Cinderella & Company

Charles Winecoff

A fascinating portrait of the love-hate relationship between the hoary vocation of 'classical singing' and the merciless machinations of instant fame in the digital age. -- Entertainment Weekly

Patrick J. Smith

Manuela Hoelterhoff is a funny writer. -- Opera News

Terry Teachout

...[A] naughtily witty tell-almost-all book...that has the further advantage of being true....what makes Cinderella...more than just a book-length bloodletting is Hoelterhoff's unexpected sympathy for most of the singers about whom she writes. —The New York Times Book Review

Library Journal

Several years ago, mezzo soprano Cecilia Bartoli was the hottest young opera singer around. Hoelterhoff, a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, where she received a Pulitzer Prize for cultural criticism, follows Bartoli's career over a two-year period (October 1995 through October 1997), talking with the singer and her family, manager, colleagues, and rivals. The result is an affectionate if not always flattering look at a charmingly eccentric artist. The title, however, is somewhat misleading; the Bartoli story in fact functions as a framework for the author's cynical and witty observations. (Her account of the recent eight-hour gala celebrating James Levine's 25th anniversary at the Metropolitan Opera is not to be missed.) A great deal of attention is paid to other singers, including Renee Fleming, Luciano Pavarotti ("Mr. P."), and Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu ("The Love Couple"). We learn about singers' fees, the role of record companies, and the harrowing life of a manager. The author knows her subject well; hers is a delicious mix of gossip and insightful commentary. Highly recommended for public libraries.--Kate McCaffrey, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, NY

Booknews

Hoelterhoff, who received a Pulitzer Prize for cultural criticism while at The Wall Street Journal, offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the mad world of opera that she witnessed while traveling for two years with the mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli.

Anthony Tommasini

...[T]he most perceptive and hilariously honest book on the making and marketing of opera...in some time....Ms. Hoelterhoff introduces us to just about everyone operatic she met during...two years, interspersed with collected bits of wisdom and gossip....an enduring love for opera and compassion come through in her account. -- The New York Times

Jesse Birnbaum

[A] chatty smorgasbord...concerning that unique branch of humanity, the opera singer....Opera buffs will munch happily...on these nuggets. -- Time

Stephanie Zacharek

Fasten your seat belts -- it's going to be a bumpy night." That dry-as-burgundy declaration from Margo Channing in "All About Eve" would have been a good epigraph for Cinderella & Company, Manuela Hoelterhoff's sly, amusingly candid snapshot of the modern opera world. Hoelterhoff escorts us through two years in the career of the supercharming Italian mezzo soprano Cecilia Bartoli, starting with her starring role in a production of Rossini's "Cenerentola" in Houston and following her back and forth across the ocean as she mounts (and, on occasion, cancels) various engagements.

But Bartoli is merely the center of a glorious pinwheel: Hoelterhoff blends gossip, reportage and crackerjack observation to render in living color the world that swirls around the singer. Hoelterhoff shows us how the opera world has changed since the days of Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi, but even more refreshingly, she shows us how it's stayed the same. The characters on her stage -- the singers, the assistants, the managers, the directors, the costume and production designer, the people who run the fustily dignified organization known as the Met -- are almost as rich and idiosyncratic as the characters they're devoted to bringing to life in performance. There are all kinds of backstage melodramas and love affairs, capricious cancellations for real reasons and concocted ones and glamour manifested in the form of limousines, luxury ocean liners and Rolex endorsements. Hoelterhoff (who won a Pulitzer Prize for cultural criticism at the Wall Street Journal) so nonchalantly takes the measure of those around her that you sometimes wonder if any of them will ever talk to her again. She describes Herbert Breslin, Luciano Pavarotti's manager -- who, Hoelterhoff explains, once foiled a book she'd hoped to write about the famous tenor -- as "a motor-mouthed, bullet-headed, forever-tan egomaniac who is adored and loathed in about equal proportions among those who've had the joy of doing business with him. I used to go through the obituary section of the Times looking for his -- a little squib tucked under the fold, somewhere beneath retired postmasters and minor-league ballplayers from the 1950s."

Hoelterhoff notes that she and Breslin patched things up after the book debacle. Then she proceeds to say, "Herbert is 71, and though he's got the vigor and venom of a much younger man, he hates getting older, and spends twenty minutes on the treadmill every day so that his Armani jacket will close neatly over the little pot belly into which, just now, he was stuffing a doughnut." Hoelterhoff shows nothing but genuine love for opera as an art form, as well as a deep respect and affection for the people who, sometimes seemingly against all odds, keep it alive. But her passion can't be tamed: Cinderella & Company is as wily and artful as that wickedly upturned swoop of eyeliner Maria Callas was famous for. As Breslin with his pot belly would probably advise you, better not forget that seat belt. -- Salon Sept. 28, 1998

Terry Teachout

...[A] naughtily witty tell-almost-all book...that has the further advantage of being true....what makes Cinderella...more than just a book-length bloodletting is Hoelterhoff's unexpected sympathy for most of the singers about whom she writes. -- The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic offers a vastly entertaining peek behind the scenes at the world of contemporary opera. Although the period between mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli's performances of 'Cenerentola' at the Houston Grand Opera in 1995 and at the Metropolitan Opera two years later provides the chronology and the excuse for Hoelterhoff's smart, sassy chronicle, it is in fact something rather more ambitious than a simple case study of a single singer. Shrewd snapshots of opera's brightest stars; intriguing conversations with agents, directors, managers, and designers; and scads of well-informed, just-catty-enough gossip add up to a vivid, intelligent portrait of the financial, artistic, and personal pressures that bedevil the artists and those who employ or serve them. Some are as time-honored as the tendency of divas (and divos) to cancel performances at the last minute; some are as up-to-date as the impact of jet travel on vocal cords. Hoelterhoff considers these and other issues in prose so snappy that opera seems as with-it as MTV. Her opinions are forceful—Met artistic director James Levine (one of the few movers and shakers in opera who apparently didn't give her an interview) is dissed as a bland, press-shy egomaniac who leaves the dirty work to others; rising superstar tenor Roberto Alagna and his equally glittery wife, soprano Angela Gheorghiu, are mercilessly caricatured as 'the Love Couple,' throwing tantrums in between nuzzles—but generally seem justified. (We hear a few times too often, however, that unionized musicians are lazy and overpaid; Hoelterhoff should save those diatribes for her gig on the Wall Street Journal's editorial board.) Theaffectionate profiles—down-to-earth soprano Renee Fleming, overbearing but knowledgeable artist manager Herbert Breslin, among them—are as punchy as the nasty ones; only Bartoli, oddly enough, doesn't register all that strongly. The text's general vivacity mostly disguises this absence at the center. It's hard to imagine a better guide to opera than Hoelterhoff, who captures its beauties and absurdities with equal zest.