Unique, talented and driven, Rosa commits to success
Many 21-year-old college students pursue marketing, business, advertising or even law. But not DePaul junior Marco Rivera Rosa. Rosa has only one dream — to be a professional opera singer.
“It is a dying art form, or, maybe not dying, but it’s not as blooming as it once was in, you know, the 1800s or whatever,” Rosa laughed energetically. “But I fell in love with opera music, or classical music I should say. I was always a singer ever since I was little.”
Rosa was born in Honduras and moved to the U.S. when he was a baby. Although Rosa’s parents couldn’t carry a tune, they loved listening to music, and Rosa remembers being surrounded by it while growing up in Hollywood, Florida.
“He’s my little singing angel,” Tatiana Rosa, Rosa’s mom, said with tears welling in her eyes. “He’s been singing since I could remember, and that’s all he ever wanted to do.”
Throughout his childhood, Rosa went to a performing arts middle school and high school. His ninth-grade choir teacher saw potential in Rosa, and told him to apply for the Master Chorale of South Florida, a highly selective choir in Florida that performs many classical and contemporary pieces.
“I applied and got in, in my freshman year, and it was filled with people who have either done an opera career, loved classical music and just doing it for funsies, people who were in college doing it, and it was so fun,” Rosa said. “I’m very spoiled in that I got to sing with a full orchestra and a full choir, like big choir, big orchestra, ever since I was in ninth grade.”
As he explains the different languages opera is typically sung in, Rosa gets up from his seat and walks to the classroom’s whiteboard, scribbling out the phonetic spellings of words in German, Italian, English and French.
“We learn what’s called the International Phonetic Alphabet. IPA, not the drink,” he clarifies.
Rosa is a countertenor, which he says is a rare male voice type. A countertenor is a male singer who can reach a range similar to a female contralto or mezzo-soprano, hitting higher registers typically associated with women.
“Normally, little boys will lose all their high notes because they’re growing into their teenage voice, which is all the lower notes,” Rosa says as he smashes the low notes on the piano. “But every once in a while, there will be a boy who can continue singing into his falsetto, or false voice, which, not the best name, but hey.”
Pursuing opera in the 21st century is a rigorous endeavor, not for the faint of heart. It entails long hours of singing, rehearsals and classes. For Rosa, classes run from around 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday. He is up at 8 a.m. every day and then goes to his first class, vocal literature, an hour later. He then practices every day in his classes, and on top of that, spends an additional three hours independently in the School of Music practice rooms.
His high school teacher, Edgar, referred to opera singing as “the Olympic level of singing” because of how much opera singers have to train their voices to be so loud they fill an entire concert hall, as opera is performed without microphones.
“I mean, we didn’t have mics in the 1700s,” Rosa laughs.
Viktoria Vizin, one of Rosa’s professors, attests to Rosa’s uniqueness and talent, emphasizing the effort he puts in as an “honors student with high expectations for himself.”
“He is going to go places, and I’m going to make sure that this is happening because he has everything to have a career,” Vizin said.
Despite the occasional feelings of burnout, Rosa is still determined. His first professional gig in ninth grade, where he performed the male soprano solo, was the moment he fell in love with singing. From then on, he knew nothing else could bring him the happiness and fulfillment of singing on stages for the rest of his life.
“I’ll stop singing for a moment and I’m like, ‘No, this is what I want to do,’” Rosa said. “I want to go on stage and sing Che Faro and I want to sing the Habanera, I want to sing all these things. I want to sing.”
His friend, Gemma Hertz, said he can be ambitious to a fault sometimes, and worries he pushes himself too hard.
“Last summer, he did a pretty intensive opera program. I think he was the only undergraduate student, and the rest were grad school people, and we were talking about him feeling a little insecure and kind of behind,” Hertz said. “I completely empathize with it, but I also think like, you’re maybe five, four years younger than all these people and you’re still in this program. So I think that’s a testament to how talented he truly is.”
Hertz and Rosa get along really well. They go to Roscoe’s Tavern together, book stores and thrift stores. At a Village Discount, she remembers Rosa pulling out clothes for her to try on, taking over the shopping for both of them.
“We’re still having fun and like going on all the multiple levels and talking until the store shuts down,” Hertz said.
Rosa walks into the classroom with his Keith Haring sweater and red jacket. His funky, gold earrings catch the light through the windowsill. He steps with exuberance, always performing for an audience, even when there is only one other person in the room. Rosa sees clothing as his armor.
“I’m taking an LGBTQ history class, and there’s a quote that says, ‘Glamour is resistance, glamour is power,’” Rosa said. “And I have never related to that so much because no matter what you say or what you do, my hard work and the way that I dress, you can’t talk s—t about.”
One thing Rosa wishes for in opera is for more queer stories to be told on stage. When Rosa takes the stage, he’s always looking for queer opera pieces, finding ways to infuse them with his identity as a gay man. Take his recital — for instance — he performed cabaret songs by William Bolcom, originally written for Bolcom’s soprano wife. In those songs, the wife sings about a male lover, but Rosa doesn’t change a word. Instead, he embraces the lyrics as they are, making them his own through the emotion he brings to the performance, letting the music fulfill its original purpose.
Despite the conservative, stuffy stereotype about opera music, Rosa found that there were a lot of LGBTQ+ people in operatic spaces — from the conductors to the performers to the stage managers. His own opera teacher in high school was gay, as well as her male singing partner.
Even within 18th-century opera music, all of the female parts were sung and performed by young boys, dressed like women. Castrati was the Italian word for them, as a common practice was castrating these boys so they would always be able to sing higher.
“I was just scrolling on Instagram reels because TikTok got too big, and there was this one girl who was like at a drag show and there was a drag queen singing opera. And she was like, ‘Oh my God, how dare they do this to opera? It’s such a’ blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” Rosa said. “And I typed in there I said, ‘Girl, I need you to search up castrati.’”
Rosa never makes himself smaller to accommodate others’ ignorance and insecurities. As an opera singer, his boldness and flamboyance has served as an advantage to getting noticed. Rosa stresses that the queer community has worked extremely hard to have the right to take up space, so “why not use that right while we have it?”
“I work too hard to ever feel ashamed of what I do, or what I am.”
Header photo by Gia Clarke
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