Photo by Valerie Booth O.
The Department of Music is pleased to share that Martha Feldman, Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Music and the College, will be releasing a new book in February 2026.
The book, titled Castrato Phantoms: Moreschi, Fellini, and the Sacred Vernacular in Rome, maps castrato afterlives in modern Rome.
We invite you to join Martha Feldman for a book discussion, Q&A, book signing, and reception at The Seminary Co-op on Monday, February 23 from 4:00-5:00pm. She will be joined in conversation by Seth Brodsky and Maria Anna Mariani. RSVP here.
Pre-order the book on Princeton University Press's website, and learn more below.
About Castrato Phantoms
"Feldman provides an exceptional guide to a culture that produced castrati only to discard them, and to the sense of a haunted too-lateness that left Moreschi outside his own life."
Around 1830, opera houses stopped using castrati, and Rome and the Vatican became home to their glorious singing, engineered by surgery and intensive vocal training. Castrati were long mired in secrecy, obfuscations, and lies about their origin and conditions, not least the last of them, Alessandro Moreschi. Musicologist Martha Feldman declines to accept these deep-seated mysteries and concealments. After a decade and more of digging through archives and family histories comes her exciting transdisciplinary and quasi-cinematic account of Moreschi, whose recordings preserve the only sonic trace of a solo castrato.
Yet Moreschi’s story extends far beyond him. It opens up intrigues, politics, and histories of the Vatican, everyday histories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Rome, the world of Roman opera, the city’s unique mélange of sacred and vernacular tropes, and representations of Rome by iconic film director Federico Fellini. Moreschi and Fellini turn out to have been related by marriage, but also to share synergies grounded in Rome’s persistent inclination to vernacularize the sacred. Far from telling of one anomalous figure, Feldman’s gripping history convinces readers that Moreschi, like Fellini, can be read as an improbable index of Roman consciousness, both during his own life and well beyond.