THE CECILIA BARTOLI CLAQUE

An ocean of ink has been spilled about Cecilia Bartoli, the Italian mezzo- soprano, most of it nonsense: that she is the salvation of opera; that she is the heiress to Maria Callas and Marilyn Horne; that she is, even, a first- rate singer. Bartoli is indisputably the hottest commodity in classical music — in fact, one of the hottest ever. Her recordings sell in the millions, her face is plastered on countless magazine covers, and her recitals are treated as important cultural happenings. Rarely has so great a fuss been made over a performer who merits so little.

Bartoli, now 30, began her steep ascent in the early 1990s with several well-marketed albums and a handful of ballyhooed operatic appearances in Salzburg, Milan, and Houston. Audiences swooned over her sparkling personality and her freewheeling way with Rossini and Mozart. Before long, Time, 60 Minutes, and the rest came calling, and Bartoli was not merely a promising, though immature, mezzo but a full-blown phenomenon.

Cecilia Bartoli, by Kim Chernin (with Renate Stendhal), is an exceedingly strange book, which is saying something for a book about an opera singer. (One study of divas, by Ethan Mordden, is titled Demented.) Chernin lives in Berkeley, California, where she writes about “eros and memory,” hunger, psychoanalysis, and “spirituality”; Stendhal is her partner and collaborator. Together, they have examined their obsession with poor Bartoli — Chernin’s more than Stendhal’s — and told the world about it. The book is so embarrassing that it is almost too painful to read.

Here is how it came about: Chernin and Stendhal trooped down to the Berkeley concert hall one day in 1991 to hear Bartoli in recital. Chernin fell desperately, unnervingly, insanely in love. “Imagine a sensuous, embodied angel,” she writes, “standing quietly on a concert stage, reporting back to God about the mysterious joys and sorrows of human existence.” She had discovered, in addition to an interesting, dark-voiced singer, a mission: “The voice has to be heard. It cannot be kept to oneself. Its mystery must be shared, communicated, revealed. As for me, I could certainly tell every music lover I ran into that a miracle had taken place on a rainy Sunday . . . I could repeat the name ‘Cecilia Bartoli,’ spread the word.”

Chernin promptly formed a kind of Bartoli Support Group, which gathered at her home. There was Augusta, who, when moved, “found that she had no need for words and preferred to sit in silence”; there was Cathy, who “thought that crying was a barrier to deeper feeling [while] I argued that being swept up and swept away was in itself a form of knowledge”; there was Sophia, who ” thought we should all spend the night and go on listening”; and, fatefully, there was Amy, who “suggested I write a book.” Chernin did not require much coaxing and mused that “a book about the singer should be written in a pitch of high ecstasy.” Cooler heads recommended “more circumspection,” but “my enthusiasm for the singer, which seemed to call into question my powers of judgment and assessment, was, I felt, an appropriate medium for appreciating an artist whose outstanding gift was the power to inspire rapture.”

Thus, Chernin induced Harper-Collins to publish what others might blushingly confide in a private journal. She acknowledges that “diva worship has its dangers,” but she seems not to recognize any of them. Chernin is part Shirley MacLaine, part would-be critic/musicologist, and part 14-year-old with a crush. In one paragraph, she confesses to musical ignorance — “I had to do this without a professional knowledge of music or a technical musical vocabulary” — and in the next, she declares that Bartoli possesses “perfect vocal technique,” a laughable claim.

Tiresome, too, is Chernin’s physical fixation on Bartoli: “She carried her ample bosom as a veritable cornucopia, the skin of her chest, neck, and arms, with its mother-of-pearl shimmer, an entirely adequate substitute for jewelry. ” A male operatic character, sung by a mezzo, must, in Bartoli, “make his way through this magnificent female with voluptuous breasts and shoulders,” then, again, on the next page, it is “the womanly, voluptuous Cecilia,” with “her dark eyes, abundant hair, low-cut gowns, full breasts, beautiful shoulders, perfect skin.”

When Bartoli was a (normal-looking) teenager — performing in public for the first time — she was, according to Stendhal (who provides the ” performance guide” at the back of the book), “awkward, gaunt, perhaps even anorexic,” bearing “painfully little resemblance to the gorgeous, full-bodied singer the world has come to love.” Still, one can only regret that, “as she matures physically,” Bartoli “has begun to shy away from trouser roles” (such as the one mentioned above).

At times, Chernin is nervously maternal: “It was her health and stamina that concerned me. I had begun to worry that the world would exhaust Bartoli before she had a chance to give the world what was in her”; “I began to worry about those colds.” And never will she brook unfavorable criticism of her idol: “If I, a fan, reading these reviews, am forced to wonder how she endures it . . . how can the singer herself feel?” Bartoli herself is far soberer, stating, “For myself, I say it is always possible to get better.”)

Though this book is quite short, it is annoyingly repetitive, because there are only so many ways to say, “Cecilia Bartoli represents the summit of artistry and is an emissary from Heaven to waken slumbering humanity.” Fan- dom, of course, has its place, and relations between performers and their admirers can be touching. (A woman once kept a cigar stub discarded by Franz Liszt on her person until the day she died.) And concerts without heroes would be unthinkably bleak. Yet Chernin has cheapened — and probably frightened — her subject through unreasoning, aggressive (and trumpeted) idolatry, which the true fan understands as inimical to genuine appreciation.

So why Bartoli? Why did the finger of celebrity and adulation emerge from the sky and point at her? She is pretty and charismatic, yes, but there are singers prettier and as charismatic. She has a competent coloratura technique, but there are much better. She is not without musicality, but she is frightfully undisciplined and libertine. At her worst, she approaches a score rather as Justice Brennan approached the Constitution — as an empty vessel into which to pour personal feelings and emotions and desires. She can take the most familiar of pieces and, with her talent for distortion, render them almost unrecognizable.

Yet she has the big, wide world at her feet. In the meantime, a Kentucky- born soprano named Faith Esham gives standard-setting performances in high- school auditoriums in New Hampshire; they are captured on videotape by a hand- held camera and circulated among musicians, who are slack-jawed. Patricia Spence, a matronly mezzo-soprano from Seattle, gives evidence of Marilyn- Horne-like-ness every time she opens her mouth; but People magazine and the television networks are indifferent. It is Bartoli who is anointed, and who reaps all that comes with anointment — including this foolish book.

Jay Nordlinger is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.