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 1680, the mirror-training regimen of Roman singing schools, the hysteria around Farinelli, the mockery and marginalization they faced offstage, and the decline driven by Enlightenment ideals, the rise of the heroic tenor, Italian unification in 1861, and papal decrees culminating in 1903. It closes with the wax-cylinder recordings of Alessandro Moreschi, the last Sistine castrato.

• Why boy sopranos and adult falsettists could not solve the Church’s polyphony problem
• Roger Pickering’s 1755 critique of Farinelli as ecstasy to the ear and offense to the eye
• Casanova’s accounts of castrati in high society and the ban on their marrying
• What became of the thousands of survivors whose voices never developed
• Modern comparisons from Jimmy Scott to countertenors and why the sound cannot be recreated