Elena Passarello

By the time he was infamous enough to sell out bullfighting arenas, the Caruso C was a sort of burlesque number.  He would inch to it from the frequencies below, nearly embrace the note, and then flat a bit before trumpeting, C! with full tenor fury. Toscanini chided him for grandstanding, but this in-and-out tease worked well with German and Latin American houses, which particularly enjoyed the punishment of a loud flirtation.

To hear that girly voice escape the concertmaster’s staff and push into secular, structural ecstasy must have felt like a peep show from behind the veil. In [the castrato] Farinelli’s highest note, they might have heard a terrifyingly private sound, one usually made by a woman, smirking at them from the mouth of a breathtakingly lovely man.  Maybe the women felt anyone who sang sounds so close to their own must understand the root tone of the noises women make.

Did men feel the same way two centuries later, upon hearing a square-jawed, shoulder-padded Lauren Bacall hit a baritone C2 for “put your lips together and blow?”

The third scream, I think, is the scream that won it. You can hear me lose a battle in my throat.  You do not have to assume that I will be mute for days afterward; you know it.  Because on the e of that last “Stella!”, the sound sinks lower into my neck and starts ripping. Imagine the margin of a piece of paper torn, notch, by notch, from a spiral notebook, or an anvil dropping through floor after floor of a cartoon tenement.  I did not tell myself to make this hurt, but there I am, punching lower and lower into myself to see what comes up.  The noise is just awful, but it is mighty loud.