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.
Editorial Reviews
From the Back Cover
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; Placido Domingo flying through three time zones to step into the boots of an ailing Otello; Luciano Pavarotti aiming for high C in his twilightyears. 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 Renee 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.
"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 più 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...
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