Countertenors now sing the opera roles once written for castrati
A countertenor talks in an ordinary tenor or baritone voice, then sings in the range of a contralto or mezzo-soprano. For two centuries the voice nearly vanished from public view, surviving mainly in Anglican church choirs, until a singer called Alfred Deller brought it back and composers began writing for it again.
The name began as a part in medieval music rather than a type of singer. In 14th-century polyphony the contratenor was a line added to the melody-holding tenor and the higher descant. Around 1450, when Ockeghem and Obrecht moved to four-part writing, it split into a higher and a lower version, and the upper one became altus in Italy, haute-contre in France and countertenor in England, where the word was widely used by the late 17th century.
Because the Renaissance Catholic Church barred women from singing at services, high male voices had a place in liturgy; Spain in particular kept a long tradition of men singing soprano lines in falsetto. Early opera, though, embraced castrati, several of whom sang in the premiere of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in 1607. Purcell wrote notable countertenor parts, such as Secrecy and Summer in The Fairy-Queen, and his singers blended falsetto and chest voice. Once Handel and Italian opera took over London, the voice faded.
Deller, an English early-music champion, first called himself an alto; the composer Michael Tippett suggested reviving the old word countertenor. His Deller Consort built audiences for Renaissance and Baroque music in the 1950s and 60s, and Benjamin Britten wrote Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream for him. In America, Russell Oberlin had similar success singing without falsetto. Today countertenors take castrato roles by Gluck, Handel and Mozart, and new parts keep appearing, from the title role of Philip Glass's Akhnaten to the Boy in George Benjamin's Written on Skin.
Most modern countertenors use falsetto for the top half of a range running roughly from E3 to D5 or E5, dropping into chest voice lower down. The hardest part is blending the few notes where either mechanism works. The author and singer Peter Giles dislikes the word falsetto and says head voice instead.
Source: Countertenor
