ABSTRACT
One afternoon when I was eleven or so, my father came home from work with a sheepish look on his face and a record in a paper bag under his arm. Now, that wasn’t an uncommon happening: Papa might wear the same fashion in shirts and trousers for years on end, much to Maman’s wry despair, but the shelves at our place groaned with books, bought both new and secondhand, and our record cabinet in the living room was stuffed to bursting with recordings of music from all over the world, and all times. But this particular record was to have a deep resonance in my life, for it marked the first time I ever met the work of the man who was to have one of the deepest influences on my creative life. I can still see it now: dark green, elegant, with a reproduction of an Elizabethan miniature of a gentleman on its cover, it was called Shakespeare Songs and Consort Music: songs from the plays, performed by the great English singer, Alfred Deller (1912–1979), who single-handedly revived the lost, exquisite art of the counter-tenor, so popular in Shakespeare’s day.
