Singers: Lonely As a Lark

A strapping man (6 ft. 2 in., 203 lbs.) with a greying Vandyke beard strode on stage at Manhattan’s Town Hall last week. An imposing figure in white tie and tails, he waited as the 27-piece Esterhazy Orchestra played the first lilting strains of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. Then, clasping his hands, Alfred Deller began to sing. The contrast was startling: out of this burly frame poured the extraordinarily high, bell-clear voice of that rarest of all male singers, the countertenor.

A freak? Not at all, just a voice so seldom heard today as to sound strangely neuter at first hearing. But once the ear adapts to Deller’s pure, vibratoless voice spiraling effortlessly up through the range of the female alto, the effect is entrancing. In two Handel arias, it floated lightly and lonely as a lark above the bustle of the orchestra. The performance had all the fresh appeal of a lost art rediscovered, which, in fact, it is. Deller is now 53, but when he first achieved recognition, he was the first virtuoso countertenor in 120 years. Almost singlehanded he has sparked a revival of interest in baroque vocal music.

The Knife. From the Renaissance through the 18th century the countertenor was the most popular singer in Europe. Monteverdi, Bach, Handel, and especially Henry Purcell, himself a countertenor, composed a wealth of lute songs, folk ballads, cantatas, hymns, operas, madrigals and carols for the male alto. The rage for the high-pitched male voice also helped give rise to the castrati singers—boy sopranos castrated before puberty. In 18th century Italy, parents received a handsome fee for each son to go under the knife. But with the dawning of the romantic era in the 19th century, the delicate voices of the castrati and the countertenors were drowned out by the growing volume of the orchestras, and countertenors were generally displaced by contraltos. “Let’s face it,” says Deller, “those romantics wanted something a bit more sexy.”

In the face of the inevitable snickering that the countertenor is unmanly, Deller wears a weary smile, answers simply: “I have two sons and a daughter.” To those who are repelled by the sound of his voice, he says, “That’s a problem they should work out with their psychiatrist. There are lots of men with fine countertenor voices, but because of the stigma they were trained as baritones. Fortunately, I never had any voice lessons, and so my voice developed naturally.”

The youngest of seven children, Deller was born in the seaside town of Margate, England. His father taught boxing and fencing at private schools, and under his coaching, young Deller became a crack soccer and cricket player for the Kent County team. He began singing with the church choir at ten, but when his voice failed to change significantly after six years, the choirmaster advised him to quit lest he permanently injure his vocal cords. He had a brief fling with the local opera company but left because the director made him rehearse with the ladies’ chorus. He took a job in a Sussex furniture store and married the owner’s daughter.

No Oozy Wash. At 28, against almost everyone’s advice, Deller gave up his promising career in the furniture business to sing with the Canterbury Cathedral choir. His salary as a choir singer was only $600 a year, and he supplemented his income by working as a farm hand for 90 an hour, pedaling his bicycle twelve miles a day to and from work. Then in 1943, Composer Michael Tippett, in search of a lead voice for a series of Purcell concerts, auditioned Deller. “In that one moment,” recalls Tippett, “the centuries rolled back. Deller’s voice is like no other sound in music, and no other sound is so intrinsically musical.” His debut was a grand success, and at 31 he found himself a one-man renaissance hailed by London critics as responsible for “the rebirth of the countertenor.”

The renaissance so far has produced only some half a dozen other professional countertenors, including, most notably, the U.S.’s Russell Oberlin. To help perpetuate the species, Deller is grooming his older son Mark, 27, to assume his mantle: “His voice is exactly like mine—uncannily so.” The resurgence of baroque music, Deller thinks, is led by the younger generation, who “have chosen to sidestep the romantics. They no longer want their ears invaded by the oozy wash of sound. They prefer instead to hear counter point, to hear the architecture of the music. It is a restatement of a fundamental truth that speaks across the centuries.” And somehow it speaks most truly in the lofty blue-yonder voice of the countertenor.