Love Quote by Cecilia Bartoli

Bartoli’s charm here is that she refuses the tidy boxes we like to put classical music in. She begins with “classic period,” then immediately complicates it: baroque, then 17th-century Monteverdi. It’s a quick hopscotch across eras that signals a working musician’s loyalty not to labels but to repertory that still feels alive in the throat and in the room. The slightly unvarnished phrasing (“I still the love...”) reads less like a manifesto than backstage talk, which is part of the point: authority delivered without pomp.

The name-drop of Monteverdi functions as a quiet corrective to the standard “opera begins later” story many audiences absorb through Mozart-and-beyond programming. Calling him “one of the greatest” is admiration; calling him “the one who really started the opera” is a stake in a curatorial argument. Bartoli has built a career on reviving overlooked or underperformed works, and this line is basically her mission statement in miniature: go earlier, dig deeper, change what people think the canon is.

There’s also an implicit plea for historical listening without museum vibes. Monteverdi isn’t presented as an artifact; he’s framed as a foundational innovator whose experiments in drama, voice, and emotion still map onto what opera is supposed to do. Subtext: if you care about opera’s future, stop treating its origins as footnotes.