Absent from Paris operas for nearly twenty years – aside from an annual recital featuring exorbitant ticket prices – the theatrical Bartoli was awaited as impatiently as if she had been Christmas Eve. The prospect was especially exciting because it was an opera by Rossini, one of her favourite composers, whom the singer had chosen to celebrate her reunion with the French public. In fact, two years after a very acclamed passage at the Zurich Opera, the Théâtre des...