The countertenor is one of the most misunderstood voice parts across all of music — and I’d know, because I’m a countertenor myself. If you’ve heard a countertenor sing before, you would probably describe them as a “man who sings like a woman.” That’s an okay starting point, but as we’ll soon find, it’s not quite as simple as that. So, strap yourselves in for a ride through the history of countertenors from the origins of the voice part to its current surge in popularity. Along the way, I’ll share answers to some of the burning questions I am most frequently asked and shine a light on some of the nuances surrounding voice parts and gender. But let’s start with the basics first.
The Major Voice Types in Classical Music
In classical music, we separate voices into six distinct groups, though there are many subsets of each. The three lowest voice parts, from lowest to highest, are basses, baritones, and tenors. Historically, these voice parts were sung by men, but in recent years voice part has become less associated with gender. Notable examples of singers defying traditional gender norms in that vein include operatic trans baritone Lucia Lucas and singer Bally Prell, who once said “The only thing that stands in the way of an opera career for me is the fact that they don’t let female tenors perform on stage,” which was certainly the case in her time.
The three highest voice parts, from lowest to highest, are contraltos, mezzo-sopranos, and sopranos. Today the upper voice parts are predominantly associated with women, but historically there was a surprising amount of gender variety, including boy treble singers, castrati, who were men castrated before puberty specifically to retain their high voices, countertenors, and women.
Isn’t a countertenor just a man who sounds like a woman?
Yes . . . and no! Most countertenors are men who have retained or cultivated a high vocal range after puberty. This allows them to sing in a range most common to mezzo-sopranos or contraltos. Some countertenors also sing as sopranos, sometimes referring to themselves as “sopranists.” But, like all other voice types, one countertenor’s sound is akin to a fingerprint, in that no two countertenors are going to sound exactly the same, and there is no universal standard for what a vocalist of any gender should sound like. As opera star John Holiday recounted in a recent GBH Music special, before his professor told him that he was a countertenor, he thought of himself simply as a singer! The voice part has a long history with gender nuances that we’ll explore. So yes, while most countertenors identify as men, the term is more associated with vocal production - how singers produce sounds - than gender at all.
In short, a countertenor is best described as a singer whose voice has changed due to the presence of testosterone, yet retains a high singing voice comparable to sopranos, mezzo-sopranos, or contraltos, and actively self-identifies with that label.
How exactly do countertenors sing so high?
There is more than one way to sing! Tenors, baritones, and basses usually sing in the range of their speaking voice, known as “modal” or “chest” voice. On the other hand, countertenors typically sing above the range of their speaking voice via a reinforced falsetto (think Frankie Valli or Mickey Mouse), and only incorporate the range of their speaking voice in the lowest portion of their register, if at all. Because the presence of testosterone thickens the vocal folds and lowers the range of the voice during male puberty, voice training is required to achieve a “feminine” sound, both in singing and in speaking.
That said, there are some outliers who just naturally have high modal voices. For singers like Russell Oberlin, for example, the mechanism of vocal production is more akin to that of a tenor, just with an unusually extended upper range. This is not to be confused with the French “haute-contre,” a subset of the tenor voice part that was prominent in 17th and 18th century France as a substitute for castrati roles in opera due to a French cultural distaste for castration. The haute-contre sings roughly between the range of that of a typical tenor and a countertenor, but does not generally utilize the same method of vocal production as countertenors. However, they do share some overlap in repertoire as a result of the historical link to castrati (more on that link later).
Countertenors can also theoretically sing in their lower registers as tenors, baritones, or basses, but most choose to strengthen their falsetto and incorporate it into their countertenor voice instead. Personally, I perform as both a tenor and a countertenor, as I find the unique challenges and timbres associated with both voice types to be exhilarating and rewarding in their own way.
