page_title: Caffarelli (castrato)
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Caffarelli (castrato) / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: image dates from c1740
context_page_description: Gaetano Majorano was an Italian castrato and opera singer, who performed under the stage name Caffarelli. Like Farinelli, Caffarelli was a student of Nicola Porpora.
context_section_description: In Carnival 1726, aged 15, he made his debut at Rome in Domenico Sarro's Valdemaro, singing the third female role, and listed with the stage name “Caffarellino.” His fame spread rapidly throughout Italy during the 1730s, with performances at Venice, Turin, Milan, Florence, before returning to Rome for a great success in Johann Adolf Hasse's Cajo Fabricio. His time in London was not particularly successful, public memory of Farinelli being too strong, but at the King's Theatre during the 1737–38 season he created roles in Giovanni Battista Pescetti's pasticcio Arsace and Handel's Faramondo, in addition to the title role in Handel's Serse, singing the famous aria "Ombra mai fù".
  In later years he worked at Madrid (1739), Vienna (1749), Versailles (1753), and Lisbon (1755). His career in France, to which he had been invited by Louis XV, was suddenly cut short after he badly wounded a poet during a duel, and left in disgrace after only one year . In 1734 the singer had taken up a post at the royal chapel of Naples, and over the next twenty years he often performed at the Teatro di San Carlo. At Naples he sang for Pergolesi, Porpora, Hasse, and Leonardo Vinci, not to mention starring in Gluck's La Clemenza di Tito. After 1756 he sang little, though in 1770 Charles Burney heard him and praised his "expression and grace." Always a favourite of royal families and a first-rate castrato who could command vast fees, Caffarelli made a large fortune, and was able to buy himself a dukedom and impressive estates in Naples and Calabria. On a palazzo he built he added the superscription "Amphion Thebas, ego domum" ("Amphion built Thebes, I this house"). However, he fell foul of local wit when some wag mockingly added to this "ille cum, tu sine" ("he with, you without").
caption: a caricature of Caffarelli by Pier Leone Ghezzi, c1740
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