The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (36 page)

After the fracas, the sympathetic doctor Lorenzo gives Giulietta a sleeping potion that will counterfeit death and save her from marriage with Tebaldo.
Lorenzo goes to find Romeo to explain his plan to reunite him with Giulietta and bring peace between their families.
But he is too late – Romeo has an angry confrontation with Tebaldo and hears the news that Giulietta has been found dead.
Distraught, Romeo breaks into the Capuleto family vault and, seeing Giulietta laid out like a corpse, takes poison.
As his strength fades, Giulietta revives.
They are briefly reunited, but when Romeo dies, Giulietta collapses lifeless over his body.

What to listen for

Wagner admired much of Bellini’s music, on the grounds that ‘it is strongly felt and intimately bound up with the text’.
Despite the thinness of the orchestration (often nothing more than repeated string arpeggios) and the aggressive but dull scoring for the feuding males, the music for the lovers is quite sublime.

Juliet is written for a lyric soprano, Romeo for a mezzo-soprano, although the music has occasionally been transposed to suit a tenor.
Romeo confronts the singer with tremendous challenges: the role is long and high-lying (with several exposed high Bs in Act I) and many long and highly expressive phrases, both in the duet with Juliet in Act I, and the opera’s final scene.
Juliet’s very first line, ‘Eccomi in lieta vesta’, is extraordinarily difficult to sing: the very first note, set to a vowel, requires a perfectly steady and controlled ‘swelling’ and diminishing (known as a
‘messa
di
voce’
) – if the singer can get that right, the omens for the rest of the performance are good.
Although it does not involve any startling flights of coloratura, much of this role is marked to be sung
piano
– a dynamic much trickier to sustain than
forte.

In performance

The success of a performance will depend on finding a pair of singers whose voices blend and contrast elegantly, and who understand that in singing Bellini, emotional expressiveness must be balanced by respect for the melodic integrity of the vocal line.

A small-scale production by Dominic Cooke at Grange Park Opera made a brave attempt to relocate the story to the world of forties
film
noir,
with the Capulets and Montagues presented as feuding mafiosi.

Recording

CD: Agnes Baltsa (Romeo); Edita Gruberova (Giulietta); Riccardo Muti (cond.).
EMI 64846 2

Norma

Two acts. First performed Milan, 1831.

Libretto by Felice Romani

Undoubtedly the masterpiece of early nineteenth-century Italian tragic opera.
Bellini and his librettist adapted the plot from a French neo-classical play in Racinian style, cutting a mad scene for Norma and emphasizing the character’s gentler side rather than her Medea-like desire for vengeance.

Plot

Gaul simmers with rebellion against the occupying forces of the Romans.
Against the wishes of her bellicose father Oroveso, Norma, High Priestess of the Druids, urges peace for the time being.
She has secretly borne two sons to Pollione, Proconsul of the Roman army, and although she has lost his affection, she is still torn by her love for him.
What she does not know is that he has become involved with the young Druid priestess Adalgisa, who agrees to return to Rome with him.

Adalgisa confides in Norma, who turns on Pollione in fury and threatens to kill their children in revenge.
But Norma cannot bring herself to commit the deed; she tells Adalgisa her own secret, and Adalgisa is so moved that she decides to renounce Pollione and urge him to return to Norma.

Pollione is adamant, however, and Norma strikes the sacred gong of the Druids, heralding war against the Romans.
Pollione is captured attempting to abduct Adalgisa.
He is led as a prisoner to Norma’s presence, and she privately threatens to kill him, their children and Adalgisa.
Then she summons her father Oroveso and the Druids, announcing that she knows the name of a guilty priestess who must be immolated on the sacrificial pyre.
Challenged to reveal the culprit’s identity, she admits that it is none other but herself.
Imploring her father to look after her sons, Norma ascends the sacrificial pyre.
Moved by her nobility of spirit, Pollione follows her.

What to listen for

Norma
stands or falls by the soprano who takes the title role.
In the operatic annals, it is indelibly associated with its creator Giuditta Pasta and, in our own time, Maria Callas – both of them magnificently domineering actresses with dark, strong, flexible voices and stage personalities capable of switching between the imperious high priestess, the scorned lover and the affectionate mother with equal conviction.
Since Callas, all sopranos (even the supreme vocal acrobat Joan Sutherland, in a technically immaculate partnership with Marilyn Home’s Adalgisa) have tended to realize one aspect of the role much more effectively than the others – and a singer who is mistress of the seamless melody of ‘Casta Diva’ is unlikely to manage the fire and brimstone of the Act I finale or the Gluckian grandeur of the final scene with equal conviction.

Adalgisa is an odd role.
She has no aria, only a long declamatory recitative, and vanishes unsatisfactorily from the drama in the last act.
Today, it is customary to cast a mezzo-soprano in the role, but this necessitates some downward transposition, and the contrast with Norma – and the blend of their duets – works far better if Bellini’s original intention is observed by casting a light, bright lyric soprano of virginal timbre.
Pollione is a dramatically unsympathetic and vocally ungrateful role which no self-respecting tenor ever relishes.

In performance

Charging the personal drama of
Norma
is the political dimension of the Gauls’ fight against the occupying Romans – subject-matter with an obvious resonance in the Austrian-occupied regions of northern Italy in the 1830s.
Directors today, anxious to avoid evoking the cartoon-strip imagery of Asterix, often like to emphasize this aspect of the opera by suggesting visual parallels with modern nationalist struggles.

Recording

CD: Maria Callas (Norma); Tullio Serafin (cond.).
EMI 47304 8

I
Puritani
(
The
Puritans
)

Three parts. First performed Paris, 1835.

Libretto by Carlo Pepoli

Bellini’s last opera, written months before his premature death.
Although the librettist was inexperienced and the plot is unintentionally ludicrous,
I
Puritani
shows formal innovations and harmonic and instrumental sophistication which can only leave one wondering how Bellini’s genius would have developed had he lived.

Plot