Monica Bacelli graduated from the Conservatory of Pescara. After winning the Concorso “Belli”, she made her debut in Spoleto as Cherubino and Dorabella. Since then her career has taken her to major theatres in Italy and throughout the world including La Scala Milan, Wiener Staatsoper in Vienna, Salzburg Festival, Covent Garden in London and San Francisco and to leading orchestras including Berlin Philharmonic, Concertgebouw Amsterdam and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. Conductors with whom she has collaborated include Abbado, Bychkov, Chailly, Dudamel, Harding, Mehta, Muti, Ozawa, Pappano, Rattle and Bolton.
Monica Bacelli is the recipient of the Premio Abbiati, a prize awarded by the Italian music critics.
Her wide repertoire includes all the principal Mozart roles for mezzo soprano (Idamante, Cherubino, Elvira, Dorabella and Sesto), Rossini, Baroque (composers such as Monteverdi, Cavalli, Handel) as well as French operas including Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Werther, Don Quichotte and L’Enfant et les sortilèges .
Monica Bacelli is recognized as a leading interpreter of contemporary music both in concert and on the stage. She has sung many world premieres including the stage monologue Le bel indifferent of Marco Tutino and the title role in Ivan Fedele’s Antigone at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.

She was noted for her long collaboration with Luciano Berio who wrote the role of Marina for her in Outis (La Scala Milan) and Orvid in Cronaca del luogo as well as the chamber work Altra voce presented at the Salzburg Festival as part of the Pollini project, and repeated in New York, Tokyo, Paris and Rome. She has also sung Berio’s  Folk Songs many times including at La Scala Milan, with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Ensemble Intercontemporain and at the Proms in London.
Her searching interpretative curiosity, her interest in chamber music and her research into unusual vocal repertoire have led her in recent years into a wide variety of projects ranging from early to contemporary music, with a focus on Italian art song of the twentieth century.
Recent engagements include: La Fortuna and Melanto in Il Ritorno di Ulisse in Patria at La Scala; Ottavia in L'Incoronazione di Poppea at the Palais Garnier Paris; Isolier in Le Comte Ory at Grand Théâtre de Geneve; Il re orso at the Opera Comique in Paris; Pelléas et Mélisande at La Monnaie Brussels and at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino under Daniele Gatti; Berlioz Les Nuits d’été at Teatro Comunale di Bologna; Rossini's Stabat Mater under Gianluigi Gelmetti in Trieste; Moïse et Pharaon and Le Comte Ory at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro; Il Matrimonio Segreto in Turin; Colasanti's Requiem in Milan and Rome; Le Nozze di Figaro in Aix-en-Provence, Royal Opera Hous Covent Garden in London and in Madrid; Evgenij Onegin in Naples and La Sonnambula and Roméo et Juliette in Madrid.

Plans include: Battistelli's Teorema at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin and Adriana Lecouvreur at the Teatro Real di Madrid.

March 2023