have seen, by Barthes in S/Z. The fragment in which the sculptor sarrasine hears Zambinella’s singing voice for the first time is summarized by Barthes as follows:
[sarrasine] enters a theater by chance, by chance he is seated near the stage; the sensual music, the beauty of the prima donna and her voice fill him with desire; because of his proximity to the stage, he hallucinates, imagines he is possessing La Zambinella; penetrated by the artist’s voice, he achieves orgasm; after which, drained, sad, he leaves, sits down and muses: this was his first ejaculation…18
“Penetrated by the artist’s voice, he achieves orgasm.” one should not forget that this is Barthes’s reading; obviously Balzac uses different words. How-ever, the point is neither Barthes’s interpretation nor whether he is “right” or
“wrong.” The point is how he reads the characters along the lines of sexual difference. He characterizes both positions, sarrasine’s and Zambinella’s, in one and the same phrase:
The voice is described by its power of penetration, insinuation, flow; but here it is the man who is penetrated; like endymion “receiving” the light of his beloved, he is visited by an active emanation of femininity, by a subtle force which “attacks” him, seizes him, and fixes him in a situation of passivity.”19 What does this mean? Barthes describes an immaculate symmetrical rever-sal: an active woman penetrates a passive man. in his voice Zambinella is portrayed as active, virile, and phallic. For Barthes, in order to get at the intended disconnection, Zambinella cannot be male. even the so-called neutrality of the castrato does not provide the necessary counterbalance.
Barthes reads Zambinella, at least in this fragment, through the eyes of sarrasine; that is to say, as a woman.
on the other hand, according to Barthes, the male subject sarrasine has been placed in the female position: passive, overwhelmed, and overpowered.
Thus the fragment anticipates his death—his castration, as Barthes puts it—
at the end of the tale.
However, in the same excerpt Balzac reveals more about the sculptor.
Apart from the passive feminine features observed by Barthes, Balzac pro-vides sarrasine with some other characteristics:
sarrasine wanted to leap onto the stage and take possession of this woman.…Moreover, the distance between himself and La Zambinella had ceased to exist, he possessed her, his eyes were riveted upon her, he took her
for his own. An almost diabolical power enabled him to feel the breath of this voice, to smell the scented powder covering her hair, to see the planes of her face, to count the blue veins shadowing her satin skin.20
As a partner for the active Zambinella we find a similarly active sarrasine in the traditional sequence man-male-active-phallic. But this sarrasine is ignored by Barthes.
in short, Barthes reads the characters in this excerpt of Balzac’s story solely with reversed traditional features. The male subject sarrasine is female in his passivity; for him to be active and phallic, the castrato Zambinella must be a woman. What Barthes does not read is the confrontation between two tradi-tional male subjects, both masculine, both active and phallic. Against “bet-ter judgment” and despite Balzac’s revealing language, Barthes seems firstly to cover up sarrasine’s masculinity in this fragment, and secondly, just like sarrasine himself, to close his eyes to the man in the castrato.
However, Barthes’s focus as a reader does not coincide with sarrasine’s, and, like any other reader, he knows perfectly well that Zambinella is not a woman. in an earlier article about Sarrasine, Barthes says: “it is not dif-ficult to show that sarrasine loves in Zambinella the castrato himself.” He can say this partly on the basis of sarrasine’s persistent declarations of love for exactly that which makes Zambinella a castrato: “oh, soft, frail creature, how could you be otherwise?”21
Here Barthes brings in his argument for the neutrality of Zambinella.
Whereas earlier the female in the castrato was stressed in order to com-pensate for, or “neutralize,” his explicitly masculine behavior, now it is the neuter that counterbalances the traditional female properties. in this way, the blending of the sexes remains a constant in the castrato. However, with the neuter, Barthes once again obscures the male in Zambinella. it seems as if Barthes cannot even consider sarrasine to be in love with weakness and frailty in a man.
Whereas earlier the female in the castrato was stressed in order to com-pensate for, or “neutralize,” his explicitly masculine behavior, now it is the neuter that counterbalances the traditional female properties. in this way, the blending of the sexes remains a constant in the castrato. However, with the neuter, Barthes once again obscures the male in Zambinella. it seems as if Barthes cannot even consider sarrasine to be in love with weakness and frailty in a man.