I have always been puzzled why domestic DVD distributors insist on giving the movie "Farinelli" a vulgar Chinese name like "Peerless Enchantress", and transliterating it directly into "Farinelli" is not very "faithful, daring, Ya"? To know that Farinelli is not a woman like Cleopatra, and of course he is not a man. Whenever a Western music history book with some knowledge introduces Farinelli, he will generally call him "the most famous male soprano in Italy". In professional terms, Farinelli is a castrato.
As a special kind of full-time singer in the history of Western music, castrato originated in the Byzantine church in the 9th century, flourished in Baroque, declined in classicism, and disappeared in romanticism. In order to make the singer's emotion single and pure, close to the sublime, castrations are mostly castrated before the developmental voice change period, so their vocal cords are still very narrow and will not widen with the growth of the body. The teacher's careful tuning made the voice of the castrato not only have the purity of a child's voice, but also the gorgeousness of a female voice and the strength of a male voice. It can really be called the sound of nature. In the castrato team of hundreds of years, Farinelli is definitely "the sound of nature".
Throughout Farinelli's entire life course, his music career can be roughly divided into two parts: before 1737, when he was young and young, he traveled to Europe with the composer's brother, and he was in the music world. Gao Renjing bowed to his voice, and people exclaimed: "There is an Almighty God in the sky, and there is a Farinelli on the earth"; after 1737, he was invited by the Queen of Spain to enter the palace to sing for the king for treatment Due to depression, he only sang the same four songs every day. For ten years, he won the favor of the royal family. After the death of the king, he chose to go into seclusion until his death without any interest in politics. Due to the limitations of the times and the outdated baroque style, Farinelli is only a legend on paper for us, and some of the songs he sang were too difficult to be buried in the depths of history. Therefore, for a biographical film like "Farinelli", which takes the first half of Farinelli's life as the narrative backbone, as long as the music is successful, then the film itself is also successful. Fortunately it did. Take the song "Let Me Cry" as an example. Although contemporary famous singers such as Bartell, Barbara, Brightman and so on have sung this song, they have either lowered the tone or deleted the flowery art. On a par. The main music creator of the film had to synthesize the solos of the famous falsetto tenor Derek Lee Ruijin and the soprano Marathi Gudlevska by computer, which reproduced the 18th-century "can make high-pitched sounds" Rotation for 1 minute" is a miracle of sound. At the end of the song, some nobles fainted on the spot because of Farinelli's complex voice curve, people flocked to the stage like a carnival, and Handel, who had always despised castratos, was also shocked: he really sang the song I wrote to God!
However, no matter how gorgeous the music is, it is only a foil. It cannot be a distraction. In this film, the film's soul lies in the speculative philosophical proposition of "art and life" discussed by the director through the character of Farinelli. At the beginning of the film, the adult Farinelli is lost in endless musing: a naked teenager stands on the parapet on the second floor of the church and shouts to a group of choir boys downstairs, including the childhood Farinelli: Stop singing, they will not Let go of you, you will die for your voice! After he finished speaking, he jumped up and said goodbye to the world. This had a huge impact on the young Farinelli, so that when he grew up and became famous, Farinelli often asked his brother: Did I really fall off a horse and become like this? The older brother said against his will: Yes. In fact, it was this mediocre brother who made Farinelli a castrato when Farinelli was in a coma with a fever, in order to make up for the mediocrity of his tune with his voice. Later, Handel, who was convinced by Farinelli's voice, sang a "divine comedy" tailored for Farinelli in order to let Farinelli leave his brother, and told Farinelli the facts. After each performance, in the dressing room on the side of the curtain, Farinelli always turned a deaf ear to the thunderous applause of the audience, and looked extremely melancholy. is not that right? Every time he showed his ghostly voice, it was just another time to show his body's incompleteness in front of others, and to tear open the newly healed wound in his heart again. No matter how perfect and sacred music and art are, they can never make up for Farinelli's physical and psychological "absence". In fact, this is also the heart disease that most castratoons have had for hundreds of years. "No matter how successful they are, the inescapable physical shadow has become an increasingly heavy burden on the hearts of eunuch singers. Even when their power and wealth reached their peak, they were never willing to admit that they had succumbed to a scalpel and The acquisition of their own voice comes down to an accident: the bite of a mad swan or a mad pig. At the same time, they spread some bizarre stories, true or false, to prove that they have the same ability as ordinary people-whether they have it or not. What kind of physical defects, they have been concerned about whether they can be seen as a real person."
The flamboyant Baroque era is over, and the castrato has also withdrawn from the stage of history. However, the operas that followed were no longer pure, and became more secular, and the singer went from the ladder to the ground. "When the singer is in the middle of a dramatic conflict, God changes his crown and takes on the costume of a worldly king. Farinelli's mythology is tomorrow's flower in the mirror," wrote the critic. Alas, things are so contradictory in the world!
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