The Brooklyn Rail

The countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo will be singing the starring role in Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice this spring at the Metropolitan Opera, and he just finished singing the part of Francisco de Avíla in the Paris Opera’s production of Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel, this winter. But being a massive opera star is only a narrow slice of Costanzo’s purview: not only is he a tireless campaigner on behalf of the art form itself, enchanting school children in the Bronx and helping to coordinate Orfeo-spinoff mini-operas in a school in Brooklyn, he has joyously commandeered the project of becoming the historian of his singing genre. He is working on a book, Countertenor, exploring the biological and sociological histories of countertenors and castrati, and waxes poetic on the notions of the gay, queer, and trans voice in both the present and antiquity.

Will Corwin (Brooklyn Rail): You’re performing right now [February 29-March 23] in the Paris Opera…

Anthony Roth Costanzo: We’re doing this Thomas Adès piece, The Exterminating Angel, from the Luis Buñuel film. But now that we’re in production, that means I can work on other things at the same time. Between the book and all of the productions I’m organizing, it’s an exciting time.

Rail: What’s it like to be in The Exterminating Angel?

Costanzo: It has that same kind of surrealist and absurdist patina as the film, but with an underlying message about class and the human condition and things like that. Adès is an incredible composer who has written a truly masterful score, incredibly dense and complicated, but it really expresses things I’ve never quite seen expressed through music before. He’s conducting it as well, so to see it embodied in his gestures has been illuminating for me. And then, working with the director Calixto Bieito, who I guess you would call an enfant terrible of opera, he’s been amazing at balancing and giving us freedom; creating a structure by which the music and story can emerge.

Rail: It’s Buñuel, so it’s about the bourgeois holding on to their prerogatives, then finding themselves hoisted by their own petard… What part are you playing in this?

Costanzo: I play one of those elite people who is doing just that. I sing a great aria as we’re descending into degradation, because we can’t escape the room and no one has showered and there’s nothing to eat and no water. Someone says “couldn’t we have some coffee,” and I find some spoons, but I say to the hostess “excuse me, Lucia, but there are no coffee spoons, these spoons are teaspoons, and these spoons are too large, and I can’t stir my coffee with a teaspoon.” So, it has that ridiculous nature.

I do think there’s a tremendous amount going on in the world always, but I do think that it is more relevant than ever or, equally relevant as it ever was. I love that opera and art allow us to have perspective on some of the issues, not by looking at them in a very topical Bernie Sanders way—which is a great way to analyze them politically—but perhaps to see them through this lens of art that gives us a different perspective and therefore a little more insight into other aspects.

Rail: One could argue that opera is one of the most elite art forms out there. And I know that you are striving to make it more accessible, but in a world riven with widening class differences, how can opera save the day?

Costanzo: Well, I don’t know if opera can save the day, I think opera can contribute to a conversation that can help change people’s perspectives, and that’s powerful. When you say that opera is one of the most elite art forms, we have to unpack that a little bit because the structures that present opera are often some of the most elite structures, and may have been from its inception—it began in the courts of the nobility. It did then become a public art form, and I would argue it became the Netflix-binge-watching of its time, once it became a public art form after the 1630s in Venice. In our current society, the tickets are expensive, although you can get rush tickets, or student tickets, at the Met and other institutions. There’s all kinds of ways to have access that aren’t prohibitively expensive. But people perceive that the structures that purvey the art form as elite, and that is something that we really have to work on changing, providing points of access. The art form itself, I do not fundamentally believe, is in any way elite! When I sing for kids, or when I sing for people who have never heard it before, they have an emotional reaction to it, they have an intellectual response to it. There’s nothing about the form itself, or the music, that is meant for one person over another. It’s how we change people’s context and access to it, and how they feel engaged. It’s interesting coming off of Exterminating Angel, and thinking about how I can make sure there is that kind of engagement and access around something like Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice with the Met [May 16-June 8] because as a twenty-first century opera singer, I see that as partly my responsibility. I’ve worked hard to build a whole festival of events and projects around Orfeo so that we can break down those perceptions that exist.

Rail: What are you organizing for Orfeo?

