Gérard Corbiau | Farinelli / 1994

a milk bath with opium

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marcel Beaulieu, Andrée Corbiau, and Gérard Corbiau (screenplay), Gérard Corbiau (director) Farinelli / 1994

 

The tale of Carlo Maria Brosci (Stefano Dionisi) and his brother Riccardo (Enrico Lo Verso) are not truly at the center of current LGBTQ interests. But I am sure that if the tradition of the castrati had remained into the 21st Century, there would certainly be a C among the LGBTQ+ alphabet mix.

     Fortunately, the practice stopped somewhere in the 18th century, when talented and well-trained operatic countertenors took their place.

    Carlo, known on the opera stage as Farinelli, at least as this film portrays him—despite having been castrated as a child by his presumably loving brother Riccardo who didn’t want to lose the voice for which he composed music—was heterosexually interested, wooing the women into his bed only to have his raunchy and sexy brother Riccardo take his place to engage the now sexually excited women in full sex. It was the ideal switch and bait situation. You might say it was the perfect relationship, except for their other serious problems.

       For one, Riccardo has lied to his brother, describing his castration to have been the result of an injury while horse riding. Secondly, as Carlo begins to perceive, his brother’s music simply plays to his spectacular soprano talents (the real Farinelli could evidently move with ease from the highest of soprano notes to the lower ranges of a tenor), long held and trilled notes at the highest of registers, which makes the females faint and brings in gay males hidden behind face masks to hide their identity, who equally swoon from the pure embellishments of his talent. Even George Frideric Handel, the greatest opera and oratorio composer of the day, wants Farinelli to join his company, a desire dearly desired by Carlo but absolutely and quite meanly refused when the young talent insists the deal include his beloved brother Riccardo.*

       Throughout the film, Carlo is haunted by images of a young castrati who warned him of the future dangers before jumping to his death and his own vague memories of an opium-laded milk bath which resulted in the castration.

     In a long series of flashbacks within flashbacks—the major structure of this overwrought but beautifully filmed and aurally delightful movie—we grow to learn of the deep love between brothers, perhaps more sexually interesting as an LGBTQ theme than the castrato condition that Carlo suffers. And equally we discover just how competitive and mean, particularly on Handel’s part, the operatic scene of the day was.

    Handel’s Covent Garden (then called the King’s Theatre at Haymarket, later the home the flowerseller Liza Doolittle in My Fair Lady) opera house controls London’s scene, bringing the competing Opera of the Nobility, sponsored by the Prince of Wales and directed by Carlo’s old vocal teacher Porpora (Omero Antonutti), into near bankruptcy.

        When the beautiful Alexandra Lerris (Elsa Zylberstein) lures him to London and he and his brother into her bed, she invites him to join the company, which he does with great success, closing, at least for one night, Handel’s theater. Handel, himself, is overwhelmed by the young Farinelli’s singing and, at least according to the myth of this movie, faints like the many women in the audience, never to compose again. That never happened in reality, but is perfect for a movie that now requires his revenge, particularly after Handel perversely tells Farinelli how his own brother really was the source of his castration—also apparently an historical inaccuracy.

       The movie itself thrills with the singing of Farinelli (performed by soprano Ewa Malas-Godlewska and countertenor Derek Lee Ragin), but challenges our narrative credulity as it moves constantly in and out of time, ignoring, in fact, the most important aspects of the real Farinelli’s career, his long involvement with the Spanish Court where he became at first a favorite of the Spanish Queen Elisabeth Farnese and soon after her husband King Philip V, who believed the castrato’s voice might cure his severe depression. Carlo was named the chamber musician for the King and Queen in 1737, providing him with an enormous salary, a position that only increased when the musician-lover Ferdinand VI, Philip’s son who ascended to the role of King. His wife was a highly accomplished harpsichordist for whom Dominico Scarlatti wrote many of his sonatas, and under the couple’s rule Farinelli became the Director of the Court Opera and Knight of the Order of Caltrava, allowing him an even larger salary and providing him with a huge residence where he was visited by figures such as Leopold Mozart and his son Wolfgang Amadeus, and even the author, adventurer, and mythologized libertine Casanova.

       Gérard Corbiau’s movie merely hints at some of these things, while focusing instead on, first the breakup of the Brosci brothers, and then Carlo’s gradual reacceptance when Riccardo finally finishes his long-promised opera for him, Orpheus. Together the brothers again come to share the love of Alexandra, Riccardo leaving her pregnant for Carlo to raise the child up as his own son, presumably to become a sort of normative heterosexual, at least in the eyes of his public.

      Belgium director Corbiau’s film is often a beautiful epic drama, but it’s condensation of reality with sensationalism weakens its force, and its pretentions to great art suffer from its disruptive representation of the real drama of Farinelli’s truly remarkable life.

      

*A far more interesting LGBTQ film might have been centered upon Handel, who was presumably gay, mean, wealthy, egotistical and talented beyond belief, a man who refused upon visiting the other great composer of the period. John Sebastian Bach upon visiting his hometown.