Alessandro Moreschi - Critical Opinion

Critical Opinion

Critical opinion is divided about Moreschi's recordings: some say they are of little interest other than the novelty of preserving the voice of a castrato, and that Moreschi was a mediocre singer, while others detect the remains of a talented singer unfortunately past his prime by the time he recorded. (Moreschi was in his mid-forties when he made his recordings.) Still others feel that he was a very fine singer indeed, and that much of the "difficulty" in listening to Moreschi's recordings stems from changes in taste and singing style between his time and ours. His vocal technique can certainly seem to grate upon modern ears, but many of the seemingly imperfect vocal attacks, for example, are in fact grace notes, launched from as much as a tenth below the note - in Moreschi's case, this seems to have been a long-standing means of drawing on the particular acoustics of the Sistine Chapel itself. The dated aesthetic of Moreschi's singing, involving extreme passion and a perpetual type of sob, often sounds bizarre to the modern listener, and can be misinterpreted as technical weakness or symptomatic of an aging voice.

The standard of his recordings is certainly variable; Moreschi recorded two versions of Rossini's "Crucifixus". In the first, Moreschi's first side from his first recording session in 1902, he sings off key, and continues to do so for several bars. Whatever modern opinion may be of his recordings, the enthusiastic applause of his colleagues attests to their appreciation on at least one occasion, as can be heard at the end of his rendering of Tosti's song "Ideale".

The best-known piece Moreschi recorded is the Bach/Gounod "Ave Maria" (though the Sistine Chapel choir recorded Mozart's Ave verum corpus, Moreschi's voice is not individually audible). Perhaps only here does Moreschi's singing approach the type of star quality that the great castrato performances of the Baroque era must have possessed; there is great fervour in the singing - the above-mentioned "tear in every note" - and Moreschi takes the climactic high B natural without apparent effort.