The Sopranist
A while ago I was listening to a radio broadcast of a recording from last year’s Wexford Festival Opera. The Opera in question was Handel’s Deidamia. In fact you can see a video of the whole performance here. Like most baroque operas, the plot of Deidamia is rather complex but it is drawn directly from familiar Greek legend, and features Achilles and Ulysses. The former spends much of the opera dressed in women’s clothing because his father Peleus doesn’t want him dragged off to fight in the Trojan War and has hidden him on the island of Skyros among the daughters of his friend Lycomedes. Eventually Ulysses lands on Skyros to try to persuade Achilles to lead his army, but the disguise is so good that he fails to identify him. He does however develop a bit of a crush on the hot young girl Pyrrha, who is actually Achilles in drag…
I won’t give any more spoilers because the Opera Deidamia is not really the point of this post, which is that the part of Pyrrha is written for a soprano. It’s not unusual in Handel’s operas for a male part to be sung by a woman – as indeed this part was when it was first performed in London in January 1741 or a castrato. The practice of castrating boys to prevent their voices breaking has long been discontinued, thankfully, so I assumed that the voice I had been listening to was that of a female singer. Then, in the interval, I learnt that this part was actually sung by a man, Bruno de Sá. Here he is in a short clip from that production.
Bruno de Sá is a sopranist, a man whose modal voice is in the soprano register, i.e. he sings that high without using falsetto. I’ve seen and heard quite a few operas in my time but I didn’t realise that there was such a thing as a sopranist. You live and learn!
I did a bit of searching on the interwebs and found the following clip which shows another sopranist, Samuel Mariño, having fun in a duet with an oboist at a concert in Versailles:
Samuel Mariño is from Venezuela. He is gay and was bullied at school when he was young for that, and for the fact that his voice didn’t break when he reached adolescence. He sought medical advice to see if he could have surgery to lower his voice, but the doctor instead suggested he embark on a career as an opera singer. And that’s what he did. Don’t be fooled by the fun he is having in that clip; he’s not some sort of novely act, he’s a very serious vocal artist.
I find his story very inspiring because of his determination to follow his own path and I love the above clip because it is so joyful. It warms this old gay’s heart to see someone daring to be different and making such a success of it.
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