14 hours ago
Diva of dualities: Maria Seiren sings opera and noh in both a female and male voice
When opera singer Maria Seiren opens her mouth, you're never sure which voice you will hear. One moment she is singing an aria in a high, warbling soprano. The next, she switches to a booming tenor, effortlessly leaping back and forth in a duet with herself.
The first-ever winner of talent show competition 'Japan's Got Talent' dazzles both with her ambivoce (Seiren's term for dual male and female singing voice) and her elaborate costumes and headdresses, designed by Mieko Ueda. Even offstage she rocks a flamboyant floral blazer and elegant long dark hair when we meet on the ground floor of the offices of MondoParallelo, her own opera production company.
Seiren rejects rigid definitions and embraces experimentation. She masterfully mixes styles such as classical opera and traditional noh theater, high art and entertainment, as she blends the masculine with the feminine — in spite of, or maybe precisely because, she has had difficulties with gender roles from a young age.
'I never really cared about gender,' Seiren says. 'I never fully grasped the concept that men and women had to be one way or the other.
'My first consciousness of being transgender was the color of the randoseru (school backpack). Black randoseru is for boys, red randoseru for girls, but I wouldn't follow those rules. My father was always strict about gender roles ... he gave me a hard time. But my spirit wasn't broken. I was a fighter.'
Thanks in part to her mother, who sang traditional songs to her as a child, Seiren developed a deep love for music and trained herself to maintain her higher vocal range through puberty. She had not, however, seriously considered entering music as a career until designer Junko Koshino invited her to sing at one of her fashion shows in 2013. Inspired by one of her icons, pop-opera queen Sarah Brightman, Seiren covered 'Time to Say Goodbye' for the event using her soprano and tenor voice switch. To her surprise, a YouTube video of the performance hit 15 million views.
'That was the first time I experienced singing as a professional in front of a lot of people,' Seiren says. 'Up until then I was just singing for fun. That experience opened my eyes to a lot of other possibilities — what if singing was my calling?'
Maria Seiren has struggled with the rigidity of gender norms since childhood, but also didn't want to be stereotyped as the queer character on TV. She founded her own production company to ensure creative experimentation and freedom. |
Yutaka Mori © 2025 Mondo Parallelo Inc.
Looking back, Seiren says 2013 was a great year as it also kickstarted her close business partnership with Fumiaki Uemura, now general director of MondoParallelo. An advertising agency director, Uemura had no professional background in music when they met, but he knew many people in the world of entertainment and he had ideas on how Seiren could boost her budding career and stand out in the industry. He became her mentor, friend and, ultimately, her adoptive father.
'Back then, I was getting a lot of offers from TV to play the onee talent role, the comedic queer character. Those roles made me uncomfortable, so I turned the offers down,' Seiren says. '(Uemura) saw he needed to protect me from people who would want to exploit my talent and queerness. So he decided to legally adopt me.'
While Seiren never attended music school, she began intensely training her operatic vocals under the guidance of Takehiro Shida , as well as her Italian pronunciation and mouth shape under vocal coach Francesca Miscio.
When asked which of her two voices feels more authentically her own, Seiren says, 'They both feel true to me.'
She differentiates the energy that she puts into vocal techniques.
'For soprano, I focus on the contraction in the upper area of my head and think of echo, vibration and softness,' she explains. 'When it comes to the tenor, I think of power, strength, intense energy and vibrations that reach the ground. Both ranges exist very naturally to me; switching comes naturally. Sometimes I don't even notice I've shifted from one to the other.'
While Seiren's aim has always been limitless creativity, fusing opera and noh theater in particular was Uemura's idea, as part of his master plan to enhance Seiren's uniqueness in the highly competitive music industry.
Initially, Seiren was unimpressed by the notoriously slow and rigid noh theater.
'It was actually emotionally painful when I first had to sit through it,' she confides, recalling her first exposure to noh in 2013. 'At the same time, I remember going to see another play called 'Toru'. After the play ended, I heard many people saying, 'Wow, the moon was so beautiful!' and I was like, 'What moon? There was no moon!''
Noh is a practice in minimalism: minimal movement, expression and set design. The true art of an experienced noh performer is igniting the audience's imagination with just a few gestures and pantomimes, such as gazing at an imaginary moon reflected in an imaginary bucket of water.
Seiren knew the magic of noh had finally captured her after seeing a play called 'Kanawa.' During one scene when a namanari (half-demon) woman suddenly droops her head and curses, Seiren thought she saw a huge storm whirling behind her.
'I could see the storm that no one else could see!,' she says.
Soon after, Seiren began training in noh dancing and acting with actor and teacher Akio Awaya and eventually entered the Kita-ryu School , one of the five branches of noh, which specializes in dynamic movement.
Noh, she found, was more about silence and standing still than moving and singing. Profound sadness could be shown by wiping a single tear; there is a depth of art and emotion Seiren says she now always strives to bring out in her opera and noh collaborations. At the same time, she says the vocal techniques of opera and noh are not dissimilar.
MondoParallelo's latest show, 'Keisei Aoshigure Torimono Emaki' (The Mystery of the Summer Rain Courtesan), combined classical opera, rock, disco, old-timey kayōkyoku pop ballads and enka folk songs. |
Tetsuo Isowaki © 2025 Mondo Parallelo Inc.
'The biggest difference with singing is in opera you lift your face to project your voice and resonate with the stone ceiling. In noh, you lower your face to resonate your voice with the wooden floor of the stage,' she says.
Seiren's goal in learning the history and traditional practices of noh is to more effectively mix the art form with other types of performance and to create something new instead of simply showcasing two things together on the same stage.
'In my show, the singing aspect is mostly opera and the movement and expression of my body is noh,' Seiren says. 'It's like taking two eggs, cracking them and mixing them together!'
MondoParallelo's latest show, 'Keisei Aoshigure Torimono Emaki' (The Mystery of the Summer Rain Courtesan), was a particularly wild omelet, whipping together classical opera, rock, disco, old-timey kayōkyoku pop ballads and enka folk songs. A particularly illustrative scene: The cast of courtesans, in elaborate noh kimono and front-facing obi knots signifying their occupation, assume position in slow noh-step, then break out into disco hit 'She Works Hard for the Money' by Donna Summer.
The show was the eighth production of noh and opera by MondoParallelo, the first being 'Otohana no Inori' (Prayer of the Song Flower) in 2020. The next opera-noh play, 'Yumekikyo' (The Bellflower of Dreams), where Seiren plays the historical figure Gracia Hosogawa, daughter of samurai general Mitsuhide Akechi, will premier in October at the Umewaka Noh Theater Hall . Seiren says the production will lean more heavily toward noh and there will be more professional noh actors joining the cast.
'Japan is usually not enthusiastic about art like opera and noh because they're considered boring. I was glad my voice could reach so many people,' says Seiren.
Seiren has released four albums, including the diva's long-awaited 10th anniversary collection 'One More Time' on June 18.
Though her career has spanned over a decade, the past two years have been the start of an exciting era for the opera diva: Seiren's participation in Japan's first ever 'Japan's Got Talent' in 2023, her victory and, a year later, her preliminary performance on 'America's Got Talent: Fantasy League' brought her fame not only throughout Japan, but worldwide.
Moving forward, she hopes to continue to grow with her company. Most of all, however, Seiren intends to keep living and performing true to who she is.
'Especially for transgender kids,' she says. 'I want to encourage them to pursue their own dreams. I want them to see that anything is possible.'
For more information, visit
