Cecilia Bartoli would be back at the ballet in a moment. She just needed to get murdered first.
It was early June, during the long weekend of the Salzburg Whitsun Festival in Austria, which she runs. When the curtain dropped on the first half of John Neumeier’s ballet “Death in Venice” at the Grosses Festspielhaus, she got up from her seat and briskly exited the auditorium. She followed a corridor through a courtyard that brought her to the lobby of the Felsenreitschule, a theater built into the side of a mountain.
As she crossed the threshold, she shook off her role as the festival’s artistic director and stepped into the persona she is best known for: Cecilia Bartoli, star mezzo-soprano.
Inside the Felsenreitschule, members of the orchestra Les Musiciens du Prince-Monaco were seated onstage, and their conductor, Gianluca Capuano, was waiting at the podium. Bartoli entered, waved hello with both hands and shared cheek kisses with friends on her way to the stage. She took her place in a chair, closed her eyes and let her head go limp.
Then she winked. She wasn’t resting but acting, transforming into the sleeping Desdemona in her death scene from Rossini’s “Otello.” When Bartoli rose again, it was to sing dramatically alongside the tenor Sergey Romanovsky, before collapsing as he stabbed her with a stage knife.
After about 20 minutes of refining the scene, she grabbed her purse, hustled back to the Grosses Festspielhaus and took her seat for the second half of “Death in Venice.”
Since 2012, this kind of bustle has been the Whitsun Festival routine for Bartoli. She is both its artistic director and its biggest attraction, shifting constantly from performer to audience member, from party host to cheerleader. This would be enough for any one person, but unlike most opera stars or artistic leaders on her level, she has a lot else going on: She is a busy singer beyond Salzburg, she founded an orchestra, and she is the director of the Opéra de Monte-Carlo in Monaco.
Bartoli is 59, an age when many opera stars wind down their careers. But she is on an opposite trajectory. Her voice remains in remarkable shape, her tone still plush, with the control and coloratura of a much younger vocalist. And she is far from done being an artistic director. Her contract at the Whitsun Festival was approaching its end when she and the festival announced this month that she would extend through 2031. By that point, she will be its longest-serving leader, eclipsing even the tenure of its founder, Herbert von Karajan.
“I will stay,” Bartoli said in an interview, “as long as I feel I have something to say.”
With her own opera company and festival, as well as an orchestra and expanding repertoire, Bartoli is teeming with things to say. And her rare longevity as a singer has been made possible through extreme care; she has always kept tight control over what she performs and where, and has never stopped training her voice.
Bartoli, who was born and raised in Rome, and who values excellent food, compared her artistry to ragù. “What is the secret of a good ragù?” she said. “It’s time. You cannot make a good ragù sauce in five minutes.” She then made the bloop-bloop sound of a simmering sauce and said that slowness is just as necessary in music.
“Your voice, your muscles, everything needs to adjust slowly,” she said. “Otherwise you end up like a watery ragù.”
It seems as if Bartoli were fated to become an opera star: Her parents, both singers, named her after the patron saint of music. (Her mother, Silvana Bazzoni, is often by her side and was a fixture throughout the Whitsun Festival; her husband, Oliver Widmer, is a bass-baritone.) She spent much of her childhood in theaters, watching her parents and other vocalists at work.
She didn’t see herself as a singer, though. She was more interested in flamenco, and wanted to join an amateur group in Rome. Her parents didn’t like the idea but made a deal with her: She could keep dancing if she also studied at a music conservatory.
“It turns out,” Bartoli said, “I was much faster with my vocal cords than with my feet.”
From time to time she still dabbles in flamenco, as some disgruntled hotel guests could attest. “I always loved to do a little zapateado in my room on tour,” she said, “but in the United States someone called and asked, ‘What is that strange noise?’”
Bartoli’s mother was an early teacher, but after school she attracted mentors with global reach, chief among them the conductor Daniel Barenboim. They met in the late 1980s, when she was performing in Rossini operas, and he nudged her toward Mozart.
“He told me I could do characters like Cherubino, Dorabella, Zerlina,” she said. “And it turned out to be fantastic advice, because with Mozart there is such a pureness to the music, you must control your instrument 200 percent.”
Control is a hallmark of Bartoli’s sound. Even at the top of her range, she is capable of extreme softness and focus, whether in “Hotel Metamorphosis” at this year’s Whitsun Festival or, famously, her performances of “Casta diva,” from Bellini’s “Norma.” In an aria already scored at a prayerful whisper, she is quieter than many of her peers.
Above all, Bartoli is a master of ornamentation. Her repertoire covers centuries of music, but the finest displays of her vocal acrobatics are in her recordings of works from the Baroque through the bel canto eras. In 1999, she released “The Vivaldi Album” on Decca; it sold over a million copies and inspired renewed interest in a composer rarely thought of in opera.
“It was a crossover hit,” Bartoli said, “but with the idea that people will cross the bridge to come to us, and not the other way around.”
Lea Desandre, a 32-year-old mezzo-soprano and fellow star in “Hotel Metamorphosis,” said that she grew up listening to Bartoli’s albums and loved “the freedom and the joy that she has while singing, and really the energy.”
Bartoli’s quick successes brought her to the Metropolitan Opera in New York at 29, as Despina in Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte.” But she hasn’t performed at the house since 1998. Because she’s afraid to fly, her career has been far less robust in the United States than in Europe.
When she has traveled to the United States, it has been by boat. “It’s actually a fantastic experience,” she said. “You see the aurora borealis, you don’t get sick, and you don’t have to worry about jet lag. The most amazing part is arriving in New York and seeing the Statue of Liberty from far away, just thinking about all the migrants who made the same trip.”
During the Whitsun Festival, Bartoli repeatedly teased that she may return to New York soon; so did Capuano, her close collaborator with Les Musiciens du Prince-Monaco, suggesting that they would come together.
She founded Les Musiciens du Prince-Monaco in 2016 with Jean-Louis Grinda, her predecessor at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo, because she wanted to create a period ensemble in a place that could resemble the courts of Baroque palaces. That summer, Capuano took over a performance of “Norma” at the Edinburgh Festival on short notice. It was his first time leading Bartoli in an opera, and the two had, he said, “a really special alchemy.”
He became the chief conductor of Les Musiciens du Prince-Monaco in 2019, and today his schedule is intertwined with Bartoli’s; the orchestra is even in residence at the Whitsun Festival. “I learned a lot from Cecilia,” Capuano said. “She taught me the freedom of doing music, to breathe and not be too square, with the art of rubato she uses all the time.”
The Salzburg performances of “Hotel Metamorphosis” demonstrate how their musical relationship plays out. Conceived and directed by the opera luminary Barrie Kosky, the show is a pasticcio, a kind of operatic jukebox musical that tells Ovid stories using scraps of Vivaldi’s music. In the pit, the orchestra performed with broken-in comfort, free yet unified, especially when supporting Bartoli.
Before Bartoli came to the Whitsun Festival, it lacked the sparkle and touch of glamour it is known for today. It struggled to find an identity after the death of von Karajan, in 1989, mostly serving as a showcase for Baroque music led by guest conductors. Riccardo Muti became the first modern artistic director in 2007. He stayed for five years, and used his platform to revive obscure Italian operas.
Bartoli came to the Whitsun Festival with a clear idea of what it should be. Each year has been organized around a theme, and has included a new opera production, with Bartoli as its star. At the after-party for “Hotel Metamorphosis,” Markus Hinterhäuser, the artistic leader of the main Salzburg Festival, said, “If the Whitsun Festival has a heartbeat, and that heartbeat has a name, it’s Cecilia Bartoli.”
She has sung her Norma there, worn a beard in Handel’s “Ariodante” and, most sensationally, starred as Maria in a “West Side Story” framed as an older woman’s flashback. Along the way, her voice has changed, but she has tailored her repertoire accordingly, and, Capuano said, the best aspects of her artistry have remained.
“In Cecilia, you cannot distinguish the melodic line and inner meaning because they are the same,” he said. “And the way she can still give different colors is just stunning.”
Unchanged, too, is Bartoli’s reputation for professionalism. Kosky called her “a force of nature” and described her as extremely dedicated. “She is one of the most authentic people I have ever worked with,” he said, “and when you combine that with one of the great voices of the last few decades, it is impossible to resist her.”
Capuano said that she is often the first to arrive at a rehearsal and the last to leave; Desandre was struck by her ability to focus quickly and “always be there in the moment” and make “the group feel like a group immediately.” In June, Bartoli entered each room like a gust, her default greeting a smile with a look of wide-eyed excitement, sometimes accompanied by a hug or a kiss. A kind of roving pep leader, she didn’t even give a speech at her opera’s after-party, instead announcing, “Dobbiamo cominciare la festa, mangiamo!” (“We need to start the party, let’s eat!”)
When Bartoli wasn’t performing, she was attending other shows and handing out bouquets during curtain calls. After the Hamburg Ballet’s “Death in Venice,” she rushed to hug Neumeier and whisper “I’m so proud of you” into his ear. She lingered backstage, rapidly switching among Italian, French and English, and posing for photos.
She closed the festival with a gala of pyrotechnic Rossini arias, an evening that included multiple costume changes and comic delights that showcase her charisma, like “Nella testa ho un campanello” from “L’Italiana in Algeri.” During an encore from “Il Barbiere di Siviglia,” she threw in a little bit of flamenco dance.
“I had to since we’re in Spain!” Bartoli said as she entered her dressing room afterward. For her, the long night wasn’t over yet. There was still a gala dinner to attend, though she would try to duck out early to sleep. She had to leave the next morning to star in Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice” that night in Cremona, Italy. And, of course, she would be getting there by car.