Alfred Deller

Alfred Deller was born in Margate, Kent, in May 1912 and trained as a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral. He worked through his twenties as a lay clerk in the choir of Canterbury Cathedral — where Michael Tippett heard him sing in 1943 — and Tippett’s championship took him into the wider concert circuit. The recital programme they gave together at Morley College in London in 1944 effectively introduced the modern countertenor voice to the British concert public.

His career across the next three decades was singularly important for the revival of early music. He sang the Purcell and Dowland repertoire that had been lost to the post-Romantic concert hall, and his interpretations of the Bach cantatas, the Handel oratorios, and the Renaissance and Baroque solo vocal literature reintroduced a body of music that had become specialist territory. He founded the Deller Consort in 1948 with Walter Bergmann, which under his direction recorded extensively across the early-music canon for Vanguard, EMI and Harmonia Mundi. Britten composed the role of Oberon in *A Midsummer Night’s Dream* (1960) with his voice in mind — the first major countertenor opera role written in the twentieth century.

Deller was appointed CBE in 1970. He died in Bologna in July 1979 while touring. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of his early-music and Britten work.