Anthony Roth Costanzo in Conversation with Wendy Heller—Countertenor

Anthony Roth Costanzo is joined in conversation with Wendy Heller, Princeton University's Scheide Professor of Music History and former Chair of the Music Department. Anthony's new book Countertenor is a lively and revelatory exploration of the history of the countertenor, by the Grammy Award-winning star of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten and “one of opera’s biggest stars” (The New York Times). The evening will include a performance by Anthony.
The sound of a countertenor—often described as ethereal and otherworldly—is both familiar and foreign. It is a high voice close to what we might expect from a female opera singer. Though we recognize the range from contemporary pop music and cartoons, from Michael Jackson to Mickey Mouse, experiencing its penetrating power unamplified in an opera house can be surprising, elemental, and profoundly moving.
In Countertenor, Anthony Roth Costanzo, one of the world’s leading opera singers, takes us on a journey through his life, his education in art, and the history of his extraordinary voice type. Countertenors, he tells us, have helped define contemporary opera for more than half a century, having inherited a repertoire originally written for castrated men in the baroque period. Part oddity, part divinity, the castrati were surgically altered before puberty. They are key to understanding the development of opera as a form, from its very origins to its expansion in the public sphere. The striking beauty and sheer otherness of the high male voice provide fertile ground for creative invention and innovation, evocatively challenging conventional notions of gender, sexuality, and identity.
With wit, humor, and an irrepressible Anthony Roth Costanzo offers fascinating insights into the contours of the countertenor and his own extraordinary artistic career as both an opera singer and a savvy producer and curator. The result is a lively and stirring account of an art form in flux, in constant reinvention, of the excitement of new, boundary-pushing work, and of the development and triumph of a remarkable, uninhibited voice.
The Grammy Award–winning countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo began performing professionally at the age of eleven and has since appeared in operas, concerts, recitals, and films and on Broadway. He has performed at many of the world’s leading opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera and the Opéra national de Paris, and at a wide variety of venues, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Versailles, the Hollywood Bowl, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In June 2024 he began his tenure as general director and president of Opera Philadelphia and is also the artistic director of SongStudio at Carnegie Hall. He earned his master’s degree and an honorary doctorate from the Manhattan School of Music and his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University.
This event is co-sponsored by Princeton University's Department of Music and Labyrinth Books.