Like the famous tunnel at Colditz which began at the top of a chapel's clock tower, the history of the falsetto voice in Western music begins in the most improbable of places. As a specific, identifiable style of singing, falsetto may have first surfaced in fifteenth-century Europe. But to find out why this happened then and there, we first have to trace a course back many centuries, and many thousands of miles away. We also have to begin with another type of voice altogether.

The Eunuch in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds

The castrato plays a significant role in the early history of falsetto chiefly because wherever the castrato voice has been cultivated, a more general appreciation of high male singing – in all its guises – seems to have been fostered. It can be no coincidence that during the early Renaissance one nation, Spain, almost simultaneously introduced both the castrato and falsetto voices to the rest of Europe. But there is another, more practical reason why one cannot discuss the falsettist without first introducing the castrato. Particularly in the Renaissance church, which appreciated the castrato voice aesthetically but disapproved of it socially, complicit records hid the true nature of the castrati by describing them as falsettists. This was possible because the two shared the same territory, singing the same part at the top of the choral texture.