Seoul Hero

Yesterday afternoon, as I was sitting on the subway and talking to my friend Wyatt on my cellphone, I was flashed, very deliberately, by a woman sitting across from me. Like the seventy-something who flashed me in the Mangwon marketplace one afternoon, she was wearing white underwear. This woman looked to be around 30. She looked really hot (in the temperature sense of the word), but not terribly crazy, so I was naturally quite surprised. The other passengers did nothing, and neither did I.
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Of much more interest to my readers, perhaps, is the fact that Italian scientists have recently dug up the bones of a famous nineteenth century castrato. One of the last of the castrati made voice recordings that still exist, one song of which is available on the internet. Until I wrote the first version of this post, I had never located or listened to that recording before. My interest in it had been piqued while I read about it in a newspaper column some years ago, and I had hoped to find it. Now “Ave Maria,” as sung by Alexsandro Moreschi is sitting on my hard drive, to be listened to again many times. It’s quite beautiful, actually, if you can get past the static from the original phonograph recording from 1904. I have now listened to it over a dozen times tonight. It’s fascinating to be able to listen to a recording that contained such tragedy, barbarism, culture, and civilization, all rolled into one historical and relatively recent auditory artefact.

The issue of the castrati interests me, in part, because I like the falsetto of the men in Palestrina’s Missa Aeterna Christus Munera, a CD recording of which I had the pleasure of enjoying with my little son the other day. He seemed to like it as much as his father did, and I don’t say that about everything we listen to. I suspect that the castrati would have sung those parts in past centuries. I won’t presume to speak for the Little Hero’s feelings on the recording of the castrato Moreschi, however.
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By the way, Brian, my wonderful friend, I hope that you can enjoy this recording from your office in Montreal. Make sure you write me and tell me what you think of it!