Music for a while, music for a wine… if it’s not already obvious, we can reveal that the title of this column is inspired by a short musical gem, a brief song by Henry Purcell (1659-1695), emblematic of the revival of early music, and connected to a man who was a pioneer in its resurgence, Alfred Deller. A whole generation of music lovers remembers the enigmatic title Music for a while and the peculiar word countertenor from the well-known recording released in 1979 by Harmonia Mundi, first on vinyl, and for a subsequent generation, on CD.

Wasn’t it the same era and the same parallel adventure
when some of us discovered wine…?

But what inspired this magical musical moment in Purcell?

“Music for a while,
all your cares beguiles…”

The aria was written as part of the incidental music for the 1692 revival of the tragedy Oedipus by poets John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee, which was written in 1679 and freely adapts Sophocles’ work. The era loved invocations of the dead and ghosts on stage, and with this music, Tiresias summoned the spirits of Laius and his companions to appear and reveal their murderer… A work that has since been forgotten, but not this aria, which speaks of music’s power to draw even the dead from the embrace of Hades.

After the composer’s untimely death, the piece was included in the collection of his best songs, Orpheus Britannicus, Volume II, 1702, which also kept its creator’s name from being obliterated by oblivion.

The performer and early music researcher Andrew Lawrence-King writes about this piece that, according to the theory of humorism (or the four bodily humors) of the Hippocratics, music corresponds to the element of blood: warm and moist. The sanguine type of person, whose temperament is dominated by this element, is optimistic and extroverted.

But doesn’t wine do the same?

Today, from the bold tradition of Alfred Deller, a whole generation of successful countertenors has grown up—male singers who, with their highly developed technique, can sing with a vocal range corresponding to that of a woman or a child. In opera, they can now also replace castrati, who were, of course, something entirely different.

Is the technique of countertenors, as established by Alfred Deller, truly a historically informed performance?

We now admit that no one truly knows what countertenors were like, and especially how exactly they sang.

However, even if countertenors are perhaps an imaginative invention of the mid-20th century, they historically served as a vehicle that led us to rediscover good music which, even if not forgotten, had been distorted by anachronistic practices. The voices of countertenors freed it from romantic bulk and helped us hear it with an acoustic austerity that requires cultivation of listening perception and understanding.

A journey quite parallel to what George Kokotos’ generation undertook in winemaking to discover and reinvent a new Greek wine and a new understanding of its enjoyment. Kokotos Estate is a wine that crystallizes this journey.

We first encountered “Music for a While” through Alfred Deller. We now recommend it again in a more recent interpretation featuring the Chilean “high tenor” (tenor altino) Rodrigo del Pozo and The Harp Consort, directed by Andrew Lawrence-King, from the CD MUSICK’S HAND-MAID Astrée Auvidis.

Fun fact: Ann Kokotou’s father was president of The Madrigal Society, a British association for the dissemination of early music.