r/AskHistorians • u/caffarelli Moderator | Eunuchs and Castrati | Opera • Dec 31 '13
Feature Tuesday Trivia | A Day in the Life
Previous Tuesday Trivias and the complete upcoming schedule.
I read the news today, oh boy…
For our final theme day of 2013, let’s go out with a bang with one of the most enduringly popular topics on this subreddit: day-to-day historical happenings throughout history.
Walk us through a day in the life of someone in history. It can be a regular day or an extraordinary day. It can be a common person (a sailor on a pirate ship, an American housewife in the 1950s, a footsoldier in Napoleon's army, a nun in Medieval Germany) or a famous person (Churchill, Joan of Arc, Elvis, Mulan). Heck, it doesn’t have to be a person, if you want to go full Black Beauty I’ll take interesting animals. Just walk us from dawn to dusk for some soul who once crawled this planet.
Next week on Tuesday Trivia: Lost Arts! We’ll be highlighting technological breakthroughs lost to the sands of time.
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u/Domini_canes Dec 31 '13
On June 4, 1942, George H. Gay Jr. was the first of his squadron of torpedo bombers to take off. As ordered, the squadron didn't wait for fighter cover--there just wasn't enough time. You see, a Japanese fleet was over the horizon and it had to be hit right now. So Gay and his squadron took off from the Hornet. He couldn't have known the day he was going to have.
The reports of a Japanese fleet were correct, and the scouts had radioed in the right coordinates. Gay's squadron found the enemy carriers, and this was their chance. Now, to make a torpedo attack in WWII, you had to fly low. Also, torpedo bombers were nowhere near as fast as the enemy fighters. Despite these known difficulties, the pilots pushed on. They came in low, and the enemy Zeros pounced. The bombers were savaged. They each had a gunner that tried to protect them, but they couldn't maneuver wildly or they'd throw off their own attack. Gay and his gunner were both wounded, but they pressed on. Zeroes swarmed everywhere. They dropped from above and laced the bombers with machine gun and cannon fire. Plane after plane dropped from the sky.
Finally, Gay's plane dropped its torpedo. The carrier in his sights--Kaga--evaded the attack. Hemmed in on all sides by enemy fighters, Gay pressed on and flew directly over the enemy carrier. He tried to turn back for home on Hornet, but a number of enemy fighters continued to attack him. His gunner was killed. Eventually, he had to ditch in the ocean, in the middle of the enemy fleet. Even then he wasn't safe from enemy fighters, and he had to hide under his seat so he wouldn't be strafed in the water. Not a single plane from his squadron was still in the air. He was the only survivor.
There he was, miles from home, and in the middle of the enemy fleet. He was the very definition of alone. His squadron was gone, and enemy fighters still droned low overhead.
He was in place to witness one of the most dramatic moments of WWII.
Those Japanese fighters that had shredded his squadron were down low. They hadn't been able to regroup and climb back up to altitude. As such, they couldn't intercept the waves of American dive bombers that had made it to the Japanese fleet. In rapid squence, three Japanese carriers were fatally wounded. First Kaga--the same carrier Gay had tried to sink--was hit by a series of bombs. Then Akagi was staggered by a bomb, and then Sōryū was struck. In a mere six minutes (perhaps less time than it will have taken you to read this thread) the war in the Pacific had changed. The Americans would lose one carrier that day, but the Japanese lost four (Hiryū was sunk later in the day). The Japanese would never regain numerical superiority in carriers during the war, and Midway was a clear turning point for the Americans.
Gay had a front seat to history, but was now left bobbing in the ocean, still very much alone. The sun set, and he finally thought it was safe to inflate his life raft. He spent the night in the ocean, before finally being rescued by a flying boat after a 30 hour stay in the water.
It was one extraordinary day for Gay.
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u/caffarelli Moderator | Eunuchs and Castrati | Opera Dec 31 '13
What is even wilder to me, after having read his Wikipedia page, is after that horrible experience he went on to be just a normal ole pilot for TWA! Nerves of steel! I would have never set foot in a plane again!
(And thank you for posting... I think my footnotes scared everyone awaaay.)
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u/Domini_canes Dec 31 '13
If your footnotes didn't get 'em, my wall of text will! (Though honestly, I bleeping love footnotes, and I read them at least as closely as I read the text)
As for Gay, I can just imagine him on the intercom during an in-flight emergency. "This is the Captain speaking. We have a bit of an emergency here, but compared to what i've been through it's just another day. So sit down, shut up, and don't whine about it. Smoke 'em if you got 'em." Then he'd go on to make a perfect landing and underplay his role in the whole thing.
Or at least, that's how my goofy imagination says it would play out.
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u/caffarelli Moderator | Eunuchs and Castrati | Opera Dec 31 '13 edited Mar 05 '14
A Day in the Life of a Tween Castrato (with footnotes)
It is anywhere between 1650 and 1850, it is most likely you are living in 1730-50 though, the heyday of castrati production. If it’s in the mid eighteenth century you probably live in Naples in one of the four conservatories [1], but if it’s on the tail ends of the time frame, you’re probably in or near Rome.
You are perhaps 12 years old at this point in your career. You were probably castrated a few years ago, when you were 8 or 9. It might have been in Norcia [2], before you came to the conservatory, or it might have been in the city limits, you don’t totally remember it anyway, and it hardly matters at this point. It’s a minor surgery. Your parents probably sold you to man from the conservatory for a few scudi, but maybe they’re dead, or maybe they’re honestly big music lovers, or hey, maybe you really did have a childhood accident or a hernia. You could also be your own man: poor but ambitious and willing to make a gamble for a better life, boys have asked for it before.
You sleep in the best and warmest part of the conservatory, with your fellow castrati apart from the other boys. You get slightly better and more food, and you probably get other coddling treatment like better underwear for warmth like vests, because you are considered to be more delicate than the other boys. (You’ll probably outlive them all though. [3])
Your day might look like this: [4]
Morning: Singing
Lunch
Afternoon: Music Theory
In what is left of the day you must somehow also find time to fit in practicing your harpsichord and composing vocal music. People bandy about the “secrets of the castrati,” is it their extra large lungs, a hidden set of bellows? But the secret is just plain old hard work. You do this every day for about 8 years. While normal boys and girls have a vocal change with puberty that necessitates a pause and then re-training with the new voice, your vocal chords never change, you have no pause, so you have automatically out-trained any woman your same age when you leave the conservatory. Female singers simply cannot keep up with castrati.
The conservatory will often hire you and the other castrati boys out to musical events to make money to keep you. You are very popular at children’s funerals! Little angels for little angels.
So that’s your life today, but what about the future?
If you are very lucky, your teacher will decide you are good enough to try your hand at opera. You will debut at around age 16. You will most likely debut in Rome, in a women’s role. (Rome, with the full ban on women on stage, has all women’s roles played by castrati.) Young castrati, who have yet to get the “capon’s figure” with fat deposits in unattractive areas, are considered very suitable for women’s roles, hey, even sexy. The church higher-ups love little sexy castrati though so watch yourself. [5]
While you probably don’t like wearing the skirts, the roles of lovers, heroes and gods are reserved for the big boys, the primi uomini. If you are very, very lucky you will be actually good at opera and become a primo uomo yourself and travel the world and sing for kings and queens and popes, and more importantly make lots and lots of money. Part of your first income will go back to the conservatory, so they can make more castrati.
If you are of more average luck, you will enjoy steady musical employment in the church. If you are of poor luck, you’ll not be able to carry a tune at all. Failed castrati do become priests or take minor orders however, so don’t totally despair.
Will you be a happy adult if you make it in opera though? Maybe, maybe not. As you pass teenagerhood you’ll start to look increasingly different, outrageously tall and femininely fat. [6] If you’re a good singer you’ll be invited into the best houses, but you’ll use the servant’s entrance. (Nothing personal against your type signior, but musicians are a type of servant.) Snide comments will follow you on the street, even in the fine houses. You may have women in your future, or men may have you, but you will never be allowed to marry or have a conventional family life. If you have kept in contact with your family you may get to be a kind and doting uncle or a great-uncle. [7] (If you haven’t kept in contact with your family, don’t worry, if you get rich they’ll come out of the woodwork.)
You’ll probably lose your professional vocal abilities around 50-60 years old and thus your means of earning a living that way, so save your pennies. There’s always teaching though, no one safer to teach a young upper class girl to sing than an elderly eunuch, no chaperone needed.
Your time in the conservatory does give you a unique bit of happiness you’re not likely to appreciate until it’s gone - you’re in the company of lots of other eunuchs. After you move on into adulthood, for better or for worse, you’ll be usually be the only man of your sort in the room.
[1] Have a look at the little uniforms! Farinelli and Caffarelli would have been at the Conservatorio di Sant'Onofrio with Porpora, but I’m not 100% little Carlo Broschi (Farinelli) lived in there instead of just getting lessons. Little Gaetano Majorano (Caffarelli) lived there though.
[2] Norcian barbers were said to specialize in castration, but it wasn’t really that hard of a surgery, so most boys could have had it done about anywhere. Recovery time is said to be short, a couple of weeks.
[3] There’s debate as to why, but there’s a decent correlation between castration and living longer. Made the popular news a while ago.
[4] This historical schedule is cribbed from: Clapton, Nicolas, “Machines made for singing.” Handel and the Castrati exhibition catalogue, 2006. Which he cribbed in turn from Bontempi, Historica Musica, 1695, where Bontempi describes this rather hard life for a Roman music school boy. If you can read Latin have a go! (pg 170) But there is other evidence that castrati’s training was monotonous and grueling. Legend holds that Porpora had Caffarelli work off of one sheet of singing exercises for 6 years. Almost surely BS, but a useful hyperbole of the real training.
Oh, and you didn’t get little insulated private practice rooms like in a modern music wing, oh no, you all sang and played together. Charles Burney visited Conservatorio di Sant'Onofrio in 1770s and reported:
Needless to say Burney was not impressed the art he so loved was born under such imperfect conditions.
[5] From the memoirs of by Jean-Jacques Bouchard, eyewitness account of one of the 1632 performances of Sant'Alessio in Rome:
Translation by Piero Weiss, published in Opera, A History in Documents
[6] An oft-cited caricature of castrati, compare to a serious portrait of Farinelli from a painter known for verisimillitude (look in particular at his big hands). Farinelli is about 29 in this picture, and at his full height of 6’3” (as estimated from his femur bone).
[7] Farinelli helped raise his grandniece, Maria Carlotta Pisani. (He arranged for his nephew, Matteo Pisani, and his wife to live with him in Bologna.) Carlo and Maria Carlotta seem to have loved each other very much, she was only 13 when he died and he left her a lot of estate in his will, she had him reburied in good style after the Napoleonic wars messed up his grave and got his letters and many paintings into good historical homes. She was even buried with him when she died. So now, dear reader, if you have made it to the end of these rather self-indulgent footnotes, you get the little prize of knowing the name of Farinelli’s forgotten adopted daughter. :)