The Italian mezzo-soprano
Daniela Barcellona has become a prominent singer in the bel canto repertory, specializing in the travesti or cross-dressing roles in
Rossini's operas. As her career has developed, she has added music as far forward as the verismo period to her repertory.
Barcellona was born in Trieste, Italy, on March 28, 1969. She studied piano at the conservatory there, but switched to opera under the teaching of conductor Alessandro Vitiello, whom she married in 1998. Unusually, he has been her only voice teacher, and he has even composed her vocal ornaments, which singers use to distinguish themselves in the early bel canto repertory.
Barcellona made her debut in 1993 in La tragédie de Carmen, director Peter Brook's adaptation of
Bizet's opera, but most of her other early roles were in Italian opera, including an appearance as Cinderella in
Rossini's La cenerentola in Genoa in 1997. Her first major travesti role was as Tancredi in
Rossini's opera of the same name at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pessaro in 1998. She has gone on to play similar roles at La Scala in Milan, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Salzburg Festival, the Royal Opera House in London, and other top venues. By the early 2000s,
Barcellona was an international star. She sang
Verdi's Requiem with the
Berlin Philharmonic under
Claudio Abbado in 2001, and that year performed at a Metropolitan Opera season-opening gala in New York in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Another season opener in 2002, at La Scala, was the first of a number of appearances
Barcellona has made under conductor
Riccardo Muti; under
Muti she sang in a performance of
Verdi's Requiem celebrating the composer's 200th birthday with the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2013.
Barcellona has performed a series of roles at the Rossini Opera Festival, including Malcom (2001), Falliero (2005), Ottone (2006), Calbo (2008), and Sigismondo (2010). Her repertory since the mid-2000s has broadened, including other bel canto composers, Baroque opera (she has worked with top historical-performance conductors
Fabio Biondi and
Ottavio Dantone), and, increasingly often, the operas of
Verdi. She has ventured back into French opera, singing
Berlioz's Les Troyens in 2011 and 2012, and into verismo with the role of Santuzza in
Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana, but has continued to sing the
Rossini roles that made her famous.
Barcellona has been recorded many times, and in 2018 she was heard as Arsace in perhaps the most difficult of
Rossini's travesti roles, in his final Italian opera, Semiramide, in a
groundbreaking, historically oriented performance on the Opera Rara label.