“I come from a long lineage in Broadway musicals,” composer Matthew Wilder tells me. “My father was a theatrical advertiser, his father was a theatrical advertiser, and I grew up front row centre watching musicals, everything from Oliver! to The Sound of Music to Man of La Mancha. These were all part of the fabric of influence for me.” His mother, meanwhile, was an opera singer – as is Wilder’s son, a career path that skipped a generation when Wilder went into rock music. In his latest project, Stiletto, these two sides of the family business come together, using contemporary musical theatre to explore the world of 18th-century Italian opera.
Currently enjoying its debut run at London’s Charing Cross Theatre, Stiletto focuses on a fascinating and oft-overlooked corner of opera history: the role of castrato singers, representing a controversial tradition where boys were castrated before puberty to preserve their high vocal range.
“Historically, the castrati were relegated to playing the female roles in opera,” Wilder explains. “Women were not allowed to appear on stage.” This overlapped with the Vatican’s ban on female singers in church choirs, resulting in a period of several hundred years where castrati played a key role in Europe’s religious and secular music.
A passion project decades in the making, Stiletto follows the life of a fictional castrato named Marco, who achieves a complicated kind of success as a singer. On the one hand, popular castrati were, in Wilder’s words, “the rock stars of their day.” Some are still recognizable names today, such as the 18th-century superstar Farinelli, whose tumultuous life has been adapted several times for the stage and screen. Yet despite their opportunities to reach a high status in the music world, castrati also inhabited an ambiguous role in society, viewed in some ways as second-class citizens. This stigmatized position was both social and legal, essentially casting castrati as a third gender that stood apart from men and women.
“In those days, Italian Catholic families would have many children,” Wilder explains. “And should one of them be able to carry a tune – woe be to them.” Castrated at the age of eight, Marco is scouted by a representative of a conservatory, who pays off his family so he can begin musical training. Within this rigorous system, “the child would be taken into the conservatory and trained to enter the choir, and if they were exceptional, they would go on to be great opera stars.”
At the beginning of Stiletto, Marco is headed for fame and fortune under the tutelage of his mentor-turned-lover Faustino. But then he meets Gioia, a startlingly talented singer whose genius disrupts Marco’s worldview. As a Black woman in a fundamentally racist and sexist society, Gioia faces tremendous barriers to success – and in her, Marco sees a kindred spirit. “These are two characters that come from opposite worlds but have the same challenges, if you will,” says Wilder. Careful to avoid spoiling the show’s final act, he teases that this ultimately becomes a life-changing relationship, as Marco and Gioia “join forces to bust the system.”
Working with librettist Tim Luscombe and director David Gilmore, the current version of Stiletto took shape over the past four years, working from a concept and score that Wilder has been developing since the 1980s. He first became interested in castrati after reading a nonfiction book on the topic, gifted to him by his opera singer mother. At that point in his life he was still focusing on his career as a solo artist, best known for the synth-pop single “Break My Stride”. Later on he composed the songs for Disney’s Mulan (earning an Oscar nomination in the process), and embarked on a long career as a producer. Throughout this time, Stiletto remained on the back-burner – in part because the world of musical theatre took a while to catch up with his creative vision.