Some call her the last of the divas, but tonight Cecilia Bartoli is playing the last of the castratos. They were the bizarre gladiators of the 18th-century opera arena, mutilated men who played Roman emperors or Greek heroes, but sang them with women’s voices — the result of one squalid operation and several years hothousing. Bartoli’s latest project is Sacrificium and is devoted to these strange, seductive creatures of the Baroque stage.
And her stage is set just as she likes it: intimate with imposing surroundings. There are just 300 of us packed into the jewel-like theatre hidden inside the enormous palace at Caserta, some 40km (25 miles) outside Naples. Inside the tiny theatre journalists are relegated to the low-ceilinged boxes at the top. Record executives, local dignitaries and Bartoli’s personal support base get the plum seats in the stalls. The ambassador between the two worlds is a solitary bat, swerving and squeaking around the tiers with an alarming lack of regard for the world’s most acclaimed and highestselling mezzo soprano.
In the world of opera and classical music, Bartoli exists in a league of her own. To be part of the 300-strong throng bused in to her latest launch is to witness not just a wildly popular musical personality. Bartoli also represents Bartoli Inc, as one of the few remaining classical stars with serious commercial clout. That’s why in Caserta the resources of her once mighty record label (now adjusting, shakily, to the worldwide crash in sales of recorded music) have been deployed so lavishly for her. That’s why she calls the shots on the content of her albums and how they are marketed.
Yet Bartoli underlines the superstar cachet by being formidably elusive. She strictly rations her performances and repertoire. Covent Garden hasn’t managed to entice her since 2005: her British performances are limited to recitals once or twice a year, usually at the Barbican (her next date, in November, has been sold out for months). But she is also elusive on a more fundamental level: finding the real Bartoli — on stage or off — is a slippery challenge.
The concert in Caserta will help me only so much. When she finally sweeps on stage for this supposedly intimate preview it turns out that she complements the bat perfectly, dressed in thigh-high boots, breeches, ruffles and a scarlet highwayman’s cape. The Bartoli Show never stops.
What follows might make an unconvincing drag act, but that unmistakable velvety voice swaggers with incandescent allure. The first, fiery aria is from Semiramide riconosciuta by Niccolò Porpora, never recorded until Bartoli found the score mouldering in the Neapolitan archives and decided to include it in Sacrificium. Somehow, in her hands, a forgettable piece becomes an unforgettable experience.
By the end of an hour of lyrical ardour and note-perfect vocal fireworks Bartoli is channelling an even wackier muse: tucking a frilly gold dress into her breeches and flinging feathers into the orchestra plucked out of a dramatic scarlet headdress. The crowd goes nuts for the woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman. Once upon a time, I read in my press pack, the audience acclaiming a top-grade castrato might ghoulishly shout “Viva il coltellino!” (long live the little knife!). I decide to settle for a quiet “bravo”.
A week later we meet in a Paris hotel, and a very different artist is on show. A frosty publicist deposits me at the door of her suite: it is apparently interview day for most of Europe’s classical music press. Bartoli is now in a smart, strict black suit, her only adornment an enormous diamond ring (not on a significant finger). So, just how much fun was flinging the feathers at her own party? “In Caserta we were really able to have this Baroque atmosphere,” she says, in soft but firm tones. “And I wanted this atmosphere, because this is a project about the Meraviglie Barroche — the Baroque marvels — but also the tragedy. And it’s probably the most dramatic story in the history of music.”
Really? Bigger than Beethoven’s Ninth? Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring? Dylan going electric? “Naples and Caserta were the places where most of the children were castrated in the 18th century,” she says, slightly sternly. “Between 3,000 and 4,000 children were castrated there every year. So to be there in Caserta was really quite a strong experience.”
In Sacrificium she certainly hasn’t skimped on all the gory details. Buy the deluxe copy of the album and you will also receive a whopping compendium of the castrato, complete with biographies of those superstars, the now-forgotten Neapolitan composers who nurtured them, as well as squirmingly anatomical diagrams of severed testes and the consequent effects on a prepubescent boy’s larynx. “It’s an amazing world,” says Bartoli, rifling through her booklet, which she seems to keep as both artistic prompt and security blanket to smother non-artistic questioning. “I discovered the most magnificent music, but also the most cruel stories. It was possible for me to do a recording without any explanation, without saying anything, but today we don’t have these kinds of taboos, and as a woman I can probably talk with more freedom about castration.”
Hence, too, the gender-bending rationale for the bizarre, even ugly, publicity shots that accompany Sacrificium: Bartoli’s head rather jarringly morphed on to ancient stone statues of men — men, that is, whose bits aren’t all quite there. She fought for the images in spite of opposition from her record label, who presumably depend on a photogenic, glossy Bartoli to pep up the sales. “Well of course it was possible for me to make a beautiful close-up, with a nice smile, a very Italian look,” she says. “But this was not the message, which was to make it clear that this is such a shocking story, and get across the combination of a male body with a female voice.”
But why does one of opera’s most charismatic stars insist on all this eccentricity? It is a question that has circled around Bartoli ever since her decision to depart so radically from a staple diet of Mozart and Rossini, the two composers that made her name in the 1990s, when she was the must-have prodigy of the opera circuit. Even then some were saying that it was small beer for a budding opera star. When she made her Metropolitan Opera debut in the role of the maid Despina in Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Pavarotti’s manager Herbert Breslin was loudly sceptical: “She can’t sing Mimì, she can’t sing Tosca or la traviata, and she can’t sing Aida, Manon Lescaut, or Desdemona [all soprano roles]. There is not one major role she can sing. You can’t be a major opera singer without singing the bread and butter repertoire. Big, big, big things don’t happen to little Despina!”
No one asked Breslin what he thought when Bartoli went on to make hay with even less well-known music. In 1999, despite opposition from her record label, she produced a career-defining album of Vivaldi. All rarities. Nothing anyone could hum. And it sold more than a million. “When I wanted to do my Vivaldi record it was really something to try and convince them that this was a great project to bring to the audience, and the only way to convince them was on sales and figures.” Since then, Bartoli’s concert and opera appearances have travelled farther and farther off-piste — Salieri, Gluck, and, most recently, a full-scale homage to another diva, Maria Malibran, which was accompanied by a touring exhibition of the 19th-century singer’s dusty memorabilia. She was playing the diva to the hilt — it just wasn’t her.
The argument she returns to again and again when defending these detours is a musicologist’s: great music has great roots, byways that matter. “Of course Mozart was a genius, but he was a genius who came from somewhere. I learnt that at his time Salieri was composing, as was Paisiello. Haydn influenced Mozart a lot. I hope I will be able to perform Mozart’s music all my life, but to learn about the life of other composers is also interesting.”
When she does return to Rossini, Handel, Bellini — the better-known half of her musical personality — she now says that she wants to do it in a different way. A return to Covent Garden, she says, would have to mean a period orchestra rather than the usual house band. Next year, she is taking on her first “Callas” part, Bellini’s Norma, in concert, but the obvious intention is to make a comparison impossible: she has summoned a period-instrument ensemble for the job, and hand-picked a much lighter-voiced cast than is usual for the piece. “We just try to follow what Bellini did in Bellini’s time.”
It’s sometimes hard to remember that the singer who now delights in all this scholarship began her career in the most public, naff way — on an Italian TV talent show in 1985, encouraged by her mother Silvana, also an opera singer. “I was 19,” she remembers, amused, “and it was a Saturday show called Fantastico! It was kind of a Fellini-esque situation, like a circus with magicians, people playing things, and two opera singers. One mezzo, who was me, and a bass-baritone who was even younger than me. Actually, I had a good time, and didn’t realise this was such a big platform, being on TV.” She didn’t win, but she was noticed by Herbert von Karajan and Daniel Barenboim, who both contacted her management the next day. “Barenboim invited me to study the Mozart characters with him. So I started my career and I was young. I was definitely young.” Her first stage appearances, in The Barber of Seville, followed quickly: she was still just a teenager.
I wonder whether she thinks talent shows — so ubiquitous now — are the right way to launch real careers. “The risk is that if you are not ready you can really burn yourself out. For many people this is the goal of being there, the top. But actually it’s just the beginning, and if you’re not ready it’s really dangerous.”
Bartoli will not be tempted on to talk of her private life: the most up-to-date reports are of a fellow opera singer with whom she lives in Switzerland. One critic recently added up that reticence to get personal with her minutely controlled, cautiously paced career and labelled her approach “constricting, airless, too perfect”. It’s true that a sense for self-protection seems to imbue most of her philosophy: “I had to follow my instrument,” she says repeatedly, almost as if it is a mantra.
But, for all the PR-friendly gimmickry of Sacrificium, its castration compendium and naked statues, the tales of these castratos cut deeper than I think she — or her detractors — are prepared to admit. Should I have shouted “long live the knife” at her concert, I ask, half-jokingly, just as the gimlet-eyed publicist returns to eject me. “Thank God they don’t shout that any more!” she shoots back. “But we do have the knife, and we use it to make new lips, new noses, new tits. What does the plastic surgery? The coltellino.”
Would she ever consider taking advantage of it? “Definitely no. It’s another way of monopolising, dictating . . . fashion dictates that this is beauty. Look at Michael Jackson, or the anorexic models that we have today. We might not say ‘viva l’anoressia’, but we say ‘oh, they’re beautiful’. Of course we don’t have castration any more. But we are still prepared to sacrifice the body for beauty.”
The gilded, gelded castratos may just be Bartoli’s obsession du jour. But they may well also be her worst nightmare: their choices proscribed, their freakish performances part of a talent show that never ended. Hence the pain stressed alongside the pleasure. So what is Bartoli’s sacrifice? “For the music I make, I’m not making one,” is her tart response. “To make music is a privilege, a passion and a joy. But what you need is discipline. Not sacrifice.”
Ignore those naked statues: it’s the lady who’s got the balls.
Sacrificium is out on October 12 on Decca
Your Comments
Order By: