Bellini’s Norma is an opera that I not only adore: it obsesses me, too. Whenever I listen to it, I have to hear it again very soon, and parts of it lodge in my mind, playing over and over again, to an extent that very few other pieces do. It was the work through which I first came to realise Callas’s lonely greatness, and it was through her that I came to see how great Italian opera could be, too, having childishly dismissed it tout court as superficial compared with the great German traditions. I still think that Norma operates on a level different from any other work by Bellini or his contemporaries, or even, I am inclined to think, Verdi. The only Italian composer who rivals it for purity and passion is Monteverdi, to whom Bellini owes nothing and has no resemblance.
The trouble for the opera-goer is that Norma is almost never performed. The new and mainly excellent production by Opera North is the first opportunity I have had to review it in the 16 years I’ve been writing for The Spectator. Everyone quotes Lilli Lehmann’s remark that she would rather sing three Brünnhildes than one Norma, but I am not sure that singers are as scared of it as managers are. Bellini doesn’t command devotion from operatic hoi polloi, unless there is a superstar in the cast. And most of the post-Callas superstars have done more to harm his reputation than to enhance it. Only Leyla Gencer, within living memory, can be compared for the comprehensiveness of her interpretation of Norma with Callas, and she never sang it in the UK.
Opera North gets off to a good start by stating, on its title page, that the production is ‘in homage to the great Maria Callas’. No one will expect the singer of Norma to match up to Callas, one can at most hope that, like her, singers will realise how intensely passionate Bellini is, and what art there is in expressing that in uniquely fluid melodic lines, or sometimes in lines that don’t even reach the melodic, as if the suffering Bellini gives his characters to express is too much to be rendered beautiful — that happens for page after page of the sublime finale.
The Dutch singer Annemarie Kremer doesn’t have a great voice, or an especially lovely one; but she is continuously, unexaggeratedly expressive, and she is prepared to take risks with it, almost all of which came off on the opening night. Her voice is more characterful in its lower register than on high, but she didn’t skirt any of her alarming coloratura. The other main female role, the priestess Adalgisa, was sung by Keri Alkema, if anything more of a soprano than Kremer — but Bellini was happy for the two to swap roles. Their voices blended exquisitely in the great duets, and they managed to sound determined rather than jolly bouncing girls in the concluding passage of the Act II duet, which can sound all too much like Rossini in frisky mood.
Pollione, the faithless Roman proconsul whom they both adore, is always a problem. There are some bel canto tenors around, but the part tends to be taken by beefy singers who sound as if they’re practising for Otello (Verdi’s) or a Puccini hero. Luis Chapa isn’t exempt from that charge, and the production only reinforces his lack of appropriate style. But he is tolerable, and delivers his Act I aria with conviction.
How does one stage Norma? Has Monty Python made it impossible to take druids and occupying Romans seriously? I don’t see that it has. We could at least be given the chance to decide. This production is not one of Christopher Alden’s major crimes, nor one of his frightening successes. Yet updating Norma to the 19th century and relocating it in North America, with a rural, woodworking community oppressed by top-hatted industrialists, hardly makes sense.
The point is simply that a community with one set of deeply held beliefs and customs is being dominated by a military regime with no understanding of the offence they are giving. That’s the context. What matters is the extraordinary ferocity with which Norma responds to her lover–oppressor, and the elevation of her transcendence of fury, jealousy and vengeance. The musicologist Alfred Einstein wrote, in 1935, ‘No one knows what music is who does not come away from Norma filled to overflowing with the last pages of this [last] act.’ Those were wonderful days when musicologists said things like that.
Bellini is still mainly thought of as a refined or overrefined delight for canary fanciers. There is greatness in several of his operas, but Norma is almost consistently great, and progressively so, and an experience as necessary as any that opera can provide. I can’t imagine that anyone would leave this Opera North production without at least temporarily sharing that conviction.
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