Marcel Rosca was born in Bucharest into a musical family, with a father who was a bass and a mother a soprano. His musical training was in his native city, where he studied singing, piano and drama, while pursuing an active sporting career as a marksman, earning a silver medal in the 1968 Olympics. He began his career in the cinema with films of drama, operetta and musicals. He later turned his attention to opera, with an engagement at the Bucharest State Opera, where he undertook a number of important rôles and guest appearances in the Soviet Union, Poland and China. In 1985 Marcel Rosca moved to Germany, where an engagement at Gelsenkirchen and later at the Aalto-Opera in Essen. There he won great success in the title rôle of Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov and as Philip II in Verdi’s Don Carlo. He has appeared as Arkel in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande at the state opera in Berlin and as Mephistopheles in Gounod’s Faust in the Paris Omnisport at Bercy.