"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!