Here, I'll demonstrate the difference between modal voice and falsetto:
It’s also important to note that not all masculine/male-identifying singers who sing in this register are considered countertenors. My colleague Elijah McCormick identifies as a male soprano rather than as a countertenor, as he is a trans masculine individual whose voice did not change through puberty, and he does not utilize falsetto in his vocal production. Similarly, there are some trans feminine singers who do employ falsetto to achieve their range, but don’t identify as countertenors. For example, Breanna Sinclairé is a soprano whose voice did change during puberty, but does not identify as a countertenor due to the historical association of countertenors with men and masculinity.
Further still, there are some male singers whose voices never break through puberty at all, like soprano Michael Maniaci. These singers are sometimes referred to as “natural” or "endocrinological” castrati due to rare hormonal anomalies in their development that somewhat mimic the anatomical characteristics and vocal production of castrati from the 16th through the early 19th Centuries.
Suffice it to say, there is a lot of nuance when it comes to the countertenor voice, and much more at play than the reductive position that countertenors are “men who sound like women.“
How did the countertenor voice type come into being? Why are they so popular in opera these days?
While the etymological origin of the countertenor can be traced back to choral music of the 1300s-1400s, it didn’t really describe what we would call a countertenor today, but it did describe a separate voice part from the tenor line (hence “counter-tenor”). Due to a decree of the Catholic Church that “women should remain silent in Church,” there was a demand for male singers who could sing the highest vocal parts in the choir that were otherwise typically sung by women or boys, and thus: the countertenor was born, if only in function but not quite in name yet.
The reason countertenors are frequent flyers in the opera world these days is largely due to the historical presence and eventual dominance of the previously-mentioned castrati in baroque opera throughout the 1600s-1700s, which is a niche that countertenors now fill in the absence of castrati in modern productions of baroque opera. Unlike countertenors, castrati were boys specifically castrated to preserve their unbroken voice who maintained rigorous professional musical careers. Castration was originally performed both to bolster the ranks of church choirs and to incentivize an apathetic public to come to church, as the cultural intrigue of castrati was immense in Italy at the time, and pews were tough to fill without something to draw a crowd. In 1589, Pope Sixtus V made an official decree that formally recognized the presence of castrati in the Sistine Chapel Choir, leaving only adult men in the choir singing all voice parts, in preference even to falsettists.
As castrati came more into fashion, countertenors and treble boy singers were gradually phased out, then back in as the demand for and ubiquity of castrati waned. The modern association of countertenors as treble-voiced adult masculine singers did not come until the 20th century.
The cruel and barbaric practice of castration was never technically “legal,” but it came to be implicitly endorsed, with some families going so far as to castrate their own sons as an attempt to lift them out of poverty due to the increasing affinity for castrati in Italian opera, which they justified under medical pretenses. It’s unclear exactly how prevalent this practice was, but there are some notable examples of “success” in this regard, such as the contralto Senesino, who was the son of a lowly barber and came to be one of the most widely known castrati of the 18th century, and was a frequent collaborator of none other than George Frideric Handel.
Castrati came to be the superstars of 17th and especially 18th century opera. Though there certainly were female singers in the context of baroque opera at the time, at the height of “castrati fever,” a production was considered doomed to fail if it did not have at least one major castrato singer in its cast, regardless of its composer, staging, or even its musical qualities. It was common practice for castrati to sing female roles “en travesti” (when a singer is deliberately cast in a role that is different from the gender that they present as in everyday life) in addition to the often heroic male characters that were typically composed specifically for castrati.
The success and popularity of castrati was at least partially because of biological changes that came as a result of castration which led to a near superhuman breath support when compared to other singers due to an unnatural expansion of the ribcage. Further to this point, the soprano castrato Farinelli, widely considered to be one of the greatest singers of all time, could purportedly sing 250 consecutive notes in one breath, and could sustain a single note for up to one minute. Here's a clip about Farinelli from the BBC documentary Castrato:
After hearing Farinelli in 1726, renowned flutist, flute-maker, composer, and friend of the station Johann Joachim Quantz had this to say:
“Farinelli had a penetrating, full, rich, bright and well-modulated soprano voice, with a range at that time from the A below middle C to the D two octaves above middle C . . . His intonation was pure, his trill beautiful, his breath control extraordinary and his throat very agile, so that he performed the widest intervals quickly and with the greatest ease and certainty. Passagework and all kinds of melismas were of no difficulty to him. In the invention of free ornamentation in adagio he was very fertile."
Further, due to the pressures of making their castration “worth it,” castrati often had a strict and demanding music education regimen as compared to other singers, in addition to their ostracized social status in society:
The popularity of castrati waned through the 1800s, and the practice of castration was made explicitly illegal in Italy in the latter half of the 1800s. The last living castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, died in 1922, and we are fortunate to have access to digitized versions of recordings that Moreschi made on wax cylinder disc in 1902. These are the only known recordings available of the castrato voice, and they offer an eerily beautiful yet haunting glimpse into the past.
Since there were no more castrati left after Moreschi’s passing to carry the torch, the repertoire they left behind created a natural niche for countertenors to fill when they came more into fashion. And come into fashion they did! Enter: the early music revival of the mid-1900s.
During the early music revival of the mid-1900s, there was a serendipitous resurgence of countertenors due in large part to the efforts of countertenor Alfred Deller, who popularized the countertenor label itself, and the Deller Consort in conjunction with a growing cultural desire to more accurately replicate historical performance practice in music from the Age of Enlightenment and before - in other words, to have countertenors sing roles originally written for castrati rather than women sing castrato roles en travesti. This further led to the increased presence of countertenors in the classical music world at large, with composer Benjamin Britten even going so far as to create the role of Oberon in his opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream specifically for Deller.
When Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream premiered in 1960, it led to a tremendous rise in new music for countertenors that has yet to wane, with distinguished composers such as György Ligeti, Thomas Adès, Unsuk Chin, Nico Muhly, Philip Glass, and George Benjamin writing music for the countertenor voice. Notable opera and song composer Jake Heggie even wrote a set of songs specifically lampooning the woes of singing as a countertenor, appropriately titled Encountertenor, commissioned by the late countertenor Brian Asawa:
The prevalence of countertenors in the classical music world and beyond has continued to surge ever since, with early music and contemporary music productions in frequent demand of their services.
What do countertenors actually sing?
The short answer: anything they'd like! While there wasn’t a significant presence of countertenors (then called falsettists) historically from the 1800s to the early 1900s, there’s recordings of countertenors singing everything from Schubert, to Fauré, and even Puccini, despite the fact that none of these composers even knew what a countertenor was, let alone wrote for any. You might be surprised to learn that Rossini wrote an opera featuring a castrato role though, which has been recorded by countertenors today!
That all being said, you’ll most likely hear them in the context of baroque and contemporary opera, or in oratorios like Handel’s Messiah or Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. But there’s no magic rule saying that countertenors only have to sing those things - it is purely a choice determined by the organizations who hire them and the artists associated with them, as well as the historical context that countertenors may or may not play into. Further, it is becoming increasingly more common to deliberately stage “genderbent” productions of operas broadly as they offer unique sonic and narrative twists to music that has stood the test of time, in addition to presenting an opportunity for accessibility as it relates to casting decisions by smaller companies with tighter budgets by “working with what you’ve got.”
Aren’t countertenors just worse substitutes for female singers - why bother with them? Are they even all that rare?
There is a somewhat popular mischaracterization in the classical music world that countertenors are simply worse musical substitutes for female singers that continue to get hired solely for their function in historical performance contexts or the “X factor” of being a perceived rarity. Like all singers, the quality, challenges, and abilities from one to the next is completely variable and exists across a vast spectrum that can’t just be generalized across the board. To say that countertenors are just worse with no individual consideration from singer to singer only cements a narrow narrative that doesn’t reflect the nuanced reality.
Moreover, countertenors could just as easily be mistaken for Mickey Mouse as they could for Barbara Streisand, but ultimately it is the decision of whoever is responsible for hiring the singers to determine if they are worthy of the platform, historical performance context or not. All of that is to say: countertenors are worth hearing in spite of this association, not because of this association. Every singer, regardless of voice type, has a distinct artistic voice to offer. If a listener is unhappy with the fact that a countertenor is slotted in for a given role over any other singer, they should take it up with who’s hiring them, because they’re the reason that they have the platform in the first place.
When it comes to the question of rarity, it is important to note that most singers who have gone through male puberty are able to sing in falsetto, however the vast majority of them choose not to prioritize falsetto as their primary means of vocal production. So the ability to sing as a countertenor is theoretically much more common among male singers than people may realize, but their actual presence in the classical music world is still largely as a perceived rarity or an outlier. Your baritone friend in choir playfully mocking the alto line in falsetto might just be the start of their countertenor journey!
Who are the top countertenors performing today?
Andreas Scholl
German countertenor Andreas Scholl was the first countertenor that I ever heard. His recording of Handel’s aria “Ombrai mai fu” from the opera Xerxes singlehandedly changed the course of my life by inspiring me to study music and perform professionally as a countertenor. His unity of register, purity of tone, and overall quality of singing is second to none. I was fortunate enough to participate in a masterclass with Scholl during my undergraduate studies at Boston University, and his insight on incorporating music into the body has followed me ever since.
Franco Fagioli
The recording below of Argentine countertenor Franco Fagioli was one of the very first recordings I heard of any singer where I couldn’t keep my jaw from practically smashing through the floor. The depth and richness of his voice in combination with his staggering range and commanding stage presence are beyond comparison to really any singer I have ever heard or seen, countertenor or not. He blew up on the scene after being discovered by none other than mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli, who has been his regular collaborator ever since - if you heard the two of them singing side by side without looking, you might not be able to tell which was which.
Jakub Józef Orliński
Polish countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński is such a breath of fresh air. He brings a youthful vitality and visceral emotional connection to everything he sings, with an immaculate tone and flexible vocal production to match. Plus he’s a breakdancer, which is pretty darn neat too!
Anthony Roth Costanzo
American countertenor and General Director and President of Opera Philadelphia Anthony Roth Costanzo has been making waves across the world since his 2021 performance as the title role in Philip Glass’s Akhnaten at the Metropolitan Opera, a minimalist opera that tells the story of the titular Pharoah’s reign. Costanzo is no stranger to the Met however, as he debuted there when he was only 11 as Miles in Benjamin Britten’s Turn of the Screw. He is by far one of the most widely known countertenors in America, lauded for his creative programming and nuanced musicality in equal measure. He always brings a thoughtful and sincere interpretation to anything he performs, be it arias, Broadway tunes, or Cabaret songs, and that alone is worth anyone’s attention.
John Holiday
American countertenor John Holiday broke onto the scene when he participated in season 19 of NBC’s “The Voice” in 2020, where he placed 5th. He’s been a frequent recitalist and opera star ever since, and it’s not hard to see or hear why. Holiday has a vast range, loads of charisma, vocal agility in spades, and a distinct artistic voice that is unrivaled by most in the classical music world, let alone among countertenors.
GBH Music had the immense fortune of hosting Holiday back in February of this year, and we couldn’t be happier with his performance. Watch his whole performance here, or a clip from it, below:
Me!
Shameless plug here; as previously mentioned, I am also a countertenor (among other things), and you can check out some of the stuff I’ve been up to here!
Encore
Below, I've shared a playlist that reflects some of the best and most iconic music written for and/or sung by countertenors that I know of, as sung by some of my favorite artists. Navigating the classical music world as a countertenor was quite a difficult sea for me to paddle through when I first got my feet wet, so I hope I can help spare you a soaked shoe or two:
