Bel Canto Bully: The Life and Times of the Legendary Opera Impresario Domenico Barbaja

by Philip Eisenbeiss

Unscrupulous, devilishly ambitious and undeniably charismatic, Domenico Barbaja was the most celebrated Italian impresario of the early 1800s and one of the most intriguing characters to dominate the operatic empire of the period. Dubbed the "Viceroy of Naples", Barbaja was the influential force behind the careers of a plethora of artists including Vincenzo Bellini, Gioachino Rossini and the great mezzo-soprano Isabella Colbran. In this book, Eisenbeiss unlocks the enigma of this eccentric and fascinating personality that has been hitherto neglected.

300 pages, Hardcover

First published April 16, 2013

Reviews

[Denise]

I won't call this book academically flawless, but gosh darn it if it’s not just pitch-perfect accessible opera history and I want to make saucy saucy book-love to it. It combines two things that push all my buttons: the dirty financial particulars of opera as a business (unnnfff yes) and I have an enormous soft spot for people who somehow did opera without being musically talented, being largely talentless myself, and Domenico Barbaja was supremely musically talentless. He was musically illiterate. Heck, forgetting music, he was functionally illiterate. He never learned the Tuscan dialect considered proper Italian, he got by on a mixture of Milanese, Neapolitan, coarse French, and the grammatical flexibility of the word "coglione." He only got into opera because it went with gambling, his real business. Being an impresario for most people who tried it in the 18th and 19th centuries usually ended with the phrase "...and died in poverty." Opera is a fantastic money-sink, despite so much money changing hands between ticket holders and artists, the impresario was usually the one left holding an empty bag with debtors at the door. But Barbaja somehow managed to tame the chaos and amass a personal fortune.

And this book focuses on telling the story of that fortune, how one man came to run the opera houses in Naples, Milan, and Vienna, but it also tells a story of a changing Italy travelling towards unification, the years from 1780 to 1840, when Italy saw rapid changes in government; new ways of managing singers to expose them to more opera goers in more cities; and how opera went from a locally produced and consumed specialty to an efficiently-organized all-out Italian export. Musical appearances from Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Malibran, Colbran, Pasta, Rubini, essentially all the big players of the early 19th century opera scene at one point worked with Barbaja.

Must-read for a hard core opera history buff, as well as anyone who likes the financial side of cultural history.

[Kate]

This is the perfect book for opera lovers. I only gave it a 3 because my knowledge of opera is very shallow. For the aficionado, it would definitely be a 5. Very well researched and written, it did keep my interest from a historical perspective. I would recommend for all of those interested in opera.