Classical
For a few moments it seemed we were hearing the most beautiful noise in the world. A man sang a quiet note high in the treble clef, swelled it to a commanding forte, then dropped it from its held eminence into the lilting return of a theme by Handel. Julius Caesar was praying for cooling breezes in the heat of the Egyptian desert. But we didn't care. We had come to hear Andreas Scholl, the counter-tenor. The returns queue at St John's, Smith Square, stretched half the way to Petty France.
Scholl is a prize possession. He is the counter-tenor not only of today, Opera magazine has courageously pronounced, but "perhaps any day". Among the best-selling recordings of the French independent company Harmonia Mundi, his CDs occupy first, third, fourth, fifth and tenth places, and as a result he has been signed up by Decca. His first album for the label - called, with commercial snap, simply Heroes - has just been released, and the breeze aria from Handel's Giulio Cesare is on it, more elegantly accompanied by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Sir Roger Norrington than last week, but just as beautifully sung.
What accounts for Scholl-mania? The German's impeccable voice, suggest the liner notes to Heroes, returns the listener directly to the experience of Handel's, Hasse's and Gluck's day. We "can read contemporary accounts of castratos", we are told, and can sense, hearing Scholl, "that we are enjoying something of the same experience". Scholl himself believes that, just as a castrato singing the role of Julius Caesar in Handel's day could be accepted as the emperor "in all his masculinity", so today a man singing at a high pitch can be accepted as heroic. It is a simple matter.
But beautiful sounds are rarely simple; and gender, or gender confusion, is surely the heart of this matter. Does the audience at the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music hear a male alto and forget his sex? Does it forget that a man with a beard - newly grown - is making these soprano sounds? Scholl himself regrets the continued misgivings of the uninitiated: the reaction that greeted Alfred Deller, self-taught English pioneer of the counter-tenor revival, persists to our day. We may not find it as odd - as queer - as some found it 50 years ago, hearing Deller for the first time. But cultural norms still insist that men should sing low and women high; male operatic heroes should bellow and vibrate like Pavarotti. A man singing high is not as nature intended. It is artifice.
Scholl's power to move us depends not solely on mature musical understanding or superlative breath control and feather-light semiquaver runs. His speaking voice is not that of a man breathing helium; how can we forget we are hearing a sound that is not according to nature's pattern? Track ten of Heroes - the aria "Pallido e il sole" from Hasse's Artaserse - reinforces the degree of artifice involved. For a few seconds the musical line descends into the singer's natural range, and a rich, deep, angry baritone rings out. It is bizarre precisely because it is natural.
It is not authenticity - "enjoying something of the same experience" (the experience, that is, of listening to 18th-century castratos) - that can make a counter-tenor such as Andreas Scholl so deeply and uniquely moving. The gender issue operates for us as it must have done, in ways as yet unrecovered in the search for authenticity, for listeners to the castrati and counter-tenors of Handel's day. By confusing our expectations, the music is left to sing for itself, as if the voice had become a musical instrument - one able to sing. Removed from associations of gender and the singer's personality, we focus on the abstractly beautiful, the music itself. And Scholl's heroes - Caesar, Artaxerxes, Orpheus - live not as circumscribed characters but as the exemplars that Handel, Hasse and Gluck intended.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
