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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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 ...

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 ...

The following content is purely satirical and entirely fictional. The Princeton TestosterTones, the University’s premier and only all-castrato a cappella group, made a splash Monday night at their ...

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 ...

Ivan Hewett is The Telegraph’s Classical Music Critic and an author whose works include Music: Healing The Rift, a personal history of modern music. He has been involved in music as a composer, ...

For centuries, their voices soared in gilded churches and candlelit concert halls - otherworldly, pure and achingly beautiful. But behind the ethereal sound of the castrato singers lay an unspeakable ...