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No Oozy Wash. At 28, against almost everyone's advice, Deller gave up his promising career in the furniture business to sing with the Canterbury Cathedral choir. His salary as a choir singer was only $600 a year, and he supplemented his income by working as a farm hand for 90 an hour, pedaling his bicycle twelve miles a day to and from work. Then in 1943, Composer Michael Tippett, in search of a lead voice for a series of Purcell concerts, auditioned Deller. "In that one moment," recalls Tippett, "the centuries rolled back. Deller's voice is like no other sound in music, and no other sound is so intrinsically musical." His debut was a grand success, and at 31 he found himself a one-man renaissance hailed by London critics as responsible for "the rebirth of the countertenor."
The renaissance so far has produced only some half a dozen other professional countertenors, including, most notably, the U.S.'s Russell Oberlin. To help perpetuate the species, Deller is grooming his older son Mark, 27, to assume his mantle: "His voice is exactly like mine—uncannily so." The resurgence of baroque music, Deller thinks, is led by the younger generation, who "have chosen to sidestep the romantics. They no longer want their ears invaded by the oozy wash of sound. They prefer instead to hear counter point, to hear the architecture of the music. It is a restatement of a fundamental truth that speaks across the centuries." And somehow it speaks most truly in the lofty blue-yonder voice of the countertenor.