BIOGRAPHY: PATRICK SKENE CATLINGreviews The Castrato and His WifeBy Helen Berry Oxford, 312pp. £16.99

MALE GENITALIA, apart from being amusing playthings and essential contributors to procreation, influence development of the voice, from boyhood falsetto and soprano to the adult sonorities of tenor, baritone and bass. Any male destined, for any reason, to stay forever vocally boyish can do so only without his testicles.

Helen Berry’s history of castration in Italy to fix boys’ vocal ranges is an implicit condemnation of paternal avarice and ecclesiastical hypocrisy that may make male readers squirm and females wistfully grimace. Readers of both genders may be moved to consider the hazards of sacrifices made to gain celebrity and big money. The book can be read as a moral tract. Berry’s academic manner obviates prurience, just about.

The Catholic Church covertly condoned castration in 1589, when Pope Sixtus V allowed four Spanish castrati to sing in the choir of St Peter’s Basilica. The first Italian castrato in the Sistine Chapel choir was said to have been castrated because of an illness. “The famous 16th-century anatomist Gabrielo Falloppio,” Berry writes, “hypothesised that castration could cure intestinal hernias.” This theory served as a useful excuse for a brisk trade in castrati for choirs. The church, through secular agents, paid large families with small incomes for surrendering sons to the practice.

Castrati, having been drastically altered, could, in turn, alter society, even at the highest levels. “There was a long-standing association of castrati with homosexuality, and some had been the lovers of powerful men.”

Operations to castrate boys were illegal in Italy, but castrati were welcomed for their angelic high notes. By the 18th century it was estimated that as many as 4,000 Italian boys a year submitted to the procedure, conducted with all the finesse of pig farmers.

Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci, the castrato of the title, was operated on at home in a small town in Tuscany in 1748 at the age of about 13 by an itinerant surgeon-barber with a sharp knife and no anaesthetic. Tenducci’s father, a labourer, needed the money. His wife could only stand by as she heard her son’s screams of agony. The surgeon’s young assistant returned to treat the wounds and pronounced the patient fit for the Conservatario della Pietà dei Turchini, in Naples, originally an orphanage founded by the Catholic Church.

Tenducci underwent a monastically rigorous regime, “in preparation for church choirs and a lifetime of divine service”, Berry records, and “to turn him into an opera star”.

Berry relates all she was able to discover of his triumphant yet precarious career as a star of the operatic stage and concert hall, in Italy, England and Ireland, and his ill-starred marriage to an Irish girl 15 years his junior, Dorothea Maunsell, the daughter of a well-to-do barrister with a grand house on Molesworth Street and political influence in Limerick and Cork as well as Dublin.

In the traditional way of an 18th-century upper-middle-class patriarch, Thomas Maunsell had already selected a socially acceptable young man for Dorothea by the time she was 14 or 15. She rejected the matchmaking and used the visiting Italian castrato as a means of escape. “The rudiments of male anatomy cannot have escaped even a well-brought-up young woman,” Berry comments, “although it is likely that Dorothea’s knowledge of the mechanics of sex and conception was probably hazy.”

The illicit couple eloped willy, so to speak, nilly. The ensuing unhappy melodrama is recounted with objective restraint that does not disallow a particularly bizarre and poignant anecdote. The singer’s one-time Dublin room-mate Charles Baroe said he saw him transfer a red velvet purse from one pair of breeches to another and asked Tenducci what he had got in there. He replied that his testicles were preserved in the purse and had been kept in it ever since his castration. “The Catholic practice of preserving relics was part of Tenducci’s cultural tradition,” Berry explains, “and the expensive pouch of velvet, in a royal colour, was a mark of reverence for the pieces of once-living tissue that it contained . . . The physical weight of the bag within his breeches may also have been comforting, providing a psychological boost to Tenducci’s self-esteem.”

Patrick Skene Catling is a novelist and the author of books for children