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The Greatest Soprano Was A Man
I had the good fortune to grow up in a household with an extensive library. It was not, however, a scholarly library, by any means. It was a serendipitous aggregation of books, but, from early childhood onwards, that miscellany was the source of many happy hours of discovery. One of the books that delighted me most as a child was Ripley's Big Book -Believe it or Not!, published in 1934, the year that my parents were married. After all of those years, pack rat that I am, I still have that volume, and here is a scan of the cover:
Robert Ripley made a fortune by means of a newspaper column, for which he provided the illustrations, that presented physical oddities and factual oddities to the world at large. Mr. Ripley has been in the marble orchard for nearly 60 years, but Believe it or Not! lives on in museums and tourist attractions the world over, most notably in his own mansion in St. Augustine, Florida. He was not a charlatan, and he was not a con artist, however. He was scrupulous about verfying his facts, and to my knowledge none of the extraordinary items that he featured in his columns has ever been discredited as factually inaccurate. In the mid 1970s, I found myself seated, at a dinner party, next to a woman who had been Mr. Ripley's last amanuensis, and she confirmed what I had long suspected. He valued his reputation so much that he insisted that the accuracy of every item that appeared his column be checked, re-checked, and then checked again.
Most of the items in the book, I admit, have a certain undeniable shock value. There's the 17 year old grandmother, for example, and the Hindu fakir who could touch his own forehead with his tongue. There's the golfer with no arms who shot a 98 for 18 holes, and there is an explanation of why, officially, the Queen of Spain has no legs. There are two pages of alternate spellings of the name Shakespeare, and an item about the man who, because of a technicality, was President of the United States for one day. And on and on.
But, among the oddities, as a child of ten, a child who had already discovered and become enamored of Baroque music, I came across an item entitled, The Greatest Soprano Was A Man. It was thanks to this installment of Ripley's Believe it or Not! that I first learned of the existence of an extraordinary singer named Carlo Broschi Farinelli. Here is a scan of that page, page 211, in that 1934 edition of Ripley's Big Book -Believe it or Not!:
The item, of course, was prepared in the days when the so-called Hays Code muzzled Hollywood, and David Selznick paid a large fine so that Clark Gable could tell Vivien Leigh that he didn't give a damn at the end of the epic film, Gone With The Wind. Ripley is discreet, to say the least, and he does not explain why it was that Farinelli was a soprano. I vividly recall the day when one of my 9th grade classmates at the Greenwich Country Day School explained why, and in graphic terms. (He was Captain of the Football, Hockey, and Baseball teams, later the quarterback of the varsity football team at Harvard, and now is a highly regarded oratorio tenor!)
This item is a curiosity to say the least, and it is one that is worth preserving for its historical uniquity, if I may be permitted to coin a word. And that is why I have taken the time to prepare this web page.
Mr. Ripley may have gotten his facts right, but the resemblance of the singer in his sketch to the "real" Farinelli is purely coincidental. Here is the famous portrait by Jacopo Amiconi that shows Farinelli at the zenith of his career:
But I don't care. After all, it was through that item on page 211, in that 1934 edition of Ripley's Big Book -Believe it or Not! that I first learned about male sopranos, and that led to countertenors, and then to the recordings of Alfred Deller, and....
God bless you, Mr. Ripley, and God bless you, too, Signor Farinelli!
Teri Noel Towe
July 2, 2001
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