At a time when androgyny and gender-bending have become widely accepted across the spectrum of pop culture, it shouldn’t shock us that classical music was putting its own spin on sexual ambiguity some 500 years before Dennis Rodman donned his first frock.
Since at least the early Renaissance, or about 1450, some male singers have been performing not as tenors, baritones or basses but in the alto or soprano ranges. Countertenors, as modern usage has dubbed them, are therefore, in a certain sense, hermaphrodites, utterly male in lung power but usurping the range of the female voice. Around them grew the tradition of falsetto singing in early church music, and composers reserved some of their finest inspirations for them.
Countertenors are commonly confused with castrati, or male singers castrated before puberty to preserve the soprano or alto range of their voice. These musical eunuchs reached the pinnacle of their popularity between 1650 and 1750, chiefly in Italian Baroque opera, which prized artificiality anyway.
But while the castrati are history, countertenors are flourishing today as never before.
The reasons are clear. First, the early-music revival of the last 30 years has opened up opportunities for those able to sing works written for the countertenor voice as well as the huge repertory of Baroque opera featuring major roles originally sung by castrati.
And although audiences aren’t always prepared to hear a husky, bearded male belting out round, womanly tones in the alto register, once past the curiosity stage they are thrilled by the luminous beauty of the sounds they hear, at once ethereal and utterly natural. They want to hear more.
Thus a new mainstream vocal category has emerged. Countertenors like America’s Brian Asawa and Germany’s Jochen Kowalski have won prestigious vocal contests, competing with aspiring singers in the standard voice ranges. David Daniels, Drew Minter, Jeffrey Gall, Derek Lee Ragin and Steven Rickards in the United States, Andreas Scholl in Germany, Gerard Lesne and Dominique Visse in France, Michael Chance and Christopher Robson in England and Yoshikazu Mera in Japan are in steady demand for opera, oratorios and concerts.
Each countertenor has his cadre of admirers. Many are already household words among record collectors. Several even have Web pages.
Countertenors, in short, have come a long, long way since the 1950s, when Alfred Deller, the British countertenor who put the breed on the map, found himself the subject of snide put-downs from male musicians at orchestra rehearsals. “I see we have the bearded lady singing tonight,” one concertmaster is supposed to have said.
With all respect to trailblazers such as Deller and Paul Esswood in Britain, and Russell Oberlin in the U.S., the younger generation of countertenors is better trained, more versatile and, truth be told, more listenable than their postwar predecessors.
Some listeners still tend to think of a countertenor as a man singing in an artificial, strained falsetto. They shouldn’t. Not only do Daniels and his fellow “new breed” countertenors wield a full, substantial, sweetly beautiful sound, but their vocal production sounds absolutely natural; there is nothing manufactured about it. One listens to them simply as singers, admiring the musical intelligence behind the sound and the technique that allows them to sing in a developed falsetto range. Perhaps more important, these male altos (or falsettists, as they are sometimes called) convey a sense of what the great castrati, with their high boys’ voices wedded to adult lung power, must have sounded like.
Certainly this is true of Daniels and Asawa, both of whom will sing principal roles in the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare,” opening next month in New York. Both countertenors are represented by recent CD releases — Daniels by a stunning disc of Handel operatic arias, with Roger Norrington conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (Virgin Veritas), Asawa by an unusual and captivating collection of songs, “Vocalise,” that BMG Classics is releasing this month.
A 32-year-old with pop-star good looks and a passion for baseball, Daniels scarcely lives up to the “bearded lady” stereotype that has dogged countertenors for a half-century. He also insists the countertenor voice is neither second-class nor unnatural.
“When early music came into vogue, there were not a lot of real singers who were interested in singing this music,” he explains in his native South Carolina drawl. “There was an attitude that if you didn’t have a great voice and couldn’t sing Romantic or 20th Century music, then you’d sing Baroque music, because you don’t have to be a great singer to do Baroque music. And that is so unbelievably wrong! There is nothing more naked than singing Baroque music, because there’s nothing to hide.”
At parties during his undergrad years in Cincinnati, Daniels used to get up and sing, in high falsetto, along with recordings by his idol, soprano Leontyne Price. “Since I was 8 years old I’ve always sung with this voice,” he says. “It has always been the easiest, most natural thing to me, even when I was singing around the house and my mother told me to try and sing as a tenor.”
Both Daniels and Asawa began singing as boy sopranos and continued with the same vocal production after their voices changed. As Asawa explains it, his mechanism became used to the tension required to sing continuously in falsetto. Through one of his teachers, Jane Randolph, he learned to cultivate as natural and unforced a sound as possible. As his voice matured, he began experimenting with vibrato and other expressive vocal devices that early-music singers usually apply only sparingly.
“I think countertenor singing in general is evolving into a more full-voiced way of singing,” says Asawa, a compact Californian of Japanese descent born the same year as his close friend Daniels. “It’s not the sort of held-back early music style, although it’s important to also have that option, because there are a lot of early-music conductors who prefer a more straight-toned way of singing.”
Young countertenors must work hard to develop a sound powerful enough to fill modern opera houses yet beautiful enough to do justice to the music and satisfy the expectations of listeners. At the same time they realize they must seize the opportunities created by the burgeoning early-music performance and recording business. Says Scholl, 32, one of Europe’s busiest and most popular countertenors: “I sing because I love it, it’s fun, it’s a way to praise God, and because it’s a way to earn a good living.”
Still, compared with Europe, the market for countertenors in America is relatively small. Asawa says about 80 percent of his engagements are in Europe, and his schedule keeps him away from his San Francisco home more than eight months a year. So he and his colleagues are open to performing repertory beyond the usual Renaissance and Baroque works. For a Swedish television film of Stravinsky’s opera “The Rake’s Progress,” for example, Asawa took on the unusual role of Baba the Turk, a bearded woman usually sung by a mezzo-soprano. He has since set his sights on yet another female role, Cherubino in Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro.”
And Ragin, 41, recorded the soundtrack for the film “Farinelli,” about the legendary 18th Century castrato Carlo Farinelli. To approximate the castrato’s atypical vocal range, the producers recorded Ragin and a soprano, melding the recordings so that the movie’s Farinelli could sing in Ragin’s low range and the soprano’s top.
More Top Picks Best Trail Cameras For Backyard Wildlife
The vocal traditions and performance standards now being established by these performers should carry the art of countertenor singing securely into the new millennium. It is a rosy future for a branch of the vocal art that barely existed a generation ago.
Perhaps countertenors will, at long last, be accorded first-class citizenship rather than thought of, at least in some quarters, as an exotic, not-quite-legitimate subspecies of singer. Says Daniels: “One of my top goals is that people listen to me as a musician and an artist, not so much as a countertenor. I don’t know if that will ever happen. But it would be nice.”