In 18th-century Italian theaters, audiences fainted and wept at voices so pure they were called angelic, yet those voices were manufactured through a brutal, often fatal operation on boys aged eight to ten. This episode examines the castrati: why impoverished families gambled a son's body on the chance of stardom, how surgeries were performed with opium, ice baths, milk baths or pressure on the carotid artery, and how the absence of testosterone left small vocal cords inside an oversized adult rib cage, producing a sound that no longer exists.

We trace the demand back to the Catholic Church's ban on women singing, Pope Sixtus V's 1589 reorganization of the St. Peter's choir, and Charles Burney's tour of Italy in which every city blamed another for the surgeries. The conversation follows the castrati's takeover of leading operatic roles by 1 ...