Creativity Quote by Cecilia Bartoli

Bartoli isn’t just name-dropping composers; she’s quietly redrawing the map of musical “nationality” that audiences inherit without thinking. Pairing Bizet with Rossini as “a French peer” is a provocation disguised as program-note politeness. Rossini is canonized as the Italian bel canto guy, Bizet as the French opera guy, and Bartoli—who has built a career on rescuing repertoire from lazy categorization—slides a lever under that whole system and lifts.

The key move is the Paris detail. “When Rossini stopped composing, he was living in Paris” reads like biography, but it’s really an argument about artistic ecosystems: cities, languages, patrons, and salon culture shape what gets written, not just passports. Rossini’s late French songs become evidence that style travels, and that “French” isn’t a bloodline; it’s a working method, a set of tastes, a marketplace.

There’s also a performer’s subtext: permission. If Rossini can write “beautiful songs in French,” then a modern singer can treat French repertoire with bel canto instincts, and treat bel canto with French diction and refinement. Bartoli is defending interpretive freedom while sounding academically modest.

In cultural context, this lands against a backdrop of rigid repertoire branding—record labels, opera houses, even conservatories that sort music into national bins for easy marketing. Bartoli’s sentence is a small, elegant rebuttal: the canon is more hybrid than we admit, and the most interesting performances happen when you let the borders blur.