Cinderella & Company: Backstage at the Opera with Cecilia Bartoli by Manuela Hoelterhoff

A wickedly funny look at opera today--the feuds and deals, maestros and managers, divine voices and outsized egos--and a portrait of the opera world's newest superstar at a formative point in her life and career. In Cinderella & Company, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Manuela Hoelterhoff takes us on a two-year trip on the circuit with Cecilia Bartoli, the young mezzo-soprano who has captured an adoring public around the world. Rossini's Cenerentola is Bartoli's signature role, and Cinderella & Company tells the fairy-tale story of her life, which started on a modest street in Rome where the Fiat was the coach of choice. The lucky break, the meteoric rise, the starlit nights and nail-chewing days are all part of a narrative that shows Bartoli rehearsing, playing, traveling, eating, and charming us with her vivacity and dazzling virtuosity. Along the way, Hoelterhoff gives us an unusually vivid, behind-the-scenes look at the opera world. The first stop is Houston, where Bartoli brightens a droopy Cenerentola production; later scenes follow her to Disney World and to the Metropolitan Opera, where a fidgety cast awaits the flight-phobic mezzo's arrival for Mozart's Cosi fan tutte. Traveling to Santa Fe, Paris, Rome, Venice, and London, Hoelterhoff drops in on opening nights and boardroom meetings, talks to managers and agents, describes where the money comes from, and survives one of the longest galas in history. Here too are tantalizing glimpses of divinities large and small: Kathleen Battle's famously chilly limousine ride; Plcido Domingo flying through three time zones to step into the boots of an ailing Otello; Luciano Pavarotti aiming for high C in his twilight years. And we meet the present players in Bartoli's world: Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu, a.k.a. the Love Couple; Jane Eaglen, the Wagnerian web potato monitoring her cyberspace fan mail; the appealing soprano Renée Fleming, finally on the brink of stardom. At once informed and accessible, Cinderella & Company brings the world of grand opera into sharp focus--right up to the last glimpse of Cecilia Bartoli waving triumphantly from Cinderella's wedding cake. Editorial Reviews The author defines her style at the beginning of this bright, gossipy book about one of opera's youngest superstars. Manuela Hoelterhoff starts off by discussing Rossini's Cinderella opera, La Cenerentola, which she then uses as a recurring metaphor throughout the book. Her description is accurate when she calls it music that dances, whispers, charms and dazzles from beginning to end. But if one substitutes prose for music in that quote, she might well be writing about Cinderella & Company. Hoelterhoff's style is deliciously appropriate for her chosen subject, the world of mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli. It is even more suited to the story's background: the larger-than-life style of the world's great opera houses and the colorful personalities of many people found there--onstage, backstage, and even in the audience. In terms of eccentricity, Bartoli does not stand out; she has a fair share of phobias (flying, computers, microphones), and she cancels performances more frequently than her fans would like, but her primary interest is musical: a voice, not very powerful but beautiful, which she uses with a fine sense of bel canto style, considerable acting skill, and a careful choice of the right music. Much of the book's appeal lies in its descriptions of people, which tend to be short, pungent, and devastatingly on target: Maria Callas, the queen of whatever opera company she wasn't feuding with; conductor Herbert von Karajan, who had a reputation, entirely deserved, as a voice killer; baritone Bryn Terfel, a guy with the body of Meat Loaf and an exuberant performing style; agent-publicist Herbert Breslin, a motor-mouthed, bullet-headed ... egomaniac ... I used to go through the obituary section of the Times looking for his; Luciano Pavarotti, a crumbling monument; and lots more. --Joe McLellan From Publishers Weekly There aren't many books about opera?or anything else, for that matter?that make you laugh out loud, but this is one of them. In her first book, Hoelterhoff, who won a Pulitzer for her cultural criticism at the Wall Street Journal, had the bright idea of following superstar Bartoli around for a time to take the temperature of the contemporary opera world. Bartoli herself isn't all that interesting?she's pretty and charming, has a superb coloratura mezzo but a tiny repertoire, and has made her reputation mostly by showy recordings?but it really doesn't matter. She is just a box-office name on which to hang as witty and bitchy a picture of this rarefied world as the gossipiest opera lover could ask for. Divas struggling with their weight and declining reputations; grasping managers; brutally cynical opera officials; Pavarotti fighting for his lost top notes and the adrenaline of ovations; and excuses for missing performances that make the dog ate my homework seem inspired?all are recurring elements in Hoelterhoff's delicious portrait. She seems, in the two years she followed Bartoli, to have been everywhere and talked to everyone who counts in the opera world; but everything she is told gets filtered through her scintillating sense of the ridiculous. Only one quibble: It may be her WSJ background, but she seems never to have encountered a musicians' union she didn't hate, whereas the ludicrous sums paid to some stars seem to warrant only a dismissive shrug. 