Get back in the closet
Why do so many gay opera-lovers have a problem with a gay opera singer?
David Daniels tells all to Martin Kettle
Special report: the Edinburgh festival 2001
Martin Kettle
The Guardian
Thursday August 23, 2001
When he first came out, David Daniels recalls, he "suddenly knew the
feeling of having all the weight of the world taken off my shoulders". But
although Daniels is an openly gay singer, he is not talking about his
sexuality. He is talking about his voice.
Until March 1992 Daniels thought he was a tenor. As the son of two South
Carolina singers, he had trained for it for years, first at the Cincinnati
conservatoire - "just the best in the country, bar none" - and then at the
University of Michigan with George Shirley, a memorable Pelléas and Loge at
Covent Garden 20 years ago.
Daniels was a pretty good tenor, too. Good enough to be cast in the title
role in the college production of Britten's Albert Herring nine years ago.
But when the performance started, it was a disaster. "I just couldn't
sustain anything above the stave. I cracked through every other note. It
was a horrible experience, beyond imagining.
"I thought it must be something mental, that I was scared to sing into the
top, and that I couldn't let go." So Daniels decided to seek advice from a
therapist. And when he went for his appointment he decided to tell her
about his "other voice".
In that other voice, Daniels told her, he could sing everything. He said
he had been trained as a treble, but that when his voice broke he had
retained the ability to put his voice up there. In fact, he had had the
other voice for more almost 20 years.
"That was when it hit me that maybe this voice was really me after all, and
that it was natural. So I went to George Shirley, worked for a week or so
on some things, and sang them for him. I'll never forget his reaction. He
just sat back and smiled, and said: 'There's no decision to make. This is
it. You've found it. You are a counter-tenor.'"
Nine years on, Daniels is not just a counter-tenor. In many people's view,
he is the counter-tenor of the age. And since this is an age in which the
music business and the music- buying public have appetites as never before
for male singers who can produce that plangent, virile yet gender-bending
vocal sound, Daniels has become the singer who broke through the glass
ceiling, the first who can truly be described as counter-tenor, superstar.
"Yeah, OK, but I get uncomfortable talking about that sort of thing,"
Daniels tells me in a cafe in downtown Washington. He is wearing a polo
shirt and shorts and drinking iced tea. "Sure, I like to be successful -
what singer doesn't? I may have kicked the door open slightly, but it was
pretty loose.
"Listen," he continues, "it's true that it's unheard of for counter-tenors
like me and Andreas Scholl to have exclusive contracts. It's obviously just
the right time for it. Maybe the sound is more appealing to the mass
audience. I also think opera companies and the recording industry were
looking to do something different and new. The ironic thing is that the new
is old."
One of the things that Daniels is comfortable talking about, I soon
discover, is sport. A conversation that was about to turn to Benjamin
Britten instead bounds towards baseball. Daniels has just come back from a
week in Atlanta, where he spent much of his time watching the local team.
"I'm a lifelong Braves fan. Next to music, sport is the second most
passionate thing in my life. It's huge for me. I play a lot of basketball.
I'm unbelievably competitive. I'm very American."
Now, though, the summer vacation is nearly over, and Daniels is preparing
to hit the road again. This month he is back in Europe, with two concerts
at the Edinburgh festival, where, on two earlier visits, he was phenomenally
successful.
The first concert is familiar Daniels territory: arias by Handel,
cornerstone composer of the counter-tenor renaissance, with whom he made a
sensational breakthrough in this country, as Didymus in Peter Sellars's
hugely admired production of Theodora at Glyndebourne in 1996. Fresh from a
performance of Handel's Giulio Cesare in Los Angeles, in which he took the
lead role, Daniels will again be singing the composer's work when he makes
his next London appearance in January. Handel was "just the greatest genius
at writing for the voice", says Daniels.
The second Edinburgh concert, though, is new repertoire. Britten's Five
Canticles on religious themes span the composer's life, and two of them will
match Daniels with another of today's most admired young vocalists, tenor
Ian Bostridge. In the Second Canticle, Abraham and Isaac, the two men sing
the parts of father and son, and Daniels laughs as he pictures himself and
Bostridge together.
"I just don't know what we're going to look like, with me, the big, bearded
American Isaac, standing next to the slim English boy as my father. It's a
little backwards in terms of stereotypes, isn't it? I'm still trying to
decide how I'm going to portray the son, given the way I look, and whether I
want to be very dramatic with it. But my guess is that I'm going to have to
pull it all in, and be rather English about it."
New repertoire is becoming something of a Daniels trademark, especially
after his ground-breaking Serenade CD last year, on which he sang a range of
works by composers such as Beethoven, Schubert, Gounod and Vaughan
Williams - far from the usual counter-tenor repertoire. And then there are
his concert performances of Berlioz's Nuits d'Eté. How much further can
Daniels go along this path?
"Well, I can't sing everything, but I can sing anything that's appropriate.
Sure, I could see myself singing a Schubert song cycle. To sing Die Schöne
Müllerin would be interesting. I could pull that off. Right now, though,
we're talking about Chausson."
Another project he is mulling over is the idea of persuading a living
American composer to write him a modern opera role. It's something he
clearly craves. "All I ask is that it has some sort of political feel,
because I think that all opera - even opera of earlier ages - has to be able
to engage us somehow with our modern issues and concerns. That's what
Sellars did so wonderfully with Theodora.
"And I ask too that the character be human - and a man. Not some sort of
hermaphrodite or something extraterrestrial. Or a drag queen. The
counter-tenor voice is a masculine voice, a male voice, and I want to
portray a man."
If you detect a note of impatience there with some of the operatic gay
stereotypes, then you're right. "The opera-going gay community here is
very, very conservative," says Daniels. "They love the voices and the
costumes but they're not willing to stand anything that's different, or that
stretches the imagination at all. It just kills me."
"I'm very open about my sexuality. I'm very open about my relationship
[Daniels lives outside Washington with pianist and music teacher John
Touchton], and the fact that for 16 years I've had something that I'm
incredibly proud of. But the most opposition I get is from the gay
community. There's a lot of negativity from the gay community because I'm
open, and proud and honest. It's very bizarre. It makes no sense whatever.
"I'm gay, and it's a huge part of me. It's a huge part of my personality
and of how I was formed, from childhood to now, because I've always known
about it. Being gay affects my singing. It just does. That's a fact, and
I don't agree with people who say it's not.
"When I think about it all," Daniels says - and we're back on his voice
now - "I think I always knew it was something special and unique, and that
what was supposed to happen would happen when people heard me sing. And it
has. Now there are other pressures. It's not all peaches and cream, but
I'm certainly doing what I've always dreamed about."
• David Daniels sings works by Handel at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh (0131-473
2000), tonight, and the Britten Canticles at the same venue on Sunday.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001
Paul Moor (Berlin)
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