Martha Feldman - "Castrato Phantoms" - Seth Brodsky & Maria Anna Mariani
Schedule
Mon Feb 23 2026 at 04:00 pm to 05:00 pm
UTC-06:00Location
5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL, United States, Illinois 60637 | Chicago, IL
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Martha Feldman will discuss "Castrato Phantoms: Moreschi, Fellini, and the Sacred Vernacular in Rome". She will be joined in conversation by Seth Brodsky and Maria Anna Mariani. A Q&A, book signing, and reception will follow the discussion.At the Co-op.
About the book: 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.
About the author: Martha Feldman, the Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in Music and Theater & Performance Studies at the University of Chicago, writes on voice, the spectral, opera, cinema, singers, and their resonant afterlives. Her award-winning monographs include "City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice" (California, 1995), "Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy" (Chicago, 2007), and "The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds" (California, 2015). She is coeditor of "The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives" (Oxford, 2006), "The Voice as Something More" (Chicago, 2019), and “Music and Sound at the Edges of History” (Representations 2021). Just out are the issues “Sounding the Spectral,” coedited with Seth Brodsky (Portable Gray Fall 2025) and “Vocal Deliriums (Five Proposals)” (Critical Inquiry, Autumn 2025).
About the interlocutors: Seth Brodsky is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Chicago and Director of the Richard & Mary L. Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry as well as Executive Editor of Portable Gray. He is the author of the award-winning "From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious" (University of California Press, 2017) as well as extensive writings on modernism and psychoanalysis, including attention to Britten, Cage, Schoenberg, and Berio.
Maria Anna Mariani is Associate Professor of Modern Italian Literature at the University of Chicago, an affiliate of the Center for Jewish Studies, and the author of numerous writings on autobiography, memory, and trauma, including the award-winning
"Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age: A Poetics of the Bystander" (Oxford University Press, 2022).
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Where is it happening?
5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL, United States, Illinois 60637Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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