Michael Maniaci, male soprano: The man with the 300-year-old voice

The man with the 300-year-old voice

Michael Maniaci’s unique soprano voice gives him the air of an antique castrato

We are endlessly fascinated by the high male voice, from Jimmy Somerville to Michael Chance, from Pavarotti to Steve Tyler. But the young American singer Michael Maniaci is something else again: a real-life male soprano. “I don’t sound like a counter-tenor or a woman” he explains. “It’s quite unique.”

He does not sing falsetto, nor does he have a baritone register, as counter-tenors do. On the other hand, he is whole and male (he obviously shaves; he assures me he is fertile). It is just that some quirk in his development led to all the appurtenances of puberty appearing except one – his larynx did not grow along with the rest of him. As a consequence, his voice never broke.

Next week the 31-year-old singer appears on stage for the first time in Britain in Tim Albery’s production for Opera North of The Fortunes of King Croesus. It is the first performance here of this rare Baroque opera by Reinhard Keiser, who was a mentor to the young Handel. It had its premiere in Hamburg in 1711. Maniaci plays Atis, Croesus’s son, a role that would originally have been sung by a castrato. He may be the only man on the planet who can sing this role at pitch, which goes up to a B natural, two octaves above middle C.

Maniaci’s speaking voice is light and high, but, because he is an adult with a stocky frame, it is oddly resonant, like a rather fruity maiden aunt. His singing voice probably comes close to those castrati voices of long ago – although with only one antique recording available we can only really guess.

Maniaci has always sung. His father is a Baptist minister, so choir was more or less obligatory. And he fell in love with musical theatre when his parents took him to see Les Misérables when he was 14. But you can well imagine that, when this developmental quirk became apparent in those tricky teenage years, it was not necessarily an unalloyed joy for the young Michael

“People would say: ‘Oh how sweet, you’re just a late bloomer’,” he recalls wryly. “I had to tell them that everything else had bloomed.” Others tried to persuade him that he needed to “become a man”. Fortunately, a woman in his church choir, Lisa Kay Morton, knew enough to save him from such do-gooders. With her guidance he entered formal musical education, first in Cincinnati and then at the Juilliard in New York

But the challenges were far from over. “It’s the good and the bad of being so unusual,” he acknowledges. “Having this weird voice made everyone aware of me quite early. I was winning a lot of competitions, but I didn’t fit. I had to continue growing and maturing but I was getting much more attention than most people at that age would have to be concerned with. I’ve been under the microscope for a long time.

Just finding stuff to sing was bad enough. Baroque opera is a lot bigger than it used to be but it is still rarely part of the repertoire of the big companies, where a young singer might learn his or her craft. At one point he was even cast as Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro, a “breeches” part written for a woman dressed as a man, after the grisly castrati craze had come to an end. As Maniaci recalls: “It gave those scenes alone with the Countess real energy and real bite. They became very dark and interesting”

It was the instinctively radical Christopher Alden who directed that Figaro in Pittsburgh. Other directors were more confused than enthused. When Maniaci auditioned for René Jacobs in Berlin a few years ago, the great counter-tenor turned conductor could scarcely believe his ears. Eventually, unable to fault Maniaci’s musicianship or vocal technique, he was reduced to complaining that his choice of ornamentation was too American

Now, though, with the work beginning to roll in, Maniaci seems happy with his gift. “I have to embrace it. To not embrace it would be silly. I am what I am. I know this was what I was meant to be doing.”

He can even make jokes about it. “I feel castrated!” he says, describing his punishing schedule this year, which started in January at La Fenice in Venice, where he jumped into a role he did not know (in Meyerbeer’s Il crociato in Egitto) at two weeks’ notice, and has not stopped since. The source of his equanimity may be found in his choice of relaxation after Croesus, when he finally has a break in his schedule. He is going back home to his family in Ohio, where he will be warmly welcomed, just the way he is.