Nature's Rejects. The music of the castrati.

from Slate:
It's not the pyrotechnic pieces that are the most difficult, Cecilia Bartoli says. "The beautiful sad arias are the hardest to sing, because I am moved almost to tears. I know they were singing those arias out of their own sorrow." Bartoli is talking about her new recording, Sacrificium, which concerns the most exquisitely unsettling episode in the history of music: the castrati and the music written for them.

From the 16th to the 19th centuries, tens of thousands of male children were castrated before puberty to preserve their high voices, then subjected to a brutal and relentless program of vocal training. The first instruction, wrote an observer, "was inseparable from the whip." As in all eras of musical education, the result was a few idolized stars like the celebrated Farinelli; a steady supply of well-trained singers for church, court, and opera; and myriad also-rans and nobodies. In this case, particularly tragic nobodies.