Costanzo: Well, I was thinking, what’s at the root of Orfeo? It’s obviously this ancient Greek myth, but I was thinking about myth and how in antiquity, myth is perceived as a fundamental truth, right? There’s a moral to the story at the core of it that is somehow true. And you see that with Orfeo. If you look at myths, the word myth in our times means the opposite, it means a lie or an untruth. I was really interested in that idea of myth and its progression in different cultures and in different communities, in our modern parlance, and in old stories. What I decided to do was organize a festival, or a series of events leading up to Orfeo, called “MYTHS.” It explores myth in different ways: one thing we’re doing is a project with the Bronx Arts Ensemble, the Met Opera, the Lulada Club (which is a female-led salsa group), the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Miguel Alejandro Castillo, a wonderful director, and Lexy Ho-Tai, a great artist. And we’re working with kids from the Rosalyn Yalow Charter School in the Bronx, talking to them about this idea of myth, using what they think about and create as the foundation for a twenty minute performance which will open the Brooklyn Library’s People’s Ball [May 5]. It will be exciting to have this performance built around myth, with a salsa reimagining of music from Orfeo, and kids voices presented, and all kinds of artists from the Met and the Bronx Arts Ensemble performing. It will be something that engages people in the material and in some of the ideas of Orfeo.

Rail: When Orfeo was written, was it for a countertenor or a castrato? Over the years it has been sung by a mezzo-soprano too. In terms of a queer reading of Orfeo, what was the historical perception versus the current one of this character who has often been either/or?

Costanzo: Well, I’m writing a book about countertenors, and the history of their connection to castrati and beyond. I think what you’re asking gets to the heart of the question, is singing the role of countertenor inherently gay? If you’re a cis male singing in a register that we associate with women, is there something queer about that? The answer for me is yes, because I’m queer and it’s a part of my identity. But the answer for others, many straight countertenors obviously, is no. I always joke, are all countertenors gay, or only the best ones?

There’s a complicated thing there, but I’ll try and say it as simply as possible. In Christopher Willibald Gluck’s time, there would have been men playing a high-pitched singing role in one performance and then women playing it the next time; the gender was kind of interchangeable and it didn’t really matter. Opera has forever had what we call “pants” roles, which are roles where women dress as men. So there is a sense that within opera, gender is more fluid. And there’s something inherently queer about that no matter whether the love story is between a man and a woman or whatever. We all have come to understand that “queer” is a term in its modern application that can represent all different kinds of things as it relates to sexuality and identity. But I do think that one thing I’ve learned through performing with Justin Vivian Bond and in my life as an opera singer, you always have a big part of yourself in the sound and in the performance, and that is what is ultimately most compelling to people.

Rail: I find the idea of the intentionality vis-à-vis genderfluid roles fascinating. Shakespeare’s frequent gender-bending, or Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. But when the composer is sitting down and writing and thinking “I’m going to write this for a castrati, or maybe it’ll be performed by a woman,” you wonder: is the composer in the seventeenth, eighteenth century engaging in this kind playfulness with gender? Or were they in a mindset of like, “Oh, this is just a man with a very high voice that fits the part?” Do you have any sense of what that outlook was?

Costanzo: Not with certainty, but I think in those days, from Gluck, and before (we’ll talk about Mozart in a second), Handel, Vivaldi, and all of that, they didn’t associate pitch with gender. Which is interesting, especially if you think of it in a modern context of the trans voice. Why must we associate pitch with gender? Obviously, there are certain physiological explanations in terms of the length of vocal cords and gender at birth, and all of that stuff. The idea of gay voice, and what sounds gay—we associate pitch with gender today, and they did not.

I think part of the reason they didn’t is that in the eighteenth century there’s no amplification, right? And there’s still no amplification in opera. But in a theater—first in a church, which is where most music was happening—women weren’t allowed to sing, and boy sopranos are not very loud. So the first time that you heard a castrato in church, it was the most powerful sound. All the [contemporary] writers about music say they were like trumpets. If you think of a trumpet, and how high it is, cutting through the space of the auditorium, that is really powerful. And that has a certain weight and is more about the penetration of sound, rather than the pitch, in terms of its power.

Rail: Now, what were you going to say about Mozart?

Costanzo: Mozart in The Marriage of Figaro (1786) writes the role of Cherubino. This is a little bit after Gluck writes Orfeo in 1762. Gluck is a bridge between the baroque and the classical periods, bridging Handel, who came before, and Mozart, who comes after. Cherubino is played by a woman because in the Beaumarchais play Cherubino, who is sort of the horny adolescent pageboy, is played by a woman—because that is who Beaumarchais thought could play the role of the page. In the play and in the opera, what becomes hilarious is that you have a woman dressed as a man, and then in order to disguise him at one point in the opera, they dress him as a woman. So then you have a woman dressing as a man dressing as a woman. And there is, I think, a certain comedy that is consciously made out of that, and a certain titillation that comes from a woman dressed as a man being attracted to or almost kissing another woman. That being taken advantage of may very well have been there in the baroque time, a sort of titillation around that. There certainly was a lot of sexual energy around the castrati in general—from both sexes—and excitement about what that meant. Part of that was because women who were in arranged marriages couldn’t have affairs because birth control wasn’t very reliable, in whatever form it existed. A castrato was infertile, but sexually functional, so they were, if nothing else, a fantasy item. In this case I think that Mozart was starting to become more aware of playing with this trope. He’d grown up with women dressing as men, and men dressing as women, and gender being a little bit more fluid.

