Maria Callas and Cecilia Bartoli

When I last interviewed Cecilia Bartoli, I praised her rendition of “Casta diva,” and she hinted that she might undertake the title rôle in Bellini’s Norma, which is usually assigned to dramatic sopranos these days.

“‘Casta diva’ is a prayer, and the dynamic markings are piano, pianissimo, sotto voce. And since Norma is by Mr. Bellini and not by ‘the tradition,’ I–as an interpreter, as the composer’s servant–simply recorded this aria with a period orchestra and the dynamics that Bellini wrote in his music.”

Bartoli has a point. In the diaphanous playing of Zurich’s Orchestra La Scintilla and the ever-shifting luster and shadings of her voice, one can hear the moonlight and the numinous shimmerings of the forest evoked in Norma’s prayer to the moon goddess.

Would Bartoli ever consider singing the rôle onstage? “It would have to be a Norma not tied to ‘tradition,’ but to the autograph score,” she says. “The orchestras that played in Bellini’s day consisted of 40, 45 musicians. It would be a bel canto Norma–not, let us say, a Wagnerian Norma!”

Cecilia Bartoli sang Norma in concert form last night in Dortmund, with a reprise scheduled for 1 July. My understanding of German does not (yet) allow me to grasp nuances of the reviews, but they seem positive and, in some cases, downright ecstatic.

Google Translator came up with a funny sentence in the Der Westen review: You must overcome the Callas, anyway.

Bartoli, like all performing artists, is self-absorbed. (That is only logical, for without a whopping dose of narcissism, who could undertake such an unforgiving career?) When I interviewed her, she had almost nothing to say about Callas and seemed to think that Callas’s glory days had been the 1960s and 1970s. For Time, Bartoli (or her handlers) wrote a tribute to Callas that consists mostly of bromides.

Nonetheless, I feel that Cecilia Bartoli and Juan Diego Flórez are the two most important heirs of Callas active today. Some scholars excoriate Callas for accepting heavily cut scores and failing to ornament music in an “authentic” manner. (To this I counter: Callas, Serafin, and colleagues were modernists and acted accordingly.) Others, including Rupert Christiansen, argue that the so-called “bel canto” revival grew out of Italian fascism and would have continued without Callas; and that early Ottocento music is hokum, anyway, so who cares? (No need to counter the latter claim: The gentleman’s stupidity speaks for itself.)

Without Callas, can anyone imagine the careers of Bartoli and Flórez, to say nothing of Sutherland, Caballé, Horne, and Sills? Would we have Philip Gossett’s revelatory editions of Verdi and Rossini? (Full disclosure: Philip is a friend.)

When Cecilia Bartoli invokes fidelity to the score and lavishes her musical and expressive genius upon “minor,” forgotten works, she is continuing the work that Maria Callas, Serafin, Luchino Visconti, and their cohorts undertook last century. Her notion of fidelity may differ from Callas’s—and her repertoire and approach certainly owe much to the HIP (historically informed performance) movement—but without Maria Callas, Bartoli’s Dortmund Norma never would have happened.

A coda: In 1957, Maria Callas portrayed Norma in London and sang a very delicate, small-scale “Casta diva” in rehearsal. A colleague complimented her on the approach, and she replied that she considered it the proper way to sing the aria—but that Italian audiences, accustomed to heroic voices, would never stand for it.

In bocca al lupo to Cecilia Bartoli. (In 2006, Bellini brought luck to the Azzurri, but it was Puritani and not Norma. But I digress.) I look forward to reading more about her Norma and to hearing her sing the entire rôle. (Europeans, please let me know if you learn of a webcast!)

Read more about Maria Callas and Norma.