Let Us Now Praise Alfred Deller

What is it about them; why do have such an effect on people? Well, consider the words of one of the best countertenors singing today:

"There's always this fascination about the countertenor voice. But I've never really understood what that is, because I'm doing it every day – it's my voice. Yet when we sing, people cry and we get love letters. You get used to that." He turns to Jaroussky. "But I experienced, for the first time, what other people feel when I heard your recording Opium. I got goosebumps. For the first time in my life – I'm serious, Philippe – I thought, 'A-ha! This is why people are so fascinated by our voices.'"

The speaker is Andreas Scholl, and the Jaroussky he is talking to is Philippe Jaroussky, eleven years his junior and an absolute knockout as a singer.

And the countertenor voice? Well, it’s something of a mystery: most people believe that it’s produced as a kind of falsetto, but it turns out that, in the lower register, some notes can be produced naturally in what’s known as “chest voice.” (Full disclosure—I have only the dimmest idea of what this is, and a better blogger would look it up and report it to you. And why don’t I know more than the fact that singers feel that, when singing in “head voice,” they’re using their heads as resonance chambers? Mainly because there’s still a lot we don’t know, though apparently the whole physiology of singing has increased a lot over the last twenty years. So singers, while the rest of us are busy getting off to work and raising the children, spend lots of hours debating whether countertenors are male sopranos, male altos, or falsettoists. Oh, and by the way, you really, really, don’t want to get into the debate, so if you meet a high-voiced male singer at a party—rare, but it might happen—don’t call him a countertenor, or anything else. Otherwise, you’ll be lectured to for the rest of the night about vocal production.)

At any rate, there’s no question that the countertenor is a particularly lovely voice. But the mystery is that we have it at all, since but for one man, Alfred Deller, we might not have it at all.

Deller, born in 1912, championed the countertenor voice, and was instrumental in championing what has come to be called “historically informed performance” practice. And that would be? Well, it goes from using the “correct” instrument of the time (a harpsichord, not a piano; a theorbo, not a guitar) to correct tuning (our modern tuning is much higher than early music, and anybody who has played a cello tuned half a step lower—I think you can guess whom I mean—knows that the instrument responds wonderfully) to proper articulation and performance technique. Supposedly, all this leads to hearing music the way that the composer would have wanted / would have heard it.

So Deller was out there when nobody else was, and at a time when men were singing like women? I’ve always wondered about the beard that Deller wore all his life, even at that point when facial hair was tantamount to declaring yourself a Communist. And there’s that famous quote of the French woman who said: "Monsieur, vous êtes eunuque"—to which Deller replied, "I think you mean 'unique,' madam."

So Deller took what was once a dying tradition, and kept it going. But he did more—he knew an amazing number of the best composers in Britain at the time; Benjamin Britten wrote the part of Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream for him.

But the best thing? Deller was also instrumental in championing Baroque opera, which previously nobody had done much about. So everybody knew a Handel aria or two—think of the famous Largo that you learned on the piano, also known as “Ombra mai fu”—but nobody had heard the full opera (in this case, Serse, of 1738). But soon, we were hearing them again, as well as a lot of other music. And so, more and more male singers began to consider becoming countertenors, instead of tenors.

That’s what happened to Jaroussky—he started out life as a tenor, and then, out of curiosity, his voice teacher asked him what his falsetto (damn, what did I just say?) sounded like. And he turned out to be nimbler and more beautiful in that range of his voice.

It may be simple numbers, but I suspect not. Because as you can hear in the two clips below, the countertenor voice has really…well, improved. With Deller, and his son Mark, also a countertenor, the tone is a bit thin, reedy, and forced. But with Jaroussky and Scholl? Well, here’s what one person had to say, in the comment section of the Purcell clip below:

As a countertenor myself, I have a deep respect and appreciation for Deller. That being said, I'm glad that we've moved to a fuller, richer tone. I've never been all that enamoured of his singing. Still, we've got so many good countertenors today, and we couldn't have done it without pioneers like Deller.

I think that’s just. But I’ll say, as well, that Deller’s recordings of English folksongs have a magical quality that other singers—such as Scholl—may not have. It may simply be the long, long tradition that Deller inherited. Or it may be that the listener knows—that’s Deller, not a superb but still German modern countertenor. My vote?

There’s something about the sparseness, the simplicity of Deller’s voice that makes it ideal for folksong. Short of being, very late at night, on the English moors and hearing the song sung though the windows of a candlelit cottage—you couldn’t hear it better!

A Winter's Journey Re-journeyed

Right, so as usual I’m a little behind the times. It’s officially spring—time to pay the taxes, watch for the scilla (yes, my dear computer—it’s a little blue flower that against the newly green of grass and a fresh snow manages both to soothe and to shock the eye at the same time) and get the frisbee out for the dog to play with. I spent the last weekend, however, immersed in that most wintery of music, appropriately called Winterreise, a Winter’s Journey.

Now for a word of reassurance. Readers of Iguanas will know that this was the music that I chose that was given to me when I descended into madness in December of 2011 and the following January. Relax—I’m not in the same place, but in one much better.

Saying which, I will also confess to not knowing now, as I didn’t know then, whose finger had been on the iPod then, or the mouse pad now. I simply stumbled onto Winterreise, which of course I don’t believe and neither should you.

So I was there and not there, a state eerily similar to the experience of watching a documentary, Over the Top with Franz, about the filming of a DVD about the singing of a glorious English tenor and the playing of a majestic also-English pianist of a song cycle written by an Austrian composer about a guy with serious problems.

The composer is Franz Schubert, the year was 1827, and the physical / psychological conditional of the composer was, as we would now say, quite compromised. Right, Schubert was rotting away with syphilis, untreatable at the time, and staring into the face of eventual madness. This normally does not provoke gales of laughter….

So Winterreise has moved out of autumnal and into the coldest of regions. Fitting, then, that as I read the lyrics—which you can do in five minutes, though the performance will last an hour easily—they’re really images: the weathervane, the village inn, the frozen spring. And the lyrics are spare; these are the lyrics to the song in the clip below:

He used to see three suns, but two of them have turned away to shine upon another, and now he sees only one, and he wishes that would pass away and leave him to the darkness.

Schubert’s treatment, to me, paradoxically matches that sparseness and is extended as well. Thus, you find yourself suspended in a long, bleak, horizontal landscape with no possibility of escape. The singer has left willingly the warmth of home that he knew; he could but will not go back.  The first poem makes this clear:

By moonlight, in winter, the poet leaves the house as he came to it, a stranger. The daughter has allowed their love to grow, and the mother has encouraged the pair to think of marriage: but the daughter's love has wandered to some new sweetheart. So he quietly and secretly steals away while they are sleeping, writing 'Good night' on her door, and leaving the path of his footsteps in the snow.

Pretty romantic stuff—the moonlight, the poet, the broken romance, writing “good night” on her door. But it’s almost artifice, this hoary repetition of the hero with the broken heart—the music suggests much more. Curiously, Schubert’s other song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin (D. 795, Op. 25, 1823) has the same theme, but the jilted young man has both an unhappier end and yet a stouter heart. Yes, he drowns himself, the hero of Mullerin; the hero of Winterreise goes on mutely, accompanied by an organ-grinder he encounters at the edge of the village. But could anything be worse than endlessly enduring, stoically going on, a poet chained by his own misery to an organ grinder?

Everything about Mullerin speaks of youth; everything about Winterreise whispers age, decay, and death.  And yesterday, I came upon a wonderful clip of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears performing and discussing three songs of Winterreise. They say, as does everyone, that it’s music for the old; Pears decided to wait until he was fifty to perform it.

Ian Bostridge, thank God, decided otherwise. And while it had been a superb German baritone, Matthias Goerne, who was the singer who accompanied me on my own winter’s journey a year ago, it was Bostridge, an amazing English tenor, who sang for me last weekend. And more than sang—I followed him throughout the process of making the film as he argued and sparred with an opinionated director, David Alden, a guy completed uncowed by the two artists in front of him. Both the pianist, Julius Drake, and Bostridge must have been frustrated; equally, they must have trusted that Alden would produce an interesting piece.

And it appears that he did, though I would have slapped Alden several times along the way. He constantly pushes Bostridge and Drake to be more gothic—at one point Drake plays the open notes of a song in a perfect parody of a music hall organist. Drake means it to repel; Alden is delighted.

But however much Pears may have been right to wait until his fifties to sing this work, I’m glad Bostridge didn’t. He’s perfect for the part—rail thin, gaunt, sunken cheeks and wide eyes.

His singing is amazing, his control perfect, and he’s unafraid, in one of the clips I saw, to make a truly ugly sound a couple of times in the last song. It shouldn’t work, it wouldn’t work with anybody else, but with Bostridge it does.

Wikipedia quotes a contemporary of Schubert’s, Joseph von Spaun, in the following anecdote:

"Come to Schober's today and I will play you a cycle of terrifying songs; they have affected me more than has ever been the case with any other songs." He then, with a voice full of feeling, sang the entire Winterreise for us. We were altogether dumbfounded by the sombre mood of these songs, and Schober said that one song only, "Der Lindenbaum", had pleased him. Thereupon Schubert leaped up and replied: "These songs please me more than all the rest, and in time they will please you as well.'".

That hasn’t happened for me yet. I suffer through Winterreise when it comes upon me, and am glad when at last it goes. I endure, not listen, when the unknown finger hits the play icon. Nothing about Winterreise is beautiful, everything about it is essential.

Is that its strange beauty? 

Two singers on the beach

Who knows what brought it on? 

My mood was perfectly good when I left on the morning trot. Was it the music?

Well, English folksong can be a bit melancholic. And there is something otherworldly about the singer, Alfred Deller.

Deller was born in 1912, sang as a boy soprano, and never got around to changing. Yes, his voice broke, and he no longer could naturally sing soprano. But he had a beautiful falsetto, and there was the tradition of countertenors singing in the cathedral choirs.

But Deller went on to champion early music on authentic instruments, as well as what WikiPedia calls “historically informed performance.” Michael Tippett hears him, Benjamin Britten creates the part of Oberon in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Well, it’s a haunting voice, as you can hear. But maybe it wasn’t the music, or even the voice.

The weather?

Yes, it started to rain quite hard, but I found shelter next to an abandoned tennis court near the beach. And yeah, I like rain.

Well, the English folksong disc petered out, so I turned to “An Evening with Jessye Norman.” I’m putting all of my CD’s that I never listened to when I worked at Wal-Mart into iTunes. So I’m hearing things I haven’t heard in decades.

OK, first track—Dido’s Lament.

That might be when it hit.

Remember me, but forget my fate. Six words, but oh, how Purcell milks them. And Jessye Norman isn’t afraid to step up and face an emotion or two. So there I was, thinking why on earth was I giving all of my time and energy, those last years of my mother’s life, to Wal-Mart?

Yeah, I would take 15 minutes or so twice a day to call her, yeah I made the trips every three months, yeah I told her she could live with us and she said no. 

So what was she doing, those last terrible years?

More often than not, I fear, sitting in her chair by her stove.

Alone.

Why didn’t I move to Wisconsin to be with her, I thought. What the hell was I doing those mornings on the bus, walking into work at 6:30, leaving at 5?

Ever hear of Raf, she replies. She talks to me, sometimes.

And now I’m crying and in the water and I’m saying ‘I’m so sorry, so terribly sorry’ and she says don’t be. I had to have that time to be ready to do what I did. That’s what let me stop eating and drinking. Now be quiet. You were a wonderful son and remember what I said yesterday?

Yeah, it’s a triumph. That’s what you said after the recital with Gunnar, and that’s what you said yesterday about Iguanas.

Yes, a triumph.

And what have I told you today?

Remember me but forget my fate.

Yes.

Will this mourning ever stop, I ask her. You didn’t go through this with your mother, did you.

I wasn’t as close to her as you were to me. And it’s much better now than two years ago. You know that, of course.

Of course.

Now stop it. Enough. What did I sing to you?

Remember me, but forget my fate.

And I plunge into the ocean…

…and then float.