“Don't you know that the tenor is a being of a different kind; that he has power over the life and death of the works he sings, power over the composers as well? ”The worried question can be found in the“ Sixth Conversation in the Orchestra ”- referred to as“ Étude astronomique ”- by Hector Berlioz . In the world premiere of his opera “Benvenuto Cellini” in 1838, he experienced a being “who was not of this world, but a world in itself”. It was Gilbert-Louis Duprez who a year earlier had triggered a seismic shock in the realm of song: The high C sung with the chest voice became the unique selling point of the modern tenoral triumphant.

Michael Spyres is one of the outstanding interpreters of Berlioz 'Cellini today, who on his recently released CD introduces himself as a hermaphrodite, as "BariTenor" (Warner). He opens his program with the aria “Fuor del mar” from Mozart's “Idomeneo”, in which Mozart researchers doubted “that any tenor could sing the original version” (as stated in the notes on the performance practice of the New Mozart Edition) . If you trust his CD, Spyres will dispel these doubts wherever he sings the title role of "Idomeneo", as recently at the autumn festival in Baden-Baden.

With the storm aria “Fuor del mar”, in which the roar of the sea is a parable for the torments in the hero's soul, Mozart had already overwhelmed the singer of the premiere: the tenor Anton Raaff. “The man is old,” wrote Mozart pityingly to his father, “he could no longer show himself in an aria like the same dermal”. The fact that he took pity on the 67-year-old singer and eliminated the highest hurdles was assessed by a later editor as “a happy and timely change” (Bernhard Paumgartner said in the foreword to the piano reduction in 1955). Most of the singers of our time were happy about this, including Pavarotti and Domingo, who contented themselves with the simplified version (12b in the New Mozart Edition). Stuart Burrows and Peter Schreier have shown that the first version (No. 12 a) can be mastered,but without being overwhelming. Spyres succeeds in generating dramatic sparks from the virtuoso formulas - technically flawless in the formation of the endless sixteenth notes on the word "minacciar" and the final crescendo trill.

But why "Baritenor"? Spyres resolves the contradiction in this suitcase word, composed of baritone and tenor. He sings eighteen arias, which were written for high tenors (typus contraltino), common tenors, for high baritones and normal baritones, with astonishing versatility and sovereignty. About the genealogy: It was initially the cult of the castrati and a hundred years later that of the tenors of the Romantic period that darkened the fame of tenors of the baroque opera. John Beard, Annibale Pio Fabri, Angelo Amorevoli or Francesco Borosini (and many others) were quite famous as singers of the music of Handel, Vivaldi, Scarlatti or Vinci. However, they were forgotten when Baroque opera disappeared from the repertoire for two centuries; but those singers would have been known again long agoif they had found revenants for their arias like the countertenors for the castrati.