Rail: Then you get this situation in the Philip Glass opera Akhnaten, a role which you have performed in London at the National Opera and in New York at the Met. The singularity of the main character is emphasized by his ethereal and genderless voice. Glass seems to be attempting to give him a supernatural personification. What is your take on the use of the countertenor in that part?

Costanzo: I think Glass’s original idea in the eighties, when he wrote Akhnaten, was that he wanted a voice that sounded like nothing else because people often refer to Akhenaten as the first individual—he had this idea nobody else had. Why did he have it? Glass wanted a sound like nothing else on stage and nothing else you recognize. As we research and look at the statute of Akhenaten that exists, we see that there are almost breasts there. I’ve talked to Egyptologists during my fellowship at Oxford in Egyptology about how God was in the middle, between man and woman, and we see the pharaoh trying to be somewhere between human and God. Perhaps he either changed his body in real life to make it look more like it was, between sexes, or he was born that way, or he had himself represented in art that way. But I think there is this idea that Akhenaten was trying to be between sexes. I think the countertenor voice perfectly embodies that aspect of Akhnaten. Whether it was totally intentional or conscious—certainly he would never think of it in this terminology—but it is a point in the trajectory of a genderfluid history that goes back to antiquity.

Rail: And so your book is about the history of castrati?

Costanzo: My book is about the history of the countertenor. Countertenors came to prominence reviving repertoire that the castrati sang. It was an authentic replication of the castrato without the snipping. My book goes to the inside of the throat and what is actually happening inside your throat to make that sound possible. Then it goes on to look at the early countertenors in London, like Alfred Deller, who, with Benjamin Britten, revived high male singing. Then it goes all the way through to Michael Jackson, Prince, and the Bee Gees, and Mickey Mouse, and all of the ways around the world that this high male voice is around us and is prevalent and a part of pop culture. It asks the question, why do we find it so queer to hear a countertenor? What is it about the operatic embodiment of that role that is so shocking to people? So it talks about gender and sexuality in that respect. And then there’s a whole lot of my life in there as well and stories from my experience singing as a countertenor, and then creating as a countertenor.

Rail: What has been your experience creating as a countertenor?

Costanzo: I was always somewhat dissatisfied with opera as an industry. I felt it wasn’t exciting enough, or innovative enough, from the time I was young. I always felt the need to innovate within a tradition that I loved and respected; not to break the tradition, but actually to take it further. As a countertenor, and as I got into my career, I realized I wasn’t going to sing Tosca, or La Bohème; I wasn’t going to have an easy road and I was going to be relegated to the fringes unless I could come up with projects that were really exciting or projects that engage people in that fringe repertoire in which they otherwise might not be interested. And so that’s how I began producing. When I say producing, it means raising all the money, coming up with marketing plans, and curating other artists. So that’s been an important part of my creation. And then at the same time, the countertenor is kind of like an “extended technique.” If you play the flute, and you blow into it so much that air comes out in addition to tone, that’s referred to as an “extended technique.” I think that the countertenor is an extended technique that composers, since Benjamin Britten with Alfred Deller in the 1950s, have really dug into. That includes Thomas Adès, who I’m working with now, but I’m particularly excited about that leading up to Orfeo.

Rail: You like to work with visual artists; I met you at a dinner for Glenn Brown, with whom you’ve done an opera/visual arts project. The singer/composer relationship is obvious. But what is the interface between visual art and music, visual art and your instrument, your singing?