8 pages of photos not seen by PW. 50,000 first printing. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Publishers Weekly There aren't many books about opera?or anything else, for that matter?that make you laugh out loud, but this is one of them. In her first book, Hoelterhoff, who won a Pulitzer for her cultural criticism at the Wall Street Journal, had the bright idea of following superstar Bartoli around for a time to take the temperature of the contemporary opera world. Bartoli herself isn't all that interesting?she's pretty and charming, has a superb coloratura mezzo but a tiny repertoire, and has made her reputation mostly by showy recordings?but it really doesn't matter. She is just a box-office name on which to hang as witty and bitchy a picture of this rarefied world as the gossipiest opera lover could ask for. Divas struggling with their weight and declining reputations; grasping managers; brutally cynical opera officials; Pavarotti fighting for his lost top notes and the adrenaline of ovations; and excuses for missing performances that make the dog ate my homework seem inspired?all are recurring elements in Hoelterhoff's delicious portrait. She seems, in the two years she followed Bartoli, to have been everywhere and talked to everyone who counts in the opera world; but everything she is told gets filtered through her scintillating sense of the ridiculous. Only one quibble: It may be her WSJ background, but she seems never to have encountered a musicians' union she didn't hate, whereas the ludicrous sums paid to some stars seem to warrant only a dismissive shrug. 8 pages of photos not seen by PW. 50,000 first printing. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Several years ago, mezzo soprano Cecilia Bartoli was the hottest young opera singer around. Hoelterhoff, a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, where she received a Pulitzer Prize for cultural criticism, follows Bartoli's career over a two-year period (October 1995 through October 1997), talking with the singer and her family, manager, colleagues, and rivals. The result is an affectionate if not always flattering look at a charmingly eccentric artist. The title, however, is somewhat misleading; the Bartoli story in fact functions as a framework for the author's cynical and witty observations. (Her account of the recent eight-hour gala celebrating James Levine's 25th anniversary at the Metropolitan Opera is not to be missed.) A great deal of attention is paid to other singers, including Renee Fleming, Luciano Pavarotti (Mr. P.), and Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu (The Love Couple). We learn about singers' fees, the role of record companies, and the harrowing life of a manager. The author knows her subject well; hers is a delicious mix of gossip and insightful commentary. Highly recommended for public libraries.AKate McCaffrey, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, NY Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Wall Street Journal music critic Hoelterhoff spent two years tracking the career of Cecilia Bartoli, the Roman mezzo-soprano whose way with bel canto repertoire, Rossini's Cenerentola (i.e., Cinderella) in particular, had made her America's favorite younger singer. Because this wasn't a matter of journalistic stalking and because Hoelterhoff cultivates friendly relations with the subjects of her critiques, she also dropped in on the careers of such other singers as up-and-comers soprano Angela Gheorghiu and tenor Roberto Alagna, the late-blooming Rene e Fleming, the judiciously long-lasting Mirella Freni, and the fabulous, faltering, fading Fat Man (Pavarotti--who else?). Her reporting on them makes utterly delicious reading--and not just for opera mavens--because she is wry and funny, because she loves singing and opera and describes their effects on good listeners well, and because she is fascinated by these enormously temperamental people, whom she sees as justified in their egocentricities by the fact that they do regularly what is flat-out impossible for the rest of us. Ray Olson Review ...a hilarious, revealing, and sometimes malicious book about operatic intrigue on and off the stage. -- The Boston Globe, Richard Dyer ...a naughtily witty tell-almost-all book (there is, thank God, no sex) that has the further advantage of being true. -- The New York Times Book Review, Terry Teachout ...the most perceptive and hilariously honest book on the making and marketing of opera to come along in some time. -- The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini From the Publisher The most perceptive and hilariously honest book on the making and marketing of opera to come along in some time....For two years, Ms. Hoelterhoff had enviable access to Cecilia Bartoli and her circle: her mother, a former chorus soprano and still Ms. Bartoli's most trusted vocal coach; her worldly Italian boyfriend; her savvy manager, and a whole cast of recording executives and attendant conductors who pass through the story like comprimario characters in an opera buffa....Happily for readers, Ms. Hoelterhoff introduces us to just about everyone operatic she met during those two years, interspersed with collected bits of wisdom and gossip....Ms. Hoelterhoff is such an interesting observer and beguiling writer that you eagerly follow her anywhere.....Knowing of Ms. Hoelterhoff's reputation as an unsparing cirtic and reporter, it's amazing that so many people in the business talked with her so freely, most notably the powerful manager and public relations maestro Herbert Breslin. [His] soliloquy on how he and his prime client, Luciano Pavarotti, showed everyone how real money could be made in opera is breathtaking in its honesty and shamelessness.... The sections on Bartoli are the heart of the book. There is ample evidence of her superb musicianship, determination and unconventionally interesting career choices.....Ms. Bartoli's career is a juggernaut, and one can only hope she keeps her balance. Ms. Hoelterhoff makes few predictions, but it is immensely fun an informative to read her account of the problems. -- Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times Manuela Hoelterhoff has written a delightful and savvy book about the opera world and Cecilia Bartoli--all world-class. It's a wonderful book! --Beverly Sills A naughtily witty tell-almost-all book that has the further advantage of being true...Cinderella & Company is very good on the circuslike aspects of real-life opera: the near psychotic egomania and secret insecurity, the cruel inside jokes ('How many divas does it take to screw in a light bulb? Just one. She holds the bulb and the world revolves around her.')...No less important is Hoelterhoff's cold-eyed grasp of the effects big money has on grand opera...Her fang marks can be spotted on nearly every page. ...But what makes Cinderella & Company more than just a book-length bloodletting is Hoelterhoff's unexpected sympathy for most of the singers about whom she writes. --Terry Teachout, The New York Times Hilarious...Opera buffs will munch happily [on] these nuggets. --Jesse Birnbaum, Time As witty a picture as the gossipiest opera lover could ask for --Publishers Weekly I couldn't put the book down...At its center is a sympathetic, warm-hearted portrait of one of the most gifted singers of today...But Cecilia Bartoli is seen in gossipy context: every big name in the mad world of opera is here--Pavarotti, Tebaldi, Domingo, Levine, The Alagnas--and few escape Hoelterhoff's eagle eye or her wit, as dry and sparkling as the best champagne. --Rodney Milnes, editor of Opera Magazine and chief opera critic of the London Times Vastly entertaining...enormously readable, often hilarious...Hoelterhoff puts her formidable critical abilities to work in combination with an unsparing eye for foibles, a sharp ear for first-rate gossip, and a raconteur's gift. --John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden From the Inside Flap A wickedly funny look at opera today--the feuds and deals, maestros and managers, divine voices and outsized egos--and a portrait of the opera world's newest superstar at a formative point in her life and career. In Cinderella & Company, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Manuela Hoelterhoff takes us on a two-year trip on the circuit with Cecilia Bartoli, the young mezzo-soprano who has captured an adoring public around the world. Rossini's Cenerentola is Bartoli's signature role, and Cinderella & Company tells the fairy-tale story of her life, which started on a modest street in Rome where the Fiat was the coach of choice. The lucky break, the meteoric rise, the starlit nights and nail-chewing days are all part of a narrative that shows Bartoli rehearsing, playing, traveling, eating, and charming us with her vivacity and dazzling virtuosity. Along the way, Hoelterhoff gives us an unusually vivid, behind-the-scenes look at the opera world. The first stop is Houston, where Bartoli brightens a droopy Cenerentola production; later scenes follow her to Disney World and to the Metropolitan Opera, where a fidgety cast awaits the flight-phobic mezzo's arrival for Mozart's Cosi fan tutte. Traveling to Santa Fe, Paris, Rome, Venice, and London, Hoelterhoff drops in on opening nights and boardroom meetings, talks to managers and agents, describes where the money comes from, and survives one of the longest galas in history. Here too are tantalizing glimpses of divinities large and small: Kathleen Battle's famously chilly limousine ride; Plcido Domingo flying through three time zones to step into the boots of an ailing Otello; Luciano Pavarotti aiming for high C in his twilight years. And we meet the present players in Bartoli's world: Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu, a.k.a. the Love Couple; Jane Eaglen, the Wagnerian web potato monitoring her cyberspace fan mail; the appealing soprano Renée Fleming, finally on the brink of stardom. At once informed and accessible, Cinderella & Company brings the world of grand opera into sharp focus--right up to the last glimpse of Cecilia Bartoli waving triumphantly from Cinderella's wedding cake. About the Author Manuela Hoelterhoff received a Pulitzer Prize for cultural criticism at the Wall Street Journal, where she has served as arts and books editor and is now a member of the editorial board; she is also senior consulting editor for SmartMoney and a contributing editor to Condé Nast Traveler. In addition, Ms. Hoelterhoff is the author of the libretto for Modern Painters, an opera by David Lang based on the life of John Ruskin, which had its world premiere at the Santa Fe Opera in 1995. She lives in New York City. Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Prelude Rags to Riches Once upon a time, the story begins. Once upon a time, long ago and far away, there was a poor cinders girl who went to a ball and enchanted a prince. We heard it first when we were young, and travelled nightly in pumpkin coaches drawn by mice to sparkling palaces where we really belonged. Courtiers bowed as we waved to adoring crowds. The story has the magic of the moon at midnight. It's cast a spell over the centuries, touching German burgs, the Sun King's court of Versailles, Disneyland. The French call the cinders girl Cendrillon; the Germans, Aschenputtel; and the Italians always call her Cenerentola. Not exactly fresh, Gioacchino Rossini was thinking as he lay in bed trying to keep warm in the underheated house of his impresario on a winter day just before Christmas in 1816. He was twenty-four years old and the rising star in the opera world, though just then he would have preferred to forget the disastrous opening night of The Barber of Seville earlier in the year. He'd been laughed at for the quaint conducting suit he wore, the one with the big buttons that was part of his fee, and booed at the end. Rome's Teatro Valle was expecting a new show from him in a few weeks' time, and he still didn't have a story, even after a long afternoon spent sipping tea with Jacopo Ferretti. Ferretti was the librettist. It was he who had just whispered, Cenerentola? Rossini sat up to think. Well, it was a story. When can I have the outline? he asked. By tomorrow, Ferretti replied grandly. If I skip sleeping. Rossini said good night and promptly fell asleep--very soundly, according to Ferretti, who left a detailed report of the great creativity that then befell him as he had another cup of tea before rushing downstairs to extract a contract from the impresario. Then he ran home, switched to mocha, and sketched the outline of La Cenerentola, finishing on schedule as promised. He sat down and fleshed it out, often helping himself to an existing libretto already set by another Italian a few years earlier, which was itself based on yet another opera by a Frenchman. He failed to remember this for his memoirs, but the practice was hardly unusual. Opera stories in those days were often based on other opera stories in the way that, say, a Hollywood producer in our own time will brilliantly decide to remake Sabrina about a garage dweller dreaming of the big house, or enliven the old German doctor's lab with the familiar lunkhead. Ferretti's plagiaristic impulse was perfectly acceptable, though we'd all be thankful if he'd pilfered the Mother Goose Tales of Charles Perrault instead. Perrault was the seventeenth-century French courtier best known for his rags-to-riches story of the kitchen drudge lifted up by mysterious fate to become queen of the land. The fairy godmother and her magic wand, the coach dipped in gold, the lizards transformed into coachmen, the ball gown of silver and gold cloth, and the tiny glass slipper are all part of Cendrillon's glistening world. Maybe Ferretti wasn't drinking mocha. By the time he got done with La Cenerentola: ossia La bontà in trionfo (meaning goodness triumphs), he'd exchanged the fairy godmother with a tutor named Alidoro (Golden Wings) and dropped the pumpkin, the coach, even the slipper. A naked foot displayed on the stage might have been rejected as subversively erotic by Rome's ever-present moral monitors, the equivalent of today's thought police. Cinderella arrives at the prince's castle outfitted with a pair of decorous bracelets. But Rossini was easy to please and, besides, he was in no position to complain. To save a little time, he stole an overture he'd written for a comedy about a newspaper and sat down with the diva, Geltrude Righetti-Giorgi, to work up a suitably fabulous finale. She had sung in the premiere of Barber and become fond of one of the tenor's tunes. Could he adapt it? He would be happy to! In a little more than three weeks, Rossini looked up from a score with music that dances, whispers, charms, and dazzles from beginning to end. He might as well have been writing with a wand. Once upon a time there was a king, Cenerentola sings as the curtain rises on her tumbledown mansion. Her mother has died, leaving her with a violent stepfather and his two screechy daughters. Una volta c'era un re--a lonely, sad king who searched far and wide for a suitable bride. Wealth and looks are unimportant, he declared. But not a good heart. Taking the simple song as her guide, she gives breakfast to a beggar who knocks at the door. Strangers keep appearing, always in disguise. The valet is the prince, the prince is the valet, and the beggar turns out to be Golden Wings, the tutor. But nothing can disguise true human nature, and with Golden Wings leading the way (Your life will change, he announces) Cenerentola moves ever closer toward the shiny castle of her dreams--and one of the great display pieces ever written: Nacqui all'affanno. I was born to sorrow and tears, Cenerentola sings. I suffered with a silent heart; but by some sweet enchantment, in the flower of my youth, swift as a flash of lightning, my fortune changed. Minutes of cascading coloratura reflect the silvery splendor of her new life. Non pi mesta accanto al fuoco, she sings. I'm no longer sitting sadly by the fire. Placed thrillingly at the end, when Cenerentola has married her prince and forgiven her beastly family, it should bring the audience to its feet. But as Righetti-Giorgi herself reported, the opening on January 25, 1817 did not go well at all. While a few tunes met with approval, the night still ended in a feast of booing and whistling--a bad thing in Italy. Librettist and composer stumbled into the night, Ferretti close to tears. Fools! Rossini exclaimed. Before Carnival ends, everyone will be enchanted. . . . One day it will be fought over by impresarios and prima donnas throughout the land. He was right. There was a time when Cenerentola eclipsed even Barber and the nineteen other operas he went on to write. Then, after composing his most magnificent and ambitious opera, William Tell, in 1829, Rossini quit, taking the most mysterious early retirement in the history of music. Nobody knows exactly why he did so. But he was rich and sickly, musical tastes were changing, and he probably didn't anticipate living another four decades as the beloved, ill-wigged, and increasingly immense fixture of Parisian music life. Rossini was what the Italians call a buon forchettone, who always cleaned his plate. Occasionally, he would still compose--charming piano pieces and the lovely Stabat Mater--but he was mostly renowned for his Parmesan cheese, his kindness and wit, and the soirées at his Paris apartment. Have him come in, but tell him to leave his C-sharp on the coat-rack. He can pick it up on his way out, he once said, as a top-note strutting tenor was about to visit. Friends in the Rothschild family took care of his fortune, which had been boosted early by a funding concept we might reconsider in our own era: the impresario of the Naples opera house gave him a percentage of the gambling tables set up in the foyer. Think of how much livelier our nights at the opera would be with roulette tables next to the bar and people betting on whether Fathilde will hit her C in the next act! By the time Rossini's cortège trundled through Paris in 1868, twilight had set on bel canto--or beautiful singing--when embellishments, fluid scales, interpolations, and good taste were expected even of tenors. Cenerentola slowly disappeared into history's memory hole along with so many of his other dust catchers, serious works like Tancredi and Semiramide, and those clever comedies L'italiana in Algeri and Il turco in Italia. The world of opera was changing. Full-bellied Wagnerians, lusty singers of clowns, baby-killers, and Moors slowly pushed aside the delicately trilling, octave-jumping heroes and heroines who inhabit the flowery realm of Rossini and his two major contemporaries, Vincenzo Bellini and Gaetano Donizetti. Bellini's Norma and Donizetti's Lucia stayed around, but most of their friends disappeared, replaced by Aida, Violetta, Otello, Tristan and Isolde, Carmen, Tosca, Mim, Elektra, and the Marschallin. High-minded conductors hammered a few more nails into Rossini's coffin. They found (and many still do) the lightly orchestrated scores too insignificant for their important orchestras. Rossini sounds perfectly splendid played with a small orchestra of forty, less than half the forces the gods require for their stately entrance into Wagner's Valhalla. By the time I started going to the opera in the mid-1960s, taste had started changing once more, thanks to Maria Callas--La Divina to her worshipful followers. Born in New York in 1923, trained in Athens, and soon the queen of whatever opera company she wasn't feuding with, Callas stoked the embers of bel canto with her searing voice and high theatricality. Her soprano was not conventionally beautiful and was often reviled by fastidious puritans, but she was excitement incarnate on the stage and off, a fabulous actress with huge, black--if very myopic--eyes, a bad temper, and a flair for fashion. I once saw half of her at a Norma concert performance at Carnegie Hall in the late 1960s. Elena Suliotis, a young singer with a short career, had just run off stage followed by boos and the rest of the cast. The audience kept hooting. Suddenly Callas, who once owned Norma's sandals, leaned down from her box and thundered, Silenzio! The goddess had spoken! People piped down; the performance continued. Right about that time, Callas had almost stopped singing and had suffered the humiliation of being dropped by Ari Onassis so he could marr...