If Norma was all about guilt, La Sonnambula is about innocence. Both appeared in 1831, but innocence came first. It was a rare move by Bellini to opera semiseria, complete with a happy ending. But it nearly didn't happen: he had first worked on a version of Ernani, about as seria as you can get, but deserted that story to avoid the Italian censors, (leaving it to Verdi to fight that fight with them 13 years later.) Sleepwalkers and druids were apparently safer subjects - and he reused his Ernani music in his remaining works. There were only two more, most famously I Puritani, before his death in 1835.
"Bellini turned to a tale so innocuous that even its bad behavior is really nothing of the sort. Why was the young lady dozing in the wrong man's room? She'd been sleepwalking -- it could happen to anybody! In the hands of another composer, the whole thing might seem silly and simpleminded. But the innocence of its sentiment is the perfect complement to the inspired purity of Bellini's melodic style." More from NPR here.
Synopsis? You don't really need one after that - but here's the full, flimsy story.
So unlike all Bellini's other operas, the sweet music isn't precariously balanced over violence, murder, brutality and doom. Which these days is its problem - Sonnambula is a purely pastoral opera.
Librettist Romani based it on a scenario for a ballet-pantomime, and the score specified its setting in an idyllic Swiss village - 'village green, an inn, in the background a water mill, in the distance mountains'. Some images actually had Amina, our heroine, sleepwalking a plank across the water mill! Bellini responded to the pastoral setting and simple, highly implausible story with some of his most lyrical and demanding music.
So productions these days face two challenges - "How to present La Sonnambula without choking the audience with Swiss kitsch and nostalgia for things long beyond the memory, let alone the experience of most people? (Remember that La Sonnambula has reappeared only when there was a soprano who could bring off Amina.)" And then you need in a tenor who can cope with the entire bel canto range and acting demands of her suspicious and capricious lover, Elviro, and it's not surprising that Sonnambula was infrequently performed.
Those great bel canto sopranos
The great Aminas of our time sang this amazing music very differently. Here's a quick comparison...
Here are links to the three most famous arias.
“Come per me sereno" - Amina's full-on happiness aria.
Maria Callas in Milano 1957
Joan Sutherland at ROH, 1960
'Ah, non credea mirarti'. – Amina's sleepwalking 'mad scene’
Here’s Callas in a 1965 concert performance here – sound’s faulty, but image fascinating.
Sutherland Carnegie Hall, December 5, 1961
'Ah non giunge' - Amina's final aria in full pastoral happy ending mode
Sutherland at the Met, 1963
Oh and the tenor? Here's Pavarotti's Elviro presenting his mother's ring to Sutherland's Alvira at the happy beginning: 'Prendi, l'anel ti dono'. Lyrics here. And here's a gem - Sutherland talking about the gala at Covent Garden for the king and queen of Nepal - all the tiaras! all the royals wearing gorgeous designer gowns - and she was in her sleepwalking nightie!
In our production, Natalie Dessay has a splendidly selfcentred Elviro in Juan Diego Florez. Listen here to his tantrum aria (from another production), "Ah, perchè non posso odiarti" - "Why cannot I despise you/ faithless, as I should?/ Still you are not driven/ wholly from my heart."
There's an interview here with Dessay with the Met's Peter Gelb during lockdown. In the second half (from 12 mins) she talks of singing as an actress - 'to make the people almost forget that I was singing' - and about Bellini music.
Our Production
This production was booed at the Met in 2012 on operning night. The majority of the critics, while deploring bad manners, also deplored the gimmick of the production. Here's a sample:
Inch by inch the Met drags itself into the late 20th century. So Mary Zimmerman, trailing Broadway clouds of glory, is imported to direct La sonnambula. ‘The plot,’ she says, ‘is famously light and even for the world of opera, a little incredible.’ Notice the emphasis on the word ‘even’.
Ms Zimmerman, it seems, has ‘issues’ with ‘opera’. So out goes the familiar Tyrolean setting and in walks Amina and Elvino, on- and off-stage lovers who are rehearsing a run-of the-mill production of La sonnambula in a studio in up-to-the-minute Manhattan. ...Is it any more than directorial chic to make it a play-within-a-play when the result is so far removed from Bellini and Romani’s carefully wrought exercise in the Pastoral?
The premise behind Mary Zimmerman’s exasperating new production of Bellini’s “Sonnambula” for the Metropolitan Opera, which opened on Monday night, is that the story of this 1831 bel canto classic is hopelessly absurd... Yet through his emotionally piercing and sublimely lyrical music Bellini touches on the buried complexities of this flimsy story. You would think an opera director could find contemporary resonances. Amina is an orphan, raised by a single parent, a good-hearted mill owner with ambitions for her daughter. From her opening aria the fragile Amina seems almost disbelieving of her luck at finding a mate as splendid as Elvino. By sleepwalking into the count’s room, is she exposing some subconscious desire? Or sabotaging her happiness?
Instead of trying to take the opera on Bellini’s terms, Ms. Zimmerman places the story in contemporary New York, where we see a small opera company rehearsing “La Sonnambula.” ... As a directorial concept, “This is just a rehearsal” has become almost as clichéd as “It’s all a dream.” So despite its seeming boldness, Ms. Zimmerman’s staging, the first Met production of the work since 1972, comes across as a cop-out.
But wait. There’s a very thoughtful response to the production and the angry audience booing and outraged messages in the (long) essay about the opera and the contexts here.
La Sonnambula works beautifully on its own luxuriously dreamy musical terms. But that doesn’t mean we should not be open to an intellectual or avant-garde approach to its staging. I found Zimmerman’s production, which contrasted gorgeous, heavenly music with a workaday, modern space, not a desecration but its exact opposite: a sanctification, a testament to the fact that grace and beauty can occur in the most ordinary, contemporary settings.
Intrigued? Here's one more....the website of the theatrical lighting designer has many favorable reviews, but none unqualified. – This is the conclusion from Berkshire Review
Do we need all this sophistication in La Sonnambula, when what we're really interested in is the vulnerability of the characters (Amina's above all.), their transient emotions, and Bellini's delightful music? Of course not...and all that stage business was more of a distraction from those simple relationships and emotions than an expansion of them.
To be discussed...!
PS How else might this kitch opera be updated?
Sonnambula has gained popularity recently as bel canto was revived, but the challenge of the pretty pastoral setting remains. For a modern director, perhaps the key to a new focus is the village crowd, clearly described in the libretto as fickle and easily moved from groupie fawning adoration to group-powered and poorly informed hostility?
Such an approach was taken by Spanish director Barbara Lluch in a 22/23 production in Madrid. While according to OperaWire the production was faulty, it did lift the story above the pastoral idyll.
Lluch sets the action in a village reminiscent of Salem’s rural superstitious society at the end of the 17th century—famous for its’ witchcraft trials. This thematic connection to the fear-mongering culture of Salem is represented by the cast’s costumes and their grey color palette—designed by Clara Peluffo—and their alienating behavior. They behave like a group that not only believes in ghosts, but turns from loving Amina to despising her and isolating her when they believe her to be unfaithful to her fiancé Elvino... Visually, there were references to the Industrial Revolution, seen in the chopping down of trees in the first act, and the smoky, factory machine in the first scene of Act Two. There was a clear intention to provide, through these visual elements, a social message. But the feminist intent behind changing the end of the story—wherein Amina remains atop a roof, rather than joining her fiancée Elvino, who had previously mistreated her in public, below—did not correspond with the lively, joyful music of the final cabaletta. This is yet another example of how stage directors can ignore the story and music of the operas they work with to instead impose their own, ‘original’ dramaturgy, with inevitably poor results. Their ideas often conflict with the music, which is what establishes the atmosphere and psychological state of operatic characters. Despite these issues, the production was easy on the eyes, the sets were both beautiful and meaningful. It is not a great production, but it is definitely not the worst one out there.
Lyn, 30/11/23