Caracas. When he hears his own voice notes from WhatsApp or the message on his answering machine, he asks himself: “Do you really speak like that?” When he listens to it in the studio in the months he is recording his second album, he frowns at that too Face. It has the advantage that you can’t hear it when singing live without a microphone. But Samuel Mariño (Caracas, 29 years old), who has already given eleven interviews to media around the world this week, has completed two nine-month opera seasons without stopping singing. Haa stood out for his high tones and facial expressions as a male soprano who spent school breaks hidden in the living room and stopped going to class to avoid the beatings and ridicule of his classmates.
“What I do is not exactly who I am,” reflects Mariño in a video call from Berlin this Friday. You report to EL PAÍS and are about to embark on your first week of vacation in two years. “Voice always has something to do with identity. But am I my singing voice? Yes and no. I have two Samuel Mariño, one who sings and performs opera and makes up 80% of my life; and another Samuel, who makes up the 20%, who likes to do simple things, stays at home in his pajamas all day, goes to the supermarket, cleans, walks the dog, loves nature and doesn’t like cities.”
Mariño has learned to listen to himself in the third person. A deformation of those years in which his voice created a conflict from which he is still healing. “My voice is something I carry with me every day. When I was in school, they made fun of not only my voice but also my personality. And they still do it. I have colleagues at the opera who joke about my tone. It’s something I’ve come to accept and love. But it wasn’t easy to get to the point where you love your voice and yourself.”
This conflict led his parents to take him to the doctor at the age of 13 to undergo surgery to masculinize his voice. No specialist could tell him that he would be able to sing again after the operation. “I was between this extreme solution and chalequeo, as they call bullying in Venezuela. I kept it a secret because it made me sad. “My mom found out when I said it in one of the interviews I did over the years.”
Samuel Mariño in New York. Courtesy of SAMUEL MARIÑO
Mariño is a middle-class man from Caracas, the son of university professor parents. He studied piano and singing at the Simón Bolívar Conservatory; He was part of the white choir Schola Cantorum from Venezuela; While dancing ballet, she took lyric singing classes. At home, her voice and her sexual orientation were never rejected. He says that, forced by his mother and determined to make the most of his “special voice,” he ended up in the opera. “The one who motivated me to sing was my mother, who saw me singing happily. She was the one who recognized it. When you are a child and feel free, you don’t realize what freedom is.”
With more than 70,000 followers on Instagram, Marino takes young people to hear opera. “I’m an opera singer, but I’m completely different than what people think an opera singer is. There is resistance, but in the end he gives in because I learn a lot, I’m well prepared, I put on a show, I change my clothes I don’t know how often, and thanks to social networks there are a lot of young people who too come to my concerts.
Mariño doesn’t know how to answer the question of whether there are still male and female voices, since they are still considered lyrical singers. In the 18th century, some men had their testicles removed to sharpen their voices and be able to play female roles. They were the castrati. “If you ask me my gender, I answer that I consider myself a man, but if you want to call me a woman, that’s fine. I don’t have a gender problem. I am Samuel Mariño, I am a soprano and sometimes I sing in the tenor voice.”
Mariño is still asked if he is neutered. “One day I will say in an interview that I am castrated, that I come from Venezuela, that we all belong to an indigenous tribe that sings opera,” he ironically. “There are really a lot of people who ask that. But as Einstein said: “We are all ignorant, but we do not all know the same things.” Mariño sees himself as an advocate for diversity. “It doesn’t matter if you’re thin, fat, short, dark, black, white, gay, straight or whatever. “It’s not what you are, but the message you have to convey,” he says.
Ten years ago Mariño came to Europe with his voice. A Venezuelan professor who taught at the Sorbonne once heard him in Caracas and got him an audition at the National Conservatory in Paris. The next month, he and his mother sold cakes and lunches to raise money for the ticket to France and the 1,000 euros with which he arrived as a student. When I remember those early days, he says that it was difficult for him to “get into the box.”
Samuel Mariño in Poland. Courtesy of SAMUEL MARIÑO
In France they tried to have him sing as a countertenor, the highest male voice, but a tone lower than he could reach. After studying with the soprano Barbara Bonney, he specialized in castrato roles.
At school they called Mariño “faggot” to denigrate him, among other things. Once the season of insults at school is over, they insult him in far-fetched ways on the big stages. “Because I’m different, they start criticizing me when a single note goes wrong,” he says. However, journalistic reviews often say that he “strives for heights” or that his “coloraturas are impressively flexible”. Mariño says he “survived” a tough youth. “Learning to love myself as I am saved, and that is a very long process.”
Mariño’s career is just around the corner. For the rest of this year he will be in Poland, Puerto Rico and Austria. Next year he will be in Spain for the first time and already has invitations from Colombia, Brazil and could repeat in 2024 at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. “I’ve sung on six continents, including Africa, but I haven’t been invited to Venezuela yet,” he says with a laugh.
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