SING HIGH, SING LOW, SING OUT

Two openly gay opera talents star in Julius Caesar

by D.L. Groover

Houston Grand Opera has opened its season with impressive royal fireworks: George Frederick Handel’s baroque masterpiece, Julius Caesar. In a new production (through November 16), this 1724 sparkler stars one of the opera world’s most sought-after, brightest singers, countertenor deluxe David Daniels as Caesar, as well as up-and-coming HGO Studio alumnus Joshua Winograde, who booms forth as General Achillas.

Daniels, the world’s reigning countertenor, blazes at the peak of his career, while Winograde, fresh out of HGO’s apprenticeship, is just beginning his. Both are openly gay and equally forthcoming.

“Opera, as are all performing arts, tends to be a very accepting and nonjudgmental field,” Winograde said in a recent phone interview. “I don’t really know why that is, but it must have something to do with choice. For people to have chosen to spend their lives in performing arts, it kind of means they’re already an open-minded person, they’re already tolerant and interested in things of an abstract and artistic nature. I know a huge amount of successful working gay singers. It’s nowhere near half, but it’s probably more than in banking. It’s a very open community. Brady’s always around and involved.”

Brady is Bradon McDonald, Winograde’s partner of nine years and a dancer with the Mark Morris Dance Group. The two met as students at the Juilliard School.

“Although I’m not sure because I have no affiliation with Wall Street at all, but if I were a Wall Street banker, I would imagine that Brady might be somewhat more of a stranger to my professional life. But in opera, he’s involved completely as I am in his as a dancer.”

Although Daniels realized his sexual orientation in high school, it wasn’t until college that he talked openly about it to others. Public acknowledgment happened by accident.

“The New Yorker was doing a piece on me in 1997,” Daniels recalled by phone. “The guy followed me around to two or three different engagements, came to my home. It was really an in-depth interview. He wanted to talk about my private life, the first time anybody had asked me about that. I kind of freaked a little bit. But then I thought, I had been with John 11 years, and I wasn’t going to pretend that that’s not an important part of my life.”

Daniel’s partner, John Touchton, is music director at Christ Congregational Church in Silver Springs, Maryland, as well as choral director at the prestigious Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. (and a San Antonio native).

“We work too hard and long, and had too good a time and too much suffering to pretend it doesn’t exist. That’s when I started to make a real effort to be open. Because I’m a classical artist, I’m limited in the audience I can reach, but I have some sort of stature that I can hopefully be a role model in some ways. Not so much a role model, but maybe an example.”

Daniels continued: “I have a little story I want to share with you. A young boy in South Carolina was in a performing-arts high school where a friend of mine was his professor. I found out this boy had tried to commit suicide twice and that it was about being gay. He came from a very fundamentalist background. I did a recital in Atlanta, which was one of my first times getting down into the South singing, and my friend brought all his students there to see me perform. He had also brought all the magazines to the school about me talking about being gay. The boy told his teacher that to see me perform in Atlanta was so inspirational—to see somebody successful, open, honest, and happy who was homosexual. He said it really helped him get through it all. He’s in college now and very much into the young gay movement. I thought, Wow, if that’s not a reason to be open and honest and real about this, there’s not any. It made a huge impression on me.”

Daniels, who is making his Houston debut in Julius Caesar, does indeed have the stature. He is one out of a handful of singers who has revived an entire repertory of neglected masterworks from baroque opera. These roles were originally performed by those most bizarre, sad, but wildly successful vocalists ever—the castrati, emasculated boy sopranos who would, after their illegal operation, retain a high, angelic sound throughout their entire career, their stratospheric vocal ornamentations and amazing breath control propelled by manly lungs within barrel chests.

Out of thousands of poor children whose parents saw unlimited fame for their offspring and forced the operation upon them, the lucky few to make a career in the early 1700s were the pop celebrities of the age. Some were gay, but most were not. A few retired with dukedoms, villas, or knighthoods, after scandalous affairs that would rival those of any contemporary rock star. It’s a rich repertory to be mined: Albinoni, Scarlotti, Hasse, Orlandini, Giacomelli, Graun, and Handel, above all.

“I’m looking forward to this production,” said a happy Daniels. “It’s gonna be fun. It’ll be my sixth Caesar, actually, and being a brand-new production with James Robinson, it just adds excitement. It’s a great opera, one of many he wrote. It just happens to be his most popular and familiar. Unfortunately, like most Americans and operagoers, I knew The Messiah, and only the Christmas portion and the ‘Hallelujah Chorus,’ and not much more. Not until I became a countertenor did I start to find all these unbelievable masterpieces.”

In September, Winograde made his New York City Opera debut in another Handel work, Alcina. “For people who think Julius Caesar was written a few hundred too many years ago for them to care, or that’s it’s antiquated, or aren’t expecting a major emotional soap opera, they’re wrong. All the heightened drama that has really become associated with later opera like Verdi and Puccini exists in Handel.”

“Many of his operas are accessible,” Daniels said. “You look at Partenope that we did in Chicago last June. Who in the world has heard of that? But it was a huge hit. We sold out 10 performances. It’s a great, great drama. It’s what Handel is so amazing at doing—the drama. A drama that can be put into modern times and still be as powerful as it was then.”

As Daniels prefers, the HGO production is updated.

“I feel constricted in tons of costume, wigs, makeup, and laurel wreaths. I can bring more human quality to the character, and it’s a little easier for me to relate to. When James [Robinson] asked me if there was anything I really wanted to stay away from, I said, Two things: Don’t dress me in white and don’t give me armor.

“I’m entering the stage in a tank!”

D.L. Groover, chief arts contributor for this magazine, is author of Skeletons from the Opera Closet (Moyer Bell Ltd.).

If you have any comments about this article, please email them to letters@outsmartmagazine.com.