"A book that leaves the reader awestruck. Feldman's meticulous documentation traces an extended search for connections between the castrato voice and its penumbrae in Italy, from recording technology's uncanniness to Federico Fellini's filmic obsessions, from biography to kinship and its meanings, touching on forms taken by the sacred, and extending from centuries past to the present. Feldman has written a non-linear, time-traveling history that departs from a gravitational center--the historical figure of Alessandro Moreschi, 'the last castrato'--to reach outer orbits in psychoanalysis and the spectral before returning to the icon at its center, then turning outwards again. In this extraordinary and moving tour-de-force, the writing itself is singing." --Carolyn Abbate, Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor, Harvard University "In Castrato Phantoms , Feldman ponders the artistic resonances of the improbable link between Moreschi and Fellini to provide an immensely erudite, imaginative, theoretically sophisticated account of the ways the long-suppressed phenomenon of the castrato echoes through Italian culture. Readers interested in histories of Catholicism, singing, popular culture, and even colonial fantasies of twentieth-century Italy will find the book invaluable, and a great read!" --Suzanne G. Cusick, Samuel Rudin University Professor in the Humanities, Emerita, New York University "Castrato Phantoms is microhistory at its best. Feldman's virtuosic reconstruction of Moreschi's life deploys the historian's tools -- genealogy, philology, and storytelling -- to poetic ends, producing a textured reflection on anachronism and the aporias of time.

Refracted in the material traces of Moreschi's life are the sounds and images of a twilight Vatican still gripping Rome in the form of what Feldman brilliantly calls the 'sacred vernacular.' Closely observing relationships between Moreschi and Fellini, Feldman seamlessly weaves the afterlife of opera to the history of film." --Giorgio Biancorosso, Professor of Music, University of Hong Kong "A meditation by one of the most gifted and heartfelt cultural historians of her generation on the resonant entanglements of what we presume to call 'the past' and 'the present.' As the book's fascinating stories unfold, woven effortlessly across several centuries and many registers of cultural criticism, they gradually converge around a central question: How do we, as historians, navigate, sound, and tell the truth while confronting the many silencings of history?" --Elisabeth Le Guin, Professor Emerita of Musicology, University of California, Los Angeles "With an artist's alertness to the inner life and a historian's zest for the archival chase, Feldman takes readers on a wild ride through the twilight of the castrato phenomenon. The journey begins in a belt shop on the bustling via del Corso in Rome, owned by the great-grandchildren of Alessandro Moreschi. They have an uncle, Federico Fellini, whose cinematic commitment to the past as lost fragments flows through the book. Feldman's excavation of the Vatican's complicity in making castrati offers a model for recovering histories still being obfuscated today. New insights into psychoanalysis explain how humans navigate massive cultural and political transformations.

" --Bonnie Gordon, Professor of Music, University of Virginia.