Word: deller
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...glorifying verbiage of your Viet Nam reports is both dangerous and sickening. Please fire the writers and editors responsible and use the money to double the wages of those who gave us the superb music coverage of Nicolai Ghiaurov and Alfred Deller, and that splendid Essay on opera...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...