(What, you don’t “like” my title?  Please, don’t get testes about it.)

Carlo Broschi, “Farinelli” (1705-1782) in 1734 by Bartolomeo Nazari

We note the death on September 16, 1782 – 237 years ago today – of one of the greatest opera singers to have ever lived, the celebrated Italian castrato Carlo Maria Michelangelo Nicola Broschi, who went by the stage name of “Farinelli”.

How often in our search for cultural equivalence – how tiresomely often – do we hear statements on the lines of, “Like, Mozart was, like, the rock star of his time.”

No, like, he wasn’t.  We’ve talked about this before, and here I’ve brought it up again.  Composers of concert music, even one as flamboyant as Wolfgang Mozart, never had the fame, notoriety, visibility, wealth, and necessary sexual charisma for what we, today, would consider the prototypical “rock star.”

Robert Plant; oh please, TMI

Let us consider the exaggerated sexuality that is the first and perhaps most important aspect of “rock stardom.”  On one hand there are the alpha males, the walking phalluses with tin foil wrapped cucumbers stuffed into their leather pants (thank you for that enduring image, Spinal Tap), rockers who reduce their female audience members to whimpering pools of fluid: Elvis, Mick, Keith, Paul (the “cute” one!), James Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Gene Simmons, and Jared Leto, to name just a few.  

Rihanna in 2013

Then there are their female equivalents, stunningly beautiful caricatures of the perfect sex machine; dressed like high-end hookers, women in (seemingly) complete control of their sexuality, whose pseudo-copulatory, strip joint gyrations on stage drive their male audience members (pun intended) to near madness with desire: Grace Slick, Debbie Harry, Tina Turner, Gwen Stefani, Joan Jett, Britney Spears, Stevie Nicks, Amy Winehouse, Pink, to name just another few.  

Lady Gaga putting the “A” in “androgyny”

Most intriguing, I think, are the pan-sexuals: those rock stars whose provocative, flamboyant, often outrageous, sometimes androgynous personas have imbued them with the reputation of erotic taboo breakers:  David Bowie, Michael Jackson (may he rest in pieces), Madonna (Madonna Louise Ciccone), Prince (Prince Rogers Nelson), Freddie Mercury (Farrokh Bulsara), Elton John (Reginald Kenneth Dwight), and Lady Gaga (Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta), for example.

In a critique, the feminist and social critic Camille Paglia asserted something about Lady Gaga that can be applied to all of the pan-sexuals listed above; that she is “an identity thief: a mainstream manufactured product.”

Well, duh.  In fact, Ms. Paglia takes nothing away from the good Gaga by pointing out that she is part of a mainstream music industry, one that goes back nearly 400 years, an industry for which provocation, flamboyance, androgyny, and sex, sex, and more sex sells.  That “industry” was created in Italy and goes under the blanket designation of “opera”.  

An opera is stage play in which the words are intensified a gazillion fold (give or take) by setting them to music.  Since the birth of opera around 1600, and particularly since opera went public in 1637, it has been acknowledged that nothing puts derrieres in seats (and money in the box office) better than sex, violence, religious controversy, sex, great costumes, beautiful singing, sex,  and celebrity: the celebrity of the singers themselves. 

Who were the real “rock stars” of the seventeenth and eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries? Opera singers, that’s who.  And who were the biggest, baddest, most flamboyant,