An Interview with Drew Minter

By Royal S. Brown

He is perhaps best known as one of the world's premiere countertenors, a soloist who has been extremely active in the performance of early music both in ensembles and in opera productions. He has also, however, gained a reputation as an actor who is not afraid to plunge into the unorthodox. In a German production of Handel's Tamerlano, for instance, he sang the first few notes of his opening aria from a handstand. A Handel specialist, he also appears in an offbeat film of Giulio Cesare directed by Peter Sellars, who set the opera in twentieth-century Beirut and who turned his character into what the vocalist has described as "this little fourteen-year-old leather sadist." He has also ventured into the field of directing and was recently responsible for a production in Germany of Handel's Radamisto. He has made over forty recordings, most recently a CD for Lyrichord with Gwendolyn Toth and ARTEK/458 Strings (see Fanfare 19:2) entitled "Love Letters from Italy." His name is Drew Minter, and he has been in the singing business from his early childhood on, starting his career as a boy soprano at the age of nine in Washington's National Cathedral. But what's this? When I began to talk to him at his apartment near the East River in Brooklyn, I quickly realized that the speaking voice I was listening to was not in the high tenor to alto range but rather a good, solid baritone. As the conversation drew on, however, his extremely flexible voice would occasionally wander into much higher ranges, but only for a moment. I quickly learned that being a countertenor has more to do with how the voice is used in its various ranges, from a chest voice below to a mixed voice in the middle to a kind of falsetto at the top, than what the voice's natural range may be. With this information in hand, I asked Minter just how he envisaged the whole problem of a career as a vocalist.

D.M.: In classical singing, there is a kind of attitude that a career is basically ... Sherrill Milnes, that you sing at the Met, that you sing the big roles, the famous roles. Then, what happens, for whatever disappointing reasons -- sometimes it has nothing to do with talent -- is that you just don't get the right break, or the opportunity developed at a time when you had vocal problems, or who knows what. But there are basically all these other careers that are so important to the life of music. People who are devoting themselves to teaching the songs of Wolf. Where are you going to be if those people are only trying to sing the great Verdi role? I was on a panel this summer with some opera singers, a panel for young artists, and they were asking questions about how to get breaks, and all that kind of stuff. And essentially what came out was: take everything you can that you feel you can do, even if it's a stretch. And at one point the conversation turned to recordings, and I was the person who had done the most recordings in his career. But I didn't set out to do it. I got the [Harmonia Mundi] recording of Handel arias for [the legendary castrato] Senesino because René Jacobs canceled it, and literally overnight I went out and sight-read a lot of the material. And so recording became a very important part of my career, but it's not the part I enjoy the most.

R.S.B.: What part do you enjoy the most?

D.M.: When I'm working with a great director, it's performing opera. That has been the most fun, but it hasn't always been easy for me. It doesn't come naturally to me in some ways, and I've had a lot of body problems. I injured my back in the early 1980s, and it's caused me more and more trouble as I've gotten older. You're so involved in your physicality, and I was starting to give up the idea of singing opera. But now I've started working with some new people on my body and on my voice, including a physical therapist who only works with singers and Broadway people. It's kind of like a new lease on life. I've just turned forty, and I'm thinking, "Oh, my God, maybe I do have more to say." I was really moving towards directing. I'm directing five productions this year. That happened organically as well. I didn't really try to do that. And now, with some designers, we're actually creating a Baroque production company that we're going to start marketing this fall. There's a scenic designer, Scott Blake, and a costume designer, Bonnie Kruger, both of whom I worked with as a singer. This year, we did a production in Marseilles, which was a remounting of a Radamisto that we had done in Germany. They gave us the most fantastic lighting designer, a man named Pierre Dupouey. When I arrived in Marseilles, they had promised us certain things for the production. The first thing I had to give up was that we were going to have a correct floor. The floor essentially needs to look like wood panels. In theory, it would be a little raked, and they had only a degree or two of rake, and they did not have a floor that worked with our sets. But the overall production manager of the house said, "But you know, Drew, la lumière cache la misère" [lighting hides poverty]. I didn't realize what an incredible lighting designer we were going to have. The production looked like Caravaggio, which is how we always wanted it to look. It was just the right effect of what I think makes fantastic vocalism for this period: chiaroscuro. In a way, it's what I'm talking about for singing: the feigned or mixed voice. You're mixing the chiaro with the scuro. The way it's talked about in vocal pedagogy now is that classical singing is a combination of "twang" and "sob." That's the way they talk about it! Chiaro and scuro, which is how the old Italians talked about it. And essentially you need those exact same elements onstage. That's the Baroque ideal, the mannerist ideal. It's essentially what I think the whole Baroque aesthetic is about.

