Long Live the Knife

"I am going to kill Signor Guiciardi. Evviva il coltello! Let me explain. Such mocking worship. Long live the knife, they scream it wildly from the crowd when a castrato raises his unnatural voice to the heavens. The knife that defines the man with every cut of flesh." From the doorstep of the maestro's musical conservatorio in Verona, Italy where he was orphaned, to the glittering opera houses of Paris and Venice in triumph, to the burning deserts of Egypt in despair, so runs the course of the life of the castrato Carmine Cirocco. In the eighteenth century world, glorified as one of the castrati singers, males who were castrated in childhood to preserve their angelic singing voices, voices unparalleled by man or woman, Carmine finds himself adored as an idol, yet rejected as a man by the woman he loves. Caught between the screws of humiliation and adulation meted out by the masses, he questions whether he is a man or a monster. When at last he captures the love of a woman, he finds her torn from his grasp by his original nemesis, the man who was his vile castrator. Obsessed with vengeance and rage, Carmine vows to murder the man who destroyed his life and stole his love.