At the general of “Giulio Cesare” with Lucile Richardot

Last summer, critics praised Lucile Richardot’s portrayal of Cornelia in Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Salzburg, alongside Le Concert d’Astrée and Emmanuelle Haïm. In this second instalment of her diary for Total Baroque Magazine, the French mezzo-soprano reveals a bit more of the backstage workings of the production, her Austrian adventure, and her personal mishaps! An adventurer of repertoires, Lucile Richardot moves with ease from Monteverdi to Berio, from intimate recitals, notably with harpsichordist Jean-Luc Ho, to major opera stages such as Aix-en-Provence, La Fenice, or La Scala. Part two of an Austrian adventure!

Salzburg, July 12 

A Saturday off for the singers, but not for the orchestra, whose entire sections arrive today for a full read-through of the score in a hall at the Mozarteum, the university just across the local river, the Salzach. I might finally get to hear a few notes of Mahler by heading deliberately to the Felsenreitschule at 5:30 p.m. [for Peter Sellars’s One morning turns into eternity]. And if all goes well, I’ll continue at 7 p.m. with a Mass at the nearby Franziskanerkirche. I need beauty and spirituality, in a beautiful Baroque building, with music, I hope, on this day marking the second anniversary of my father’s passing, which came a month after my mother’s…  

In the meantime, I’m catching up on my administrative backlog (already partly tackled yesterday during the long break between the two calls when I once again stayed in my dressing room—my clothes weren’t dry anyway after the drenching I got cycling over at 12:30 p.m.…). I finally sent my updated bio and portraits to the festival after noticing that, thanks to my procrastination with the translations, I was the only one with neither photo nor text on the website page dedicated to our opera, Giulio Cesare, because of my own oversights… Usually, in such cases, people make do with whatever they find online, sometimes tired of chasing me unsuccessfully or waiting for me, but here, big surprise, they were still waiting for me to wake up! But no one had thought it useful to remind me about this ever-unfinished task… drat. Well, let that be a lesson. Sometimes, when you’re really and constantly nose to the grindstone, trying to scrape together here and there a few hours of rest, sociability, or focused work on scores you never have enough time to polish—because each day brings something new or some new disaster to manage urgently—you end up postponing indefinitely the texts and files you’re asked for, which five institutions are demanding at the same time, with three different translations, urgently in November for a festival the following summer… I admit I don’t always understand this urgency, from my vantage point already tangled up in much shorter-term concerns! 

This morning, I added a bit to my submissions; thankfully they offered to translate my bio for me, because my attempts with ChatGPT last June were rather disappointing… if not downright calamitous! Monthly status declaration too, on the France Travail website—the usual little routine of a French intermittent (an artist who works on a project-by-project basis), relating to the previous month’s activities, not those in Salzburg… 

And I’m trying to deal with breakdowns at home in Paris, remotely, thanks to the help and motivation of my “beloved cohabitant,” who pushes back against my bad procrastinating and ostrich tendencies—hiding both my head and my dust under the rug… 

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