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In their heyday, Handel’s operas almost always involved castrati, singers who were castrated as boys to preserve their higher voices but still gained the full lung capacity and overall stamina of grown men.

But you left out my favorite: “He breaks into castrati shrieks and yelps like a throttled bird clamped to the P.A.”

In Vivaldi’s day, when castrati ruled the roost, the entire cast would have been male.

Arianna takes a wife for the new emperor, which tracks musically since Handel wrote Anastasio for a castrato voice that well suits a women.

Now he is branching out from Baroque parts originally written for castrati.