You're a young boy living in poverty, and your parents don't know how they're going to keep you fed. If you're growing up in the Dominican Republic in 2009, they may pray that a baseball scout will ...

NEW YORK (Billboard) - Cecilia Bartoli could have followed the path of least resistance. When the Italian mezzo-soprano burst onto the opera scene in the early '90s with a standard repertoire of ...

Long before botched plastic surgery ruined a movie star’s career, they were the original showbiz victims. Castrati were young opera singers in past centuries castrated to preserve a high-pitched voice ...

1562 The Sistine Chapel choir accepts its first castrato member. 1607 Claudio Monteverdi writes Orfeo, the first major opera, with several roles for castrati. 1737 Farinelli, the most celebrated of ...

No one paid a higher price for celebrity than the male soprano of the 18th-century, those greatest of European stars, whose fame in their own time was proportionally greater even than that of George ...

Over 250 years after Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice presented opera in a new way, an acrobatic staging aims to do the same. Iestyn Davies, whose Orpheus will be amid the tumblers, dancers and acrobats, ...

Everyone knows what a toll the rock-star lifestyle can exact. Drugs and alcohol are de rigueur, sexual promiscuity often comes with the territory, and loss of hearing is yet another occupational ...