Farinelli [1994] Gerard Corbiau

http://bayimg.com/JaLbOAaCN

Farinelli (1994)


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109771/

Audio Track 1 ITALIAN
Audio Track 2 FRENCH
Subtitles ENGLISH

Farinelli is a 1994 biopic film about the life and career of Italian opera singer Farinelli, considered one of the greatest castrato singers of all time. It stars Stefano Dionisi as Farinelli and was directed by Belgian director Gérard Corbiau.

Stefano Dionisi ... Carlo Broschi (Farinelli)
Enrico Lo Verso ... Riccardo Broschi
Elsa Zylberstein ... Alexandra
Jeroen Krabbé ... George Frideric Handel
Caroline Cellier ... Margareth Hunter
Renaud du Peloux de Saint Romain ... Benedict
Omero Antonutti ... Nicola Porpora
Marianne Basler ... Countess Mauer
Pier Paolo Capponi ... Broschi
Graham Valentine ... Prince of Wales
Jacques Boudet ... Felipe V
Delphine Zentout ... Young admirer
Richard Reeves
Jonathan Fox
Jo Betzing (as Josef Betzing)

Although Dionisi provided the speaking voice, Farinelli's singing voice was provided by a soprano, Ewa Malas-Godlewska and a countertenor, Derek Lee Ragin, who were recorded separately then digitally merged to recreate the sound of a castrato.

Although based on real life events, some dramatic license is taken. For example, Farinelli's brother is given much importance and Porpora is de-emphasized, while the movie offers a different explanation for how Carlo Broschi came to take the stage name Farinelli. George Frideric Handel, played by Jeroen Krabbé, is made out to be somewhat of a villain, but this is based on the competition between the theater at which Handel's music was played and the theater at which Farinelli sang.

Its musical director was the French harpsichordist and conductor Christophe Rousset. The musical recording was made at the concert hall "L'Arsenal" in Metz, with the orchestra Les Talens Lyriques.

It is rated R by the MPAA for depictions of adult themes and sexuality. It is available on Region 1 DVDs with a spoken track in French and Italian with a little English, and subtitles available in English and Spanish.


Farinelli (January 24, 1705 – September 16, 1782), was the stage name of Carlo Maria Broschi, one of the most famous Italian contralto and soprano castrato singers of the 18th century.

The film is not the first dramatic work to take Farinelli's life as its source material. He appears as a character in the opera La Part du Diable, composed by Daniel Auber to a libretto by Eugène Scribe, and has the title-role in the opera Farinelli by the English composer John Barnett, first performed at Drury Lane in 1839, where his part is, oddly, written for a tenor (this work is itself an adaptation of the anonymous Farinelli, ou le Bouffe du Roi, premiered in Paris in 1835). More recent operas include Matteo d'Amico's Farinelli, la voce perduta (1996) and Farinelli, oder die Macht des Gesanges by Siegfried Matthus (1998).


A castrato (Italian, plural: castrati) is a man with a singing voice equivalent to that of a soprano, mezzo-soprano, or contralto voice produced either by castration of the singer before puberty or one who, because of an endocrinological condition, never reaches sexual maturity.

Castration before puberty (or in its early stages) prevents a boy's larynx from being transformed by the normal physiological events of puberty. As a result, the vocal range of prepubescence (shared by both sexes) is largely retained, and the voice develops into adulthood in a unique way. Prepubescent castration for this purpose diminished greatly in the late 1700s and was made illegal in Italy in 1870.

As the castrato's body grew, his lack of testosterone meant that his epiphyses (bone-joints) did not harden in the normal manner. Thus the limbs of the castrati often grew unusually long, as did the bones of their ribs. This, combined with intensive training, gave them unrivalled lung-power and breath capacity. Operating through small, child-sized vocal cords, their voices were also extraordinarily flexible, and quite different from the equivalent adult female voice, as well as higher vocal ranges of the uncastrated adult male (see soprano, mezzo-soprano, alto, sopranist, countertenor and contralto). Listening to the only surviving recordings of a castrato (see below), one can hear that the lower part of the voice sounds like a "super-high" tenor, with a more falsetto-like upper register above that.

Castrati were rarely referred to as such: in the 18th century, the euphemism musico (pl musici) was much more generally used, although it usually carried derogatory implications; another synonym was evirato (literally meaning "emasculated"). Eunuch is a more general term, since historically many eunuchs were created after puberty, castration thus having no effect on their voices.