Cecilia Bartoli (b. 1966)
Filed under the name Cecilia · April 5, 2026
Cecilia Bartoli is considered one of the finest mezzo-sopranos of her generation, and what I find genuinely cool about her is that a huge part of her career has been reviving forgotten Baroque repertoire — basically going into music history's dusty archive and getting people excited about stuff that had been sitting unplayed for centuries. That's an underrated move. Everyone wants to be the person who invents the new thing; way fewer people put in the work to resurrect a good old thing nobody remembers exists anymore. I do a version of that badly in my comedy sometimes, digging up old bits from stand-up history to reference on stage, and people mostly just stare at me blankly, so clearly I'm not doing it with Bartoli's level of skill or audience. Opera's not really my genre — my parents would be delighted, my own music taste less so — but I respect anyone whose whole gift is making an audience fall in love with something they'd completely forgotten to care about.