The Metropolitan’s new La Sonnambula happily erases the opera’s previous production that twisted the libretto with smirking irony, thus sabotaging Bellini’s sublime score and the excellent singing of the principals, Natalie Dessay, then Diana Damrau as Amina, Juan Diego Florez, then Javier Camarena as Elvino. The present director, Rolando Villazon, rereads the work without betraying its essence. Amina, heretofore portrayed as a passive victim of her fiancé and her rustic village, is here liberated from the restrictions of her hidebound mountain community. Through Villazon’s perspective, the libretto, often characterized as weak, becomes a compelling narrative.
La Sonnambula was one of the first operas treated in this blog: https://www.blogger.com/u/3/blog/post/edit/7211323416075256950/6485706952834799789
I return to it now with a new set of excerpts.
Nadine Sierra adds Adina to her superb Met Gilda, Juliette, and Lucia; she is clearly at the top of her game and among the excellent contemporary exponents of these key roles. In a clip from a 2022 Madrid performance, she deploys exemplary musicianship, a luminous, rich voice, and breathtaking agility in Adina’s joyous entrance aria. Adina thanks the villagers for their good wishes on her forthcoming marriage to Elvino: “Come per me sereno (How peaceful for dawns the new day).”
Bellini composed one of his most plangent melodies for the bass role. Count Rodolfo sings of his happiness at revisiting the site of his youth: “Vi ravviso o luoghi ameni (I again see these lovely places.)” The Italian bass-baritone, Sesto Bruscantini, conveys the wonder of return to a beloved landscape with particular sensitivity.
The finale of Act I is a remarkable ensemble of soloists and chorus: “D’un pensiero e d’un accento rea son son [(I have never sinned in thought or word).” Compromised when found in the Count’s bedroom, sleepwalking Amina is unable to persuade the scandalized and accusatory Elvino and the villagers that she has no idea how she got there. The clip is from a 1957 commercial recording that captures Maria Callas in one of her greatest La Scala successes. Nicola Monti is Elvino; future star Fiorenza Cossotto, still cast in secondary roles, is Teresa. Antonino Votto conducts the La Scala orchestra and chorus.
The opera concludes with a double aria for Amina. In the first, the lyric “Ah! non credea mirarti, (I never believed I would see you.") Amina, in her sleepwalker’s trance, believes that she is reunited with Elvino. Montserrat Caballé, who never performed the role of Amina in the theatre, gives the full measure of the character’s sadness as she shapes Bellini’s characteristically long phrases.
When Elvino again gives her the ring with which he declared his love in Act I, Amina expresses her joy in the extremely altitudinous range and the virtuosic embellishments: “Ah! non giunge uman pensiero, al contento ond'io son piena (Human thought cannot conceive of the happiness that fills me.”) In this clip from a 2024 Venice performance, Jessica Pratt astonishes with her technical facility and her ease on high. One of the leading coloratura sopranos on Europe’s opera stages, British born and raised in Australia, she has sung only rarely in the United States.
P.S. My first post on La Sonnambula, published in 2014, featured the young Cesare Siepi’s recording of “Vi ravviso.” Its beauty is still unequalled. I repeat it here.