2 Singers, 1 Computer Meld, No Short Cuts

Aren’t computers wonderful? Thanks to the wonders of modern sound technology, audiences will be able to hear a sound that no longer exists in nature--the voice of a castrato.

“Farinelli,” which opens March 17, is the Belgian entry in this year’s Oscar race and the surprise winner of best foreign film at the Golden Globe Awards (against such heavy favorites as “Red” and “To Live”). The film attempts to re-create the enormous popularity of the title character, a 17th-Century Italian singer who was castrated before he reached puberty so that the flow of testosterone would not compromise the higher registers and range of his singing voice.

The process of duplicating the “emotional shock” that director Gerard Corbiau says was engendered by this feat required seven months of technological sleight of hand, several of Europe’s finest sound technicians and two extraordinary voices, one male and one female, which all blended together into the unearthly voice that now comes out of the film’s star, Stefano Dionisi.

As anyone who’s read Anne Rice’s novel “Cry to Heaven” is aware, while castrati could not reproduce, they were heralded for their physical as well as their vocal charms. The Catholic Church contended that a childlike voice brought the faithful closer to God, Corbiau says. And the Sistine Chapel reverberated with their closer-to-godliness tones.

Corbiau and his wife, Andree, extensively researched the castrato phenomenon, which swept across most of Europe beginning in the 16th Century, peaking in the 17th and 18th centuries during which, they estimate, there were 3,000 to 5,000 castration operations. Most castrati joined church choirs or an opera company. (Women were not allowed to sing on stage until the 19th Century.)

The young Italian Carlo Broschi--a.k.a. Farinelli--was a superstar in his day. And like many of today’s popular music personalities, Farinelli’s life was replete with groupies and sexual controversy.

Since the practice of castrating males for art’s sake was banned in the 19th Century, there are no castrati recordings; the current rage for countertenors in classical music is about as close as contemporary music comes.

“We could have used a countertenor’s voice or that of a soprano,” says Corbiau. But neither was sufficient to suggest the range or vocal flourish castrati possessed. “It was like the voice of a child, but resonant through the large chest cavity of a grown man. They had immense register, three octaves or more. There are few singers today who can do that.

“So I had this crazy idea,” he continues. He would technically fuse two voices--one male and one female--to render Farinelli’s unique sound.

Melding is different from simple mixing. It had to be seamless, he says. “I wasn’t sure exactly where I was headed.”

The two singers recorded the complete compositions; then the process of editing them together began. For the lower end of Farinelli’s voice, Corbiau recorded African American countertenor Derek Lee Ragin--”the voice of flesh and body,” as he puts it. For the higher registers he used Polish soprano Ewa Mallas Godlewska. “We were very lucky because both singers had similar vocal qualities and at times it was hard to tell them apart.”

With the help of Swiss technician and musicologist Jean-Claude Gaberel, Corbiau spent three months editing the voices together, which required 3,000 separate cuts. After the editing was completed, the computer work was initiated at Paris’ IRCAM laboratory. Software programs were written to combine the timbres of the two singers so as to make them indistinguishable, which took another four months.

“It’s as if you took a violin and a viola and meshed them together so you couldn’t tell where the one ended and the other began,” says Corbiau. “At the same time we had to keep intact the interpretive quality each singer brought to the material.”

Keeping the male and female qualities of the voice was symbolically important, says Andree Corbiau. As to whether the result is genuinely the sound of a castrato, “no one will ever be able to say,” Gerard Corbiau admits with a slight shrug.*