No one suffered more for their art than the castrati, the men whose heavenly high voices cost them part of their manhood.
Among the most famous of their ranks was the 18th-century Italian known as Farinelli, the Pavarotti of his day. So enthralled was Queen Isabella with his voice that she took him home to Spain to serenade her manic-depressive husband, King Philip V. Music may not have cured the monarch, but Farinelli stayed with the king until his death, and never sang in public again.
That’s the history behind “Farinelli and the King,” which opened on Broadway on Dec. 17 to ecstatic reviews for Mark Rylance’s addled king and Iestyn Davies’ castrato.
Program notes assure us that the countertenors in this production (like Davies) are intact and the castrati extinct — the practice mercifully banned around 1870. So saying, Davies tells The Post, “a lot of what we know about castrati is based on hearsay. They were reportedly tall, with huge rib cages, but their voice box stayed the same size. They were sexually active but couldn’t reproduce, so they were basically walking contraceptives.”
In a speaking voice some two octaves below his singing one, the 38-year-old says he found his falsetto by accident: As a teenager who sang “crap tenor” with a pop band, he was bored during his school’s choir practice and suddenly broke out some high notes.
“It felt really good,” says Davies, whose Welsh first name is pronounced “Yestin.”
“I felt like I was accessing something that allowed me to express myself.”
He’s since expressed himself on stages around the world, including the Met, where he starred this fall in “The Exterminating Angel.” The British Grammy winner might never have left the opera houses had “Farinelli” playwright Claire van Kampen not heard him singing on the radio three years ago, and asked him to be her castrato.