Costanzo: I was just talking to George Condo, we’re working on a project together again and we’ve collaborated a lot. We were talking about all the music that is in his paintings, and in turn all of the visual references and cues that are used to create singing. Singing technique is about using your imagination to control what are essentially involuntary, teeny, tiny muscles in your throat that you can’t even imagine. If I think of a color palette, or a brush stroke, or a particular gesture that can help me remember a feeling that I can replicate on stage, that’s essentially what singing technique is. Also, opera is inherently interdisciplinary; it was from the beginning; the set design was art, costumes were fashion. What’s wonderful about working with visual artists is that I only have my perspective, and I can go see as many things as I want, but I will never hear this music in the same way as another artist would. When I am able to sing with an artist like Condo, who has painted live with me, and I see what he paints in response to the music, I see an embodiment of what I call a “post-auditory visual representation” of that music. If sheet music is the pre-auditory visual representation we look at in order to know what notes and rhythms to sing, it is incredible to then see the post-auditory visual representation, which is someone else’s interpretation of your physical act. I think it’s also a way for people to relate to music to which they might otherwise not connect.

Rail: Are you one of those people with synesthesia, where you hear colors?

Costanzo: I don’t think so. I don’t exactly hear colors. That’s why I need the artists to hear the colors for me. On some level opera is a kind of synesthesia, not just color and sound per se, but emotion. What does an emotion sound like? There is a kind of synesthesia in that. I think Gluck was amazing—in the moment when Orpheus turns and Eurydice dies for the second time, and he loses her, you expect this really minor-key, sad aria, but in fact, Gluck writes the lament, the famous aria “Che farò senza Euridice” in a major key. And there’s something about that; it’s so sad and so pathetic. And it’s such an interesting way to embody the extreme emotion of that moment in music. So there are all these different kinds of synesthesia.

Rail: I was thinking about opera before talking to you. In a way it is the most inauthentic art form; in musicals there’s a narrative, but then obviously the conceit that “now we’re going to start singing,” or in ballet, there’s no excuse made at all, it’s pure dance, pure abstraction. But in opera, people just start singing and they don’t stop. Some people hypothesize that ancient Greek theater was sung in the same way. But it forces you to get out of your own comfort zone, you are watching people sing for three to five hours (or at least an hour and a half). I was curious about your take on the history of that experience. It’s deeply ritualized behavior. You talked about church and singing in church, but what about this idea of singing a story?

Costanzo: I would counter that by saying that I think it is one of the most authentic art forms. What we do when we’re born, the first thing we do, is cry, which is an operatic act. It is a primal use of our vocal cords in the most extreme way. So physically it’s something that we do from the moment we’re born. I also think that the human condition and what is inside is the most authentic on some level. What we do, what we say to each other, and the situations we are in, day to day, only represent a tiny slice of what’s happening to humanity. I think what opera does is it gives an expression of the authenticity of the human experience which we suppress day to day. It’s actually that which makes it so profound. The reason it has the capacity to be so illuminating is that it is everything that is happening inside these people. They can’t simply just say it like they would in a play because that couldn’t represent the depth or the extremity or the catharsis of it. They have to sort of scream it like a child, crying over a hundred instruments playing in the orchestra pit, because that is the authenticity of the human experience when we encounter death, or when we encounter great love or whatever the feelings that we feel we can’t really express and don’t know how to express. Opera gives us a way to see them expressed at the velocity in which we feel them. So that would be my argument for the way in which opera is actually authentic!

Rail: That’s a very good point. You’re a huge public advocate for opera, especially with kids. What is their response when you sing for them or show them opera? Is it like when a baby first starts crying, do they immediately take to it?

Costanzo: Well, recently I was with a one year old, who is very dear to me. And I started singing just a note. And she looked at me, and then she started singing this very same note. And I thought, okay, there’s something interesting. If you Google it, you’ll see me working with these ninth and tenth graders in the Bronx. What you see is that the moment I start singing, it is hilarious to them, right? Like, you’ve got this guy singing as a woman and they’re trying to not break down laughing. I just keep going and I’m singing quite a sad aria. And they don’t know anything about what the words are, they just know that it’s an aria about that. And over the course of the four minutes, you see them absolutely transformed. And every time I’ve done this, the kids understand it, they get it immediately, they get what’s in it, and the musicality of it. So I don’t think there’s any resistance there. There’s only, as it’s often true with kids, a great need for creativity, as they experience the possibility that this art form holds. Really the only barriers to it are the structures in society that give people apprehension about whether it’s really for them.

Rail: Orfeo is a bit different from what the Met usually does.

