THE COMPOSER discovered Senesino in the company of the Duke of Wurtemburg, whose retinue includes twenty ballet dancers, three trained monkeys, a small string orchestra, fifteen castrati, and two surgeons from Bologna. The two treat their operation with the strictest professionalism: they wield their instruments only on the condition that the young subject has been tried as to the probability of the voice. The boy muffled, the heady reek of ether, the surgeon delicately sweating, and brava! The vas deferens is severed. Nothing now will touch the resonant high C; the vein is closed down, like a mine. Senesino's mother, it is rumored, keeps the dainty pair pickled in a tiny clay pot.
The boy ages into a fleshy and strangely hairless man.