A Brief History of the Countertenor

♪ I'm Anthony Roth Costanzo.

And I'm a countertenor.

I sound very different from the way that I look.

So I'm excited to tell you about that and also take you on a journey of how I prepare for a performance at the Metropolitan Opera.

Let's go.

People respond to the novelty and the excitement of a man singing high.

And then I feel like I can rope them in and get them to listen to what I'm trying to communicate with my voice.

You know, the human voice is an amazing thing.

And opera singing, it's kind of like the Olympics of the human voice.

How does it work?

You have these vocal cords, these two tiny pieces of skin that sit in your throat.

You breathe air in.

And then as it goes back out, it travels up through these vocal cords that come together and vibrates.

As a countertenor, I'm sort of making my cords go like this with a little hole in them.

By shortening the cord, it makes the vibration higher.

So to get my voice ready for a performance at the Met and ready for that kind of intense physical action, I have to get my vocal cords limber.

Even with all that warming up, I can't control the 60 muscles in my throat.

It's not like a bicep or something that I can just say, Move.

No, I have to fire a set of impulses from my brain with my imagination.

If I can use images or the idea of smell or taste to shape the way these muscles should move, it's much more effective.

So I got some snacks before I go down to the Met, and I'm going to show you what it would sound like if I sang this food.

We have this Swiss roll.

This creamy center.

It makes me think about legato singing.

I'm going to take a taste so I can picture it.

Do you hear the creaminess?

This yuzu candy.

If I want to cut through the House of the Metropolitan Opera with my voice, I want it to kind of slice the air and go right into your ear.

It needs to have bite.

It's still kind of bitter and bright.

So I have this mochi.

It's so incredibly soft and bouncy, it kind of spins in my mouth because it's so bouncy.

And that's what I want the voice to do.

I want it to spin.

High voice male singing happens in all different cultures around the world.

When I was in Japan, I heard kabuki singers and I was like, It's me, it's a countertenor.

There's kunqu opera singing in Chinese culture.

Hawaiian singers.

The rancheros in Mexico.

But the history in the Western European cultural tradition of the countertenor began with opera, and opera exists only because of castrati.

Men who were castrated in the 17th century so that they could maintain their high register.

Well, audiences loved this, and they became the rock stars of their era.

And so composers from Handel to Vivaldi to Mozart to Gluck, you name it, they wrote for these castrated men.

And that's the reason opera still exists, because castrati made it popular.

So today, the countertenor, we take over those roles.

And nowadays, composers are writing right and left for a countertenor.

A contemporary role that changed my life was Philip Glass's Akhnaten.

There is no other that knows thee.

Save thy soul Akhnaten.

It was so thrilling to see how this sound could express the otherworldly, mysterious life of the Pharaoh Akhnaten that exists somewhere between mysticism and reality.

And that is the perfect place, in a way, for the countertenor voice.

Lately I've been thinking about how community and communication they have the same root.

In a way, we can create a new community and we can all sit in a theater together and breathe the same air and have our heartbeats sync up because of this communication that can happen through this primal instrument that we all have inside of us.

Well, I made it to the Met and I can't wait to get inside and sing opera.

You know, ultimately, opera is about those moments in life.

Great losses, death, great love through the lens of beauty and through the magnificence of the human voice.

It gives us a kind of understanding.

And also those things wind up giving life a greater meaning.

So I can't wait to get on the stage and communicate all of that to the audience.

I'll see you at the opera.