The End of Castration: Anna Renzi in Rome, 1640
The Woman Who Shattered a Thousand Years of Feminine Silence
“Let your women keep silence in the churches.”
— Corinthians 14:34
“If God forbade drinking, would he have made wine so good?”
— Cardinal Richelieu
I. The Debut
Murmurs rippled through the room, quiet at first, then gathering force. The embroidered curtains rose. Velvet chairs groaned under shifting bodies as hands fumbled with worn librettos — pages fluttering like skittish birds. Something remarkable was about to happen. Everyone thought it, no one could imagine what it would be.
In the front row, Cardinal Richelieu, cloaked in scarlet. The Red Eminence. The man who didn’t attend performances — he anointed them.
From behind, a heavyset husband with a thin wife leaned forward.
“Why is he here tonight?” he whispered.
Is there a new treaty? A war?” she replied.
He paused. “Think not, Señora. It’s for her.”
II. The Room That Listened
The setting was heavy with implication: the private theater of the French ambassador in Rome, nestled inside the Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi. Not just another night of courtly entertainment — something bigger. The air was fraught with slow-building tension, something unexpected. Something feared by some, longed for by others.
The opera, Il favorito del principale, had been written for her.
Composer Filiberto Laurenzi shaped the music. The libretto came from Giulio Rospigliosi — soon to become Pope Clement IX. They weren’t just collaborators. They were believers in a movement that didn’t yet exist.
Armand Jean du Plessis — better known as Richelieu to his friends, though he had none — sat cloaked in scarlet, silent and inscrutable. He was the architect of modern France, advisor to kings, and founder of the Académie Française. His smile famously hid a blade. “Give me six lines from an honest man,” he once said, “and I’ll hang him.” He trafficked in manipulation, not mercy.
But this evening, he wasn’t here for conquest. He was here for pleasure, his ears attuned to a sound they never heard before — a different kind of joy. Richelieu was a notorious voluptuary, once remarking, “If God forbade drinking, would He have made wine so good?”
The palace walls had witnessed diplomacy and betrayal, courtly games and whispered power. Florence and Venice had begun their cultural unshackling — rules softening, thresholds lowering, light pouring into rooms where science began to relieve the darkness. And here, in this greatest of all the cities of the classical world, the birthplace of Catholic Christianity, conditions had realigned. A thousand years of custom was about to be discarded.
As the overture rose, the doors at the back of the stage parted. And Anna Renzi entered like a question that needed no answer.
III. The Voice That Wasn’t Supposed to Exist
This was her debut. She didn’t glide. She didn’t hesitate. She arrived. A new forge had formed — because greatness never waits for the room to warm up.
Her gown shimmered in candlelight, her curls pinned back, chin high, eyes alight with something untranslatable. She opened her mouth — and the centuries cracked.
The sound was unearthly. Something never heard. It wasn’t a castrato, a boy in soprano’s disguise. It wasn’t a nun behind a lattice. It was a woman. In public. In Rome.
Singing — where no woman had sung before.
As the overture built — strings and harpsichord in delicate balance — the audience straightened. A discernible gasp floated across the seats. And in that pause, history held its breath.
What she brought to the stage wasn’t just talent — it was sovereignty over a long-conquered self. She wasn’t a symbol. She was angelic in range. Human in form.
Cardinal Richelieu didn’t blink. He leaned forward and applauded with gusto.
IV. What Changed
For centuries, the high notes belonged not to alter boys — but to boys who were altered — castrati. High-pitched young male voices, surgically frozen in adolescence, engineered for purity, worshipped for unearthly resonance. These weren’t falsettos. They were the sounds of bloody sacrifice.
Castrati weren’t created for opera, not originally. They emerged in church choirs, born of necessity when women’s voices were banned because of a line written around AD 55, in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians:
“Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak…” (1 Corinthians 14:34).
The theater soon borrowed what the Church had wrought. Opera audiences — entranced by the soaring range and virtuosity — fell for the same cravings. So did the families of the boys. Sons were offered up in pursuit of art and ambition. The cost — bodily and human — was woven into art. And audiences, spellbound, found it easy to hear past the wound.
By the late 1500s, Italy had invented both the operatic stage. Jacopo Peri’s Dafne (1597) was followed by Euridice (1600), then Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607), all performed in a world where women were silenced, and boys sang heaven’s notes.
Ironically, Paul’s intention may have been temporary, even local — a call for order in early worship, not a lifelong gig. But the Church didn’t read it that way. A whisper from the past turned into a commandment. The instruction made for crisis metastasized into doctrine. A glance became a taboo, then a wall, then tradition. And like many such rules, it calcified.
Castrati were exalted. Women went unheard. Until Rome, 1640.
V. The Roman Way
When Anna Renzi stepped into the Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi, violet silk whispering across marble, Paul’s epistle met its rebuke — not in theology, but in aria. In that instant, centuries of church tradition cracked.
Her time had come, and she didn’t ask permission. The Renaissance didn’t need a manifesto. It needed a voice. A living rebuttal. A woman — undeniable, human, and finally heard.
And Richelieu? He didn’t just bear witness. He gave it his blessing. He leaned forward, then applauded — slowly at first, then louder. Until the entire theater stood with him, tossing roses, shouting “Brava!”
The Red Eminence became her patron. And that night in Rome, history didn’t tarry. A woman arrived.
The Roman Renaissance — seat of the Papacy, engine of grandeur — had long been a proving ground for genius. Popes commissioned glory: cathedrals, domes, frescoes. Michelangelo, Raphael, and da Vinci left their fingerprints on the city. Now, a woman singing a hauntingly beautiful aria joined their company.
And because it was Rome, the world heard it too.
PS Anna Renzi became the highest-paid soprano of the Renaissance.
