Article: Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage and Music in the Life of Atto Melani

Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage and Music in the Life of Atto Melani By Roger Frei tas Cambridge Press, 431 pp. $99

What did it mean to be an insider in seventeenth-century European society? Roger Frei tas, in a wonderfully detailed biography, addresses this question repeatedly through the lens of his subject, castrato Atto Melani. Atto's is a singular case - or perhaps, one intuits from Freirás, not so singular as one might expect. Born into a large, bourgeois, musical family in Pistoia, Atto used music as the ignition, diplomacy as the fuel, to elevare himself and his family to noble stature. Wonderfully researched, and drawing from Atto's voluminous correspondence of ...

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