…Long live ENO!

The three most moving, transporting death scenes in 19th-century opera all involve the respective heroines mounting a funeral pyre — partly, no doubt, a matter of operatic convention and fashion, but also recalling opera to its duty as a rite of purification. Berlioz’s Didon in Les Troyens, like her creator, is so relentless in her grasp of the truth that she fails to achieve anything but a vision of Carthage overcome by Rome, and ends in despair and execration. Brünnhilde in Götterdämmerung rides into Siegfried’s pyre in a state of ecstasy, imparted to the audience with all Wagner’s unlimited capacity for exaltation. In Bellini’s Norma things are more complicated: Norma’s faithless lover Pollione joins her on the pyre in a shared purgation while the Druids regard them both with horror. It would be absurd to say which of these is the most profound as well as thrilling; they offer starkly differing views on the dramatic possibilities of willing death. What is clear is that Norma is up there with the other two, and can offer, in a performance of the stature of English National Opera’s new production (previously seen in Leeds and elsewhere), the kind of experience that one goes to opera for years in the hope