Last castrato Alessandro Moreschi sings in a quartet. La cruda mia nemica (Palestrina) - 1904

Who are these singers? And why was this recorded? A speculation: Of all the recordings featuring “the last castrato,“ Alessandro Moreschi, this one is the most fascinating to me. G&T had already been to Rome in 1902 expressly to record Moreschi and the Sistine Chapel choir by name (Cantori della Cappella Sistina). By the time they returned in 1904, the Roman Catholic Church had been reformed in large degree by the growing Cecilianist movement, which culminated in the 1903 Tra le sollecitudini decree, which instituted standardization of the church music. Only Latin was to be permitted and only truly spiritual music was to be performed. No Italian language music, none of the theatrical-style music that was adapted to church use. This Palestrina madrigal, being both in Italian and in its content completely secular, would have been forbidden. To have recorded it under the name of the Sistine Chapel would have been a direct affront to Lorenzo Perosi, the leader of the papal choir who was the most vocal and prominent advocate of Cecilianism. Interestingly the early catalogues list this madrigal recording not by Moreschi’s or the Sistine Chapel’s name but as the safer, more generic “Cantori Romani.“ But why that name? And of all Palestrina’s work why a profane madrigal and not one of his liturgical works? Could this madrigal have special meaning to these particular four singers? We know that while Moreschi was young, he was employed as first soprano at St. John Lateran, whose maestro di cappella, Capocci, put together a small ensemble of singers who would perform in the salons of Roman upper class society. An American, reporting about one such party in 1883 at the home of a prominent American woman Mrs. Charles Bristed, notes that Moreschi sang the Jewel song from Faust, and then the entire group sang “a chorus of Palestrina.“ That was followed by the “Quis est homo“ from Rossini’s Stabat mater, “sung by two gray-haired sopranos.“ One of these may have been Domenico Mustafà, who was 54 years old at the time. The writer mentions the best performance of all “was the solo sung by a fat, yellow-mustached barytone. I never heard anything to compare to his exquisite voice. We shall never hear anything like it in this world, and I doubt in the next.“ A photograph () from around this time depicts Moreschi, the great baritone Antonio Cotogni, castrati Giovanni Cesari and Domenico Salvatori, countertenor Filippo Mattoni, and baritone Gaetano Capocci—all from the papal choir except Cotogni—gathered together for just such a “concert party.“ Some of the hand-written names of the singers on the photo are out of order, improperly named, or misspelled, signifying that the person who wrote them either did not know the individuals or remember them or perhaps even known Italian spelling or naming conventions. Could this photograph have been taken *at* the party mentioned above and then annotated by the American hostess or one of her confused, non-Italian-native guests? In our recording, we hear Moreschi on soprano and another voice taking the alto (though I have considered that this voice is another castrato, it is unlikely; the choir employed mature male falsettists to sing the contralto part, usually reserving the castrati for the higher soprano lines). The tenor is probably Cesare Boezi, but we can’t be certain. The lowest part is not a bass but a baritone, a very distinct one with a rich lower D and C#, a very strong upper D (open, not covered), and quite clear and broad sounds around middle G and A; all the vowels are clearly defined, diction crisp. It would not have been Capocci; he died in 1898. What baritone had a long association with the performance of church concerts and singing with church musicians in the salons of Rome? What baritone could not risk being named in an explicitly anti-Cecilianist recording (which was quickly pulled from the catalogue) because he was himself employed by the Academy of Santa Cecilia? Of course it could be any Roman baritone—as even the liturgical cantors were just as highly trained vocally as the operatic singers— has it ever been considered that the baritone on this recording is Antonio Cotogni? The voice, to my ears, is very similar to the confirmed recording of Cotogni from four years later ( The recording engineer on the madrigal was William Sinkler Darby, not the Gaisbergs, who did the 1902 Sistine Chapel recordings or the Cotogni/Marconi duet in 1908. Frederick Gaisberg wouldn’t have recognized Cotogni from the Sistine Chapel sessions because there would be no occasion for him to have seen him. Of course there’s no way of knowing :) I imagine—perhaps fantasize—that this Palestrina madrigal was recorded quickly and in secret by a nostalgic quartet of singers from the old guard who risked their jobs to put down a sample of a tradition that had already disappeared.