Costanzo: I try and use some of the practical aspects like the fact that it’s ninety minutes with no intermission; everybody loves that. That’s an ideal night for an opera. But also, you have this Mark Morris production, incredible dance with costumes by Isaac Mizrahi and this music that is so heart rending and beautiful. But how do we get buzz going? My friend dragged me to this gay bar called the Eagle in Chelsea, I’ve never been before. There was a line around the block, and I thought, “Oh my God, all of these people are waiting in line for like forty-five minutes, everyone was on their phone and I had this realization like, what if you sent in a bunch of people to promote the opera. What if they were performers?” I have a friend who’s in this group called the Neo-Futurists. What if we could get some improvisational actors to go with a flyer and see if they could sell the opera in a conversation with people who are waiting online to get into a bar?

Rail: How do you get people past this idea that high art is inaccessible?

Costanzo: I don’t think about how I can make opera accessible. Or rather, I think about what is the point of access, for each different person I talked to. It might be for this person that they can dress up and look great and have a night out, and that’ll be ninety minutes. For another person, it might be that they love the idea of seeing an opera, but they’ve never had a chance to do that, or they’ve always thought it was really expensive. In fact, they can get in for $40 and it will cost them less than having two drinks at the bar. For other people, having a way into the idea of myth through National Black Theatre, or the Brooklyn Public Library in the context of being yourself and expressing yourself through fashion, and then coming to see Isaac Mizrahi’s costumes at the Met. What are the different points of access for someone? And how can I hand them that key to open the door? And then once they’re there, once I get someone in the room, I’m not so worried about the material itself being accessible because I believe in it, I believe that it is compelling enough to excite people once they’re there. The issue is getting them there.

Rail: So do you think all opera is accessible to everybody? Can you convince everybody to sit through Parsifal?

Costanzo: No, I don’t think that all opera is at the same level of accessibility. I think that some operas, the more context or experience you have, the more you get out of them—some are easier to come to. That said, I don’t believe that Carmen, La Bohème, and La Traviata are necessarily the best first opera. In fact, I know that Akhnaten was many people’s first ever opera. And some of them have said they’ve never found something they like as much as that again. So I don’t subscribe to this idea that there’s eight operas that are the best first operas for everyone and if they go to access those operas, then maybe they’ll be able to digest something better. People relate to all different things. So there might be someone who relates to Parsifal as their first opera in a way that transforms them. And there might be someone who was much more a La Bohème person. But in terms of Orfeo, because of its music and because of the simplicity of the story; Gluck was coming from a time when Handel was writing four-hour operas with all these characters changing places, and he wanted to do something different. The reason it’s so compact is because he wrote what he called the “reform” opera, which had only one protagonist and three characters, with ninety minutes and a lot of dancing. That was his attempt to make opera more accessible. So part of the reason I love Orfeo and want to do it is that that’s what Gluck was doing. I think, like Akhnaten, Orfeo is another opportunity because it was built as a kind of gateway drug.

Rail: A new alternative introductory list: Philip Glass, Gluck, that’s great.

Costanzo: I think there’s a way in which La Bohème and La Traviata do bring a lot of people to the opera. But when you’re talking about a demographic that finds the opera elite, that is exemplified by La Bohème and La Traviata, and all of those sort of canonical classic operas, right? So what if there were other points of entry that didn’t carry that baggage with them? And I think that Akhnaten, Orfeo, and contemporary operas that allow for people to see their own stories told on stage can be those operas.

Rail: I was just having a conversation with a friend yesterday about conceptual art and how on a certain level you’re buying into something that most people are going to look at and say, “I’m not buying it.” Obviously there’s music that also fits into that category where you shed a lot of the ideas of enjoyment, pleasure, or entertainment, but it is at times sublime and wonderful.

Costanzo: If you look up “reform opera,” you’ll find all that. I think also the other thing about the Parsifal question, and this is something we encountered with Akhnaten, is the possibility for that duration of focus gets less and less in the time we live in. When I have dinner with someone, and I put my phone on the side of the table, I think some people would relate to the fact that it sometimes becomes difficult not to pick it up and look at it every ten or fifteen minutes. And when you go to the opera, and for an hour at a time or an hour and a half, or whatever the length of the act is, you have to just be with your thoughts and let go of that. Your mind has to slow down from the need for this serotonin and the constant changing between apps, or looking at your email or seeing what texts come in, seeing what’s next. I think that is quite valuable, those moments when we allow our mind to slow down and we can tap into an emotion or an experience, which gives life meaning. Also, I am getting older and older; we rest, or get away, but we are rushed through life, and we don’t know how to encounter these big moments and what to think about them. There’s therapy or there’s ways that for an hour we can look at it. But I think that in order for us to take stock of what is meaningful in life we need to have those moments however we can find them. For me, opera is one of them.