An open post to Cecilia Bartoli:

When you’re an colatura mezzo-soprano who is wildly celebrated, nearly deified, within the opera world when you are still in your mid-20s; when you have been raised by your singer/teacher mother within arts culture since you could speak and have never, ever been asked to create an identity of any other kind, ever; when all the critic/journalist/cognescenti in opera speculate constantly, again beginning in your mid–20s, about where you will take your career, what roles you will sing, whether you will broaden beyond the comedic repertoire emphasizing Rossini and Mozart to include other famous works, whether you will revitalize opera in mainstream culture like a Fleming or a Callas or whoever the hell–there’s just nowhere for you to go. Whatever roles you embrace, however well your performances do or do not sell when Decca pours money into promoting them in Barnes & Noble, you are set up to “fail,” to “not live up to your promise” because that promise is too great.

My favorite baseball player growing up was Darryl Strawberry, so in my mind this is the Darryl Strawberry problem. I wish Mike Trout, despite the fact that he plays for an evil franchise, the ability to somehow avoid this fate.

And then what you do, in addition to broadening your personal repertoire and selling enough CDs and DVDs to make Decca keep spending promotional dollars on you–what you do in addition to that, as you age through your 30s and 40s, is develop album after album, film after film, of weird and wonderful archival treats exploring little-heard composers’ work, exploring historical and musicological themes in early opera, checking out how the women tsars after Peter the Great brought opera to Russia. You do all of this in an inimitable way, with bizarre photographs of you as a castrato or a berobed monk or Catherine the Great in the snow. You educate a guy who has never had a shred of formal musical education or enculturation, a guy who uses records and films and writing to try to make sense of art in sound. Of course that’s what you do. 🙂

And as you do all of this, using your corporate musical power in this marvelous and idiosyncratic way, you show the world–and the guy–that yes, women in opera (despite Catherine Clement’s justifiable excoriation), women in modern corporate for-profit musical entertainment, can educate and can illuminate and can change the world through art.

I fully well recognize that musicologists and writers and photographers and so on compete to be paid to do most of this work; that the photos of you poring over archives in St. Petersburg are staged for effect; that you probably, in all likelihood, do your fair share of “just singing what the managers set up for you to sing.” You were pampered and puffed up and had every conceivable advantage, advantages nearly all women ever born never have regardless of how beautifully they sing.

And I don’t care, because you could have done anything with your talent and you chose to do this. And I love you for it, and I’m so glad to find a woman to join P!nk among corporate artists who I deify, since I’ve done it so long with so many men.