Florin Spătariu: Vocile castraţilor în muzica epocii baroce
Starting with the example of the famous emasculated singer Farinelli, father Florin Spatartiu, in this study analyses, at first view, an anomaly that existed and covered the entire Europe during over 200 years, namely, the voices of emasculated people in Baroque era music. These singers represented a category of artists that dominated the Western musical panorama beginning with the last decade of XVI century till classicism period, favoring the appearance of some unequaled musical masterpieces, having as authors Händel, Bach, Purcell, Scarlett etc., meant, in a great part, for these rare voices. The author treats, first of all, the historical aspects, underlining the appearance of this phenomenon and the way it underlied in the second Christian millennium, but at the same time, the music aspects. In the conclusion of this article father underlines that even if we think this way of realizing music to be strange and deviating from nature, for musicians of the Baroque era it was an opportunity to create, render and offer to the humanity unique music values, even if it means the sacrifice of so many normal lives.