No, there are no castrato singers today in the traditional sense. The practice of castrating boys to preserve their high-pitched singing voices ended over a century ago, and the last known castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, died in 1922. However, a handful of modern singers produce a remarkably similar sound through rare medical conditions or specialized vocal training.
Why the Practice Ended
For roughly 300 years, from the 1500s through the 1800s, thousands of boys across Italy were castrated before puberty to create singers with an extraordinary vocal range. The practice was driven largely by the Catholic Church’s ban on women singing in church choirs, combined with a growing appetite for virtuosic opera. At its peak in the 1700s, an estimated 4,000 boys were castrated annually in Italy alone.
Pope Pius X effectively ended the tradition in 1903 with an official decree stating that whenever high soprano and contralto voices were needed in church, “these parts must be taken by boys, according to the most ancient usage of the Church.” Italy had already outlawed the surgery decades earlier, though the Vatican had quietly continued employing castrati in the Sistine Chapel choir. Moreschi, who sang in that choir, retired in 1913 and remains the only castrato ever to have made solo recordings. Those recordings, made between 1902 and 1904, are scratchy and limited by early technology, but they offer the only direct evidence of what a castrato actually sounded like.
What Made the Castrato Voice Unique
The castrato voice wasn’t simply a man singing in a high register. It was the product of a specific and irreversible biological change. Without testosterone at puberty, the larynx stays roughly the size of a child’s, keeping the vocal cords short and thin. This preserves a naturally high pitch without any of the strain or breathiness that comes from an adult male pushing into falsetto.
But the rest of the body keeps growing. In fact, castrati tended to grow unusually tall because testosterone normally triggers the closure of growth plates in the long bones. Without it, the bones keep lengthening. Castrati also developed a characteristic “keel chest” (a protruding breastbone with an expanded rib cage), which gave them significantly greater lung capacity than a typical adult. The result was a voice with the pitch of a boy soprano powered by the lung volume and muscular strength of a full-grown man. Contemporary accounts describe the sound as overwhelming in its volume, agility, and ability to sustain phrases far longer than any normal singer could manage.
The Closest Modern Equivalents
A very small number of living men produce a soprano-range voice that sounds closer to a historical castrato than anything else available today. These singers have hormonal conditions that partially replicate the biology of castration. The most notable is Radu Marian, born in 1977 in Moldova, who is sometimes described as an “endocrinological castrato.” His body naturally underproduced the hormones that would have deepened his voice at puberty, and his singing voice spans from middle C up to two octaves above it. Listeners and critics note that he sounds far more like a boy treble than like an adult man singing falsetto.
Kallmann syndrome is one condition that can produce this effect. People with Kallmann syndrome don’t undergo typical puberty because their brains fail to produce the hormones that trigger sexual development. In males, this means the voice never deepens, facial hair doesn’t grow, and the larynx remains small. If untreated with hormone replacement, a man with Kallmann syndrome could retain a high voice into adulthood. But this is exceedingly rare as a path to a singing career, and the handful of singers in this category are medical curiosities rather than part of any ongoing tradition.
How Castrato Roles Are Performed Today
Opera houses face a practical problem: some of the greatest roles in Baroque opera were written specifically for castrato voices that no longer exist. Handel’s operas alone contain dozens of leading roles composed for castrati, with elaborate passages designed to showcase their unique abilities. Modern productions use two main workarounds.
The first is casting a woman, typically a mezzo-soprano, in the male role. The second is using a countertenor, a male singer trained to sing in a highly developed falsetto register. Both approaches are common and widely accepted. The Metropolitan Opera’s production of Handel’s “Agrippina,” for example, cast mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey as Nerone (originally a castrato role) alongside countertenor Iestyn Davies as Ottone.
Neither solution perfectly replicates the castrato sound. A mezzo-soprano has the right pitch but a distinctly female vocal timbre. A countertenor has the right gender but is singing in falsetto, which produces a lighter, airier tone than the full-throated power a castrato could generate. The physical instrument that created the castrato voice, a child-sized larynx in an adult-sized chest, simply cannot be reproduced through training alone. What audiences hear in modern performances is an approximation, often a beautiful one, but fundamentally different from the sound that made 18th-century audiences weep.