Cinderella and Company
Backstage at the Opera with Cecilia Bartoli
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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; Plácido 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.
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.