What was fun about my thirties was discovering a whole area of medieval music, which was unknown to me. With the Newberry Consort [of which Minter was a founding member], that has really become much more of a focus for us, partly because we have the right instruments for that. We've been together for thirteen years, and we've found an area in which we have a common language which seems to work. It's fun how your career develops. You don't really expect these things. It's so different today for countertenors. I came out of this whole choral thing, and countertenors didn't really have big careers yet. There was James Bowman, Paul Esswood, there had been Alfred [Deller], and Russell Oberlin. Did anybody else have a big career? Then there was René Jacobs, who's a little older than me as well, and he was just starting to have a big career when I was studying. I was the first countertenor to go through the vocal program at Indiana University, and those juries were just catfights. The comments were hilarious. People just did not know what to make of it. Some of the comments were incredibly perceptive in spite of themselves. I remember one rather well-known Wagnerian baritone saying, "I do not understand this use of the voix mixte in the middle, the chest voice below, and working with the falsetto and head voice at the top." I read his comments and I thought, "Well, it sounds as if you understand it perfectly well!" Another was totally into it and thought that I should be given an artist's diploma, while yet another person thought that this was not singing. It's very interesting to me. In America, I'm now one of the older guys. There's Jeff Gall, Derek Ragin, and me -- we already have careers. I hope I haven't left anybody out! Younger countertenors come to me, a lot of them in conservatory training, and they're training as opera singers now. I never had training as an opera singer. And these amazing voices are coming out of them, because they now have precedents, and the vision to do it. The potential of what a countertenor can do is so much greater now, because people's vision of it is greater. David Daniels, who's sort of the new countertenor on the block, has this big, beautiful voice, with a great top and everything.

R.S.B.: With this happening, do you think we're going to have a revival of people writing music for countertenors? Michael Nyman would seem to be an ideal candidate.

D.M.: It's happening already. Michael Nyman has written some beautiful pieces for James Bowman. Really quite interesting pieces, including one really arresting piece with four or five gambas that was written for James Bowman and Fretwork. There is actually quite a lot of stuff being written. Peter Maxwell Davies. Penderecki has written parts for countertenor. I've only done two projects where I've worked with a composer. But it's more exciting to be working with the real composer in situ. The farthest from it in a way is doing medieval music, where we have so little information. Basically you have a bunch of spots on a page, and you have to figure out how to organize them and make them into some kind of sense. Essentially, you're becoming a composer. Much more. What I find fun about working with a composer on a modern piece is that you are assisting them in the compositional process. It was ever thus. Handel wrote all of his roles with specific singers. And every time he did a new performance with a different singer, he altered the role. Without exception. When you start investigating, you realize that all these great people -- Mozart, Shakespeare -- were working with real people. They had what Stravinsky talks about in his Yale lectures as necessary: they already had parameters. And that's what allowed them to be so creative. You have to create within some kind of parameters. One of the reasons I think that today we are working more with re-creative and less with creative material is that people are in essence paralyzed by possibility. In the music that I do, you figure out in essence what the composer's intention is and what you're trying to convey, and then you rewrite it. It was ever thus. Singers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were composers -- they were all composers. The whole thing of ornamentation: it wasn't ornamentation to them, it was a necessary part of music-making.

R.S.B.: The way the break is in jazz.

D.M.: Exactly. People didn't think, "Oh, ornaments." They thought, "Oh, music."

R.S.B.: In that sense, recordings have helped freeze one interpretation of a given work in people's minds. When I was first into classical music as a teenager, there was one way of doing Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, and that was Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra on an RCA Victor LP. End of discussion.

D.M.: It's the same thing in pop music. There was an article in the New Yorker recently on popular art song, and it talked about how certain songs are associated with certain people now. If you're thinking of "Stardust," you're thinking of Ella's version of "Stardust." That's what it is. And everything else is a departure from that. And we have the same thing in classical music. There's a film in which I remember Montserat Caballé talking about one of her roles, and in her brain there was only one way of doing it: Maria Callas. I'm not sure that's a bad thing. It keeps you striving.

R.S.B.: A lot of the reviews I've read of your performances talk about the purity of the sound and things like that. What also struck me in listening to some of your recordings is that the listener can understand every single word you're singing.

D.M.: That's really my goal, and I'm always working to improve that. Singing is for me nothing more than enhanced speech. Essentially, if you're not communicating through the word, then you might as well do the Rachmaninov Vocalise. I find that, interestingly enough, that's also the quickest way to help people learn to sing. I'm not saying that you should just go out and belt. If people can understand the poem, then they have somewhere to go. But that's not the only answer for understanding how to sing. A composer, in setting a poem or text, is creating another world, an idea of that text. It's not the same thing. I'm very suspicious when I'm working with a director who's only looking at the libretto and not listening. The composer is already giving you a dramatic context for whatever you're saying or singing. Our duty, what makes us great as musicians who are sensitive people, is to get, as much as possible, inside the world of those composers. What was in their heads? What caused them to compose the melody this way instead of this way? It's the reason for the whole HIP -- historically informed performance -- practice. You find your own personal response to all that information, and then you leave it and you go perform it in what I think of as almost an altered state. Ideally, you're freed enough by enough contact with the material to really kind of go into an alpha state from our normal, everyday beta brain state. But you go beyond that. You incorporate the material. This is why people are so awestruck and moved by singers, I think. It's not only because you're using left and right brain, for the combination of words and music. It's also because the sound from certain voices can be so utterly moving that your skin crawls. It's much harder for an instrumentalist to create that effect. It's much harder to get into the body of the instrumentalist through the instrument. I find it easiest with wind instruments. Or the bow stroke. The less natural to the human body the instrument is, the harder I find it to go there. A pianist really has a difficult time. It's a feigned legato, essentially. But the great pianists do that. They do give us a visceral feeling. But it's so hard to achieve on the piano. You're trying to create something that sounds like caressing through pushing and hitting. When I'm working with a singer, I'm responding to how they use the language and whether they understand it or not. That's the first thing. My first question to every student who comes in the door for the first time is "What are you doing here, and what are you looking for?" Because if they can't identify that, they're not going to find anything. But then, essentially, you put your own body slightly aside and try to feel their body and feel where it's not accessed or not opened, and help them open that up. You then actually get into the thing of what is the actual physical capability of the singer.

R.S.B.: Did you really do one aria from a handstand?

D.M.: (wincing): Um hmm. Unfortunately, that caused me a lot of back problems. I had injured my back in '82 in a dance injury. I pulled some ribs off the spine. There have been touch and go things since then. Anyway, I was working with a great director. It was in Tamerlano. That was one of those situations I was referring to when you asked "What do you enjoy most?" Well, I was working with a great director, Jean-Louis Martinoty. He was very involved with the Paris Opera for a long time, before the Bastille. He was very cagey about how get to stuff out of you. He was also incredibly smart. He essentially got it out of me by saying "Tu as l'air très sportif" [You look very athletic]. And I said, "No, not really." And he said, "Oh, no, I can tell you're physically in shape." And I said that I used to dance. "Well, can you stand on your head?" "Well ... yeah." "Can you sing that way?" Well ... no." And then he said, "Well, can you stand on your hands?" And I said, "Well, yeah, for a second, if somebody will hold my feet." And so he got me up there, and then he said, "Now, can you sing that way? I can see that you could." I had a long time to figure it out the first year. But in the second year the guy that held my legs had had very little stage experience. We ended up having to rehearse it a lot, and I ended up hurting my back. It was one of those bittersweet experiences. It really was, the first year, a kind of coup de théâtre in every review, just as he knew it would be. Because it was the first entrance. I came out and went into this thing, and it really set the character up in an interesting way. Martinoty knew everything about Timur the Lame. After Napoleon and Alexander the Great, he ruled more of the world than anybody else ever has. He was really responsible for a lot of communication between east and west, but he did it in a rather grisly way. Anyway, Martinoty knew everything, and that's such a special experience. It's so exciting, working with people on that level. What I find is that they end up offering you so much more as a person. It's the whole thing of the greater the people are, the more generous and nice they are too. At least that's my experience so far. Of course, I never worked with Karajan!

R.S.B.: What are some of your forthcoming projects as a director?

D.M.: I'm doing Hildegard's Ordu virtutum at the National Cathedral. I'm doing an Italiana this year, and three Handel operas

R.S.B.: Tell me more about Hildegard von Bingen

D.M.: Hildegard has experienced this huge renaissance. She was this twelfth-century mystic nun, a German nun. She is so studied, and there are billions of records of her now. There are also many books of hers out. She was the first woman to really stand up to the church in a big way, and she lived into her eighties. She was a painter, a composer, she wrote this play [Ordo virtutum], which is a morality play set to music, tons of chants, tons of poems, treatises about every facet of spirituality. And she invented a lot of words, too. She invented the word greening, for example: veriditas. And all the time sort of carrying on for women's lib within the church.

R.S.B.: Do you as a director try to acquire the kind of breadth of knowledge that has impressed you with directors you have worked with?

D.M.: Yes. It really can bear some wonderful fruit. Dido, for instance. I studied The Aeneid like mad. Everyone knew The Aeneid. It was studied and known. Now, we have witches performing the roles that in The Aeneid were actually Venus, the mother of Aeneas, and Juno, who was the protector of Dido. Essentially, it was the two of them getting mixed up, and in the process sending Mercury, that screwed things up, and that made the whole problem for Dido and Aeneas. Witchcraft was incredibly popular and was just being discovered in seventeenth-century England as a sort of thing to be against. And so witches began to be inserted in all kinds of things -- plays such as Macbeth, for instance. Witches were very often played by men instead of by women. It is known that the Sorceress was played by tenors and not contraltos in many performances. You learn things such as the fact that Belinda, who is the confidantel of Dido, is actually the representation of Anna, who is the sister of Dido in The Aeneid and the actual confidante of Aeneas. The audience, and the composer, and the librettist, all would have been sitting there with all that information. They knew that information. And so w hat you have to do today is find a way of conveying what that information would have meant. You don't have to replicate it, but you have to somehow find a way to add that meaning to what's going on. Sometimes you just let the singers know this information that they might not know, so that they'll be able to carry it out with a certain conviction.

R.S.B.: To go all the way back to the beginning: how is it that you became a singer? Usually, it seems, you find a kid sitting at the piano, the parents decide to give him lessons, and the rest of the musical career opens up from there. Your mother basically got you singing boy soprano in the National Cathedral choir.

D.M.: My father used to say that I was vaccinated with a phonograph needle. Apparently I used to just sing all the time as a little child. I never stopped singing. I think they just did it out of self-defense to get me out of the house. I sang at some school function, and one of the other kids told his mother, who told my mother that she should get me into the National Cathedral, and that's how it happened. I guess through osmosis I cultivated a lot of musical skills through that work. We sang five days a week. We did four evensongs a week and morning services. It was a lot of music. And so when I went to Indiana, I don't know that I passed out of all my theory, but I didn't take any of those history classes. I just sort of knew the stuff. I never had to take sight singing or anything like that. My last year as a boy soprano I had a kind of vocal problem. I had a note at the top of the staff that didn't speak. I had some orchestral gigs that year, and they had to double me with another boy so that that note would happen. I remember having a lot of nerves my last year singing boy soprano, because my voice had essentially started to break, I think. But I could still go way up high. And we had always had countertenors in the choir, and so to me it was just normal that boys did that when their voice broke.