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!