The Castrato Sacrifice: Was it Justified? Page: 18
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Senesino. Handel composed many roles especially for Senesino, a contralto. A few of these
roles are the title role in Giulio Cesare, the role of Guido in Flavio, and Luceuis in Scipione.
What kinds of lives did these altered boys lead? To answer this question fully, we must
first explore the time in which they lived. The 17th and 18th centuries were not an easy time in
which to raise a family and be successful. Some historians refer to this time period and the one
preceding it as the "crisis of the 17th century." The general crisis theory was first introduced in
1965 in a collection of essays highlighting different aspects of the 17th century crisis edited by
T.S. Aston, also the editor of the journal Past and Present. He extracted 13 essays from Past and
Present that dealt with this topic and entitled them Crisis in Europe 1560-1660. Many more
publications on this subject have arisen since then, many in foreign journals. But this was not the
first attention given to the general problems of this shaky time period. Voltaire would even go so
far as to say that the 17th century was "a period of usurpations almost from one end of the world
to the other," in his 1756 Essai sur les moeurs et / 'esprit des nations.
Historians describe this crisis in various ways. Some call it a general economic crisis,
targeting the fall in the rate of European economic growth. Economic considerations factored in
every aspect of life, including the population. The price of essential items such as bread directly
affected the birth, death, and even marriage rate in early modern Europe. People had trouble
supporting themselves when the erratic price of bread rose beyond the earnings of the average
worker. Harvest failures swept throughout Europe in the 17th century, causing a "subsistence
crisis." These crises in turn led to "industrial and commercial paralysis" (Parker and Smith
1978). A vicious cycle, the sharp rise in the price of food caused the demand for manufactured
goods to drop, which resulted in widespread unemployment among the wage-earning population.
Countless families had to deal with the painful irony that their wages were cut off just as the18
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Sowle, Jennifer. The Castrato Sacrifice: Was it Justified?, thesis, August 2006; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc5343/m1/21/: accessed May 12, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .