READ: Cinderella & Company by Manuela Hoelterhoff

Like many arts organizations these days, the New York City Opera has fallen on tough times. Really tough times. Low funds, a seemingly inept board of directors, a company manager in over his head, unhappy employees from singers and musicians to house staff and management. The blogosphere is hopping with interest, opinion, and bloodlust.

One place to read opinion, heated and calm, outrageous and commonsensical, is the blog Parterre, owned and managed by the music critic for the New York Sun. (No wonder it’s so bitchy!) One name that crops up there constantly is Manuela Hoelterhoff, a former writer for the Wall Street Journal who won a Pulitzer Prize for “cultural criticism.” She now writes for bloomberg.com. She’s been a figure in the NYC art world for decades, and she can be just as bitchy as those opera queens on Parterre. It’s an awful lot of fun at other people’s expense.

Anyway, in 1998, Knopf published her book, Cinderella & Company: Backstage at the Opera with Cecilia Bartoli. It covers one year (1997-98) and follows the great Italian mezzo around the world, chronicling her triumphs, fears, family problems, artists’ managers, and just about everything else. It also tells lots of stories about other popular singer, including Deborah Voigt, Roberta Alanga, Angela Gheorghiu, James Levine, and especially the two main tenors from the Three Tenors gang. Some of the anecdotes are pretty funny, some just sad. The reason she shows up on lots of opera blogs is her view of musicians, as quoted from this book: “making videos is increasingly hard to do in a world of larcenous unions who work hard at working as little as possible for as much as possible.”

What’s also interesting is how much things have changed in the dozen years since the book was published. In spite of her forays into esoteric music, Bartoli is still the best-selling classical vocal artist, the dream husband-and-wife team Alanga and Gheorghiu have gone their separate ways, Pavarotti is dead, and Voigt is now as thin as her voice. But Domingo just keeps going like the Energizer bunny, while Levine tries to just keep going. But, as she rightly observes, “There’s always someone in the wings.”