Cecilia Bartoli: ‘Opéra Monte-Carlo is the perfect place for debut singers’

There is little Cecilia Bartoli has not achieved during her 35-year career. The mezzo soprano has founded her own court orchestra, transformed a minor Austrian music festival into a cultural highlight and brought long-forgotten composers and operas to a vast audience. A five-time Grammy Award winner, she also has one of the biggest discographies of any living opera singer, her albums and DVDs clocking up 12mn sales.

Now, at 56, Bartoli has found a new challenge. As the first female director of Monaco’s Opéra Monte-Carlo, she will, from January, attempt to turn the Mediterranean fiscal paradise into an operatic mecca. “We already have an extremely faithful audience that comes from the south of France and Italy,” Bartoli says over coffee in Zurich, where she lives. “Now we hope to have people from all over the world. The public knows quality when it sees it.”

Her plan is to overhaul programming, attract some of the biggest names in opera and — occasionally — star in productions herself. “I have been singing for a long time, so I was forced to learn the managerial side,” she laughs, as if acknowledging that all singers have finite shelf lives. “The voice is still in good shape,” she hastens to add. “I can still sing and have the strength to do so. Then we’ll see what happens.”

I have been singing for a long time, so I was forced to learn the managerial side

Bartoli’s energy supplies are clearly far from depleted, yet she admits to reducing her commitments as a singer. Instead, she wants to turn Monte-Carlo into a launch pad for up-and-coming singers and believes the small Salle Garnier opera theatre, with just 524 seats, is ideal for this.

“It’s the perfect place for singers making debuts. The human scale means you can focus on singing without having to reach 2,500 people,” Bartoli says. “In an intimate theatre you sing with a different kind of pleasure. The beauty lies in conversing with the violins and oboes, wallowing in the nuances, passing from pianissimo to fortissimo.”

Monaco’s Place du Casino — which is flanked by the opera house, casino and one of Monte-Carlo’s most exclusive hotels — is where the rich and famous like to show off their Ferraris and Lamborghinis. Yet the principality also has a rich operatic heritage, since Prince Charles III built the Salle Garnier in 1878 to attract winter tourism. A dizzying melange of marble, frescoed ceilings and gold leaf ornamentation, it hosted the likes of Enrico Caruso, Beniamino Gigli and Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes in its heyday, and staged the world premieres of Massenet’s Don Quichotte (1910) and Puccini’s La rondine (1917).

Bartoli is well placed to reinject some top-flight musical glamour to the Opéra Monte-Carlo, whose reputation has waned since its early-20th-century pomp. Born in Rome to professional opera singers, she came on to the international scene in the late 1980s while in her early twenties and has captivated audiences ever since. She also has experience as an impresario: as artistic director of the Salzburg Whitsun Festival since 2012 — a contract she recently extended to 2026 — Bartoli turned the four-day June event into an engagingly themed initiative specialising in innovative productions. “Monaco’s season is short [it runs to April], which means I don’t have to give up Salzburg,” she explains.

As she prepares to take over from Jean-Louis Grinda, who has directed Opéra Monte-Carlo for 15 years, Bartoli plays down the significance of being the first woman in the job. “Merit matters more than gender,” she says. “In my opinion, managers need to have a profound understanding of the musical world.”

Her appointment marks a longstanding relationship with the principality. It began in 1989 with a production of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia which featured leading lights including Fedora Barbieri. “I was performing alongside incredible singers who form part of operatic history,” Bartoli says. “When you work with great artists they transmit their passion. I was like a sponge at the time: always watching, always analysing.”

More recently, in 2014, a project to record works written by Italian composers for three 18th-century Russian empresses inspired Bartoli to create her own modern-day court orchestra. After considering Liechtenstein and Andorra, she approached Prince Albert II of Monaco, who she says is “hugely passionate” about opera. The monarch leapt at the idea, and in 2016 a period instrument ensemble, Les Musiciens du Prince, was born. It now gives dozens of performances across the world annually. “We have become a kind of ambassador for Monaco,” Bartoli says.

Her inaugural Monte-Carlo season will features a mix of works familiar to local audiences — Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Verdi’s La traviata — and baroque pieces receiving house premieres. The resident Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo will usually play the romantic operas while Les Musiciens du Prince will perform the earlier works. Starry casts and production teams include Jonas Kaufmann, Rolando Villazón, Ildar Abdrazakov, Aida Garifullina and Philippe Jaroussky, many of them in house debuts. Controversially, it also promises the return of Plácido Domingo, who since 2019 has faced allegations of historical sexual harassment. No official charges have been brought and the 81-year-old singer and conductor has denied any wrongdoing. On this, Bartoli says: “As far as I know, there is no formal conviction of Plácido Domingo, and in this case I would join the position of the Salzburg Festival: in dubio pro reo.”

Bartoli herself will be one of the main draws of the season, starring in the title role of Handel’s Alcina in January, the work’s house premiere, before returning to her Monaco roots in a new production of Il barbiere di Siviglia in April. Established singers have been offered new opportunities, for example Mexican tenor Javier Camarena, a mellifluous bel canto specialist, who debuts in the heavier role of Alfredo in La traviata in March. But Bartoli aims to foster new talent too. She is planning a series of masterclasses for 2024 with a view to casting participants in the Monte-Carlo season alongside renowned singers. “[Newcomers] need to learn how to hold themselves on stage because it’s there that the real learning happens,” she says.

Bartoli believes she will be able to sing for another 10 years. In June she made her debut at the Vienna Staatsoper with a series of ecstatically received Opéra Monte-Carlo productions of Rossini operas featuring Les Musiciens du Prince. But she admits to curtailing commitments further afield: “I’ve cut down a lot on long-distance tours. They absolutely kill you,” she says.

Instead she is turning her attention to Monte-Carlo and to another new role, that of president of Europa Nostra, an international organisation promoting Europe’s cultural heritage.

“I have been an ambassador for culture for the last 35 years, singing the works of great musicians and poets,” she says. “We artists have been entrusted with a rich cultural heritage. We need to take charge of it and fully preserve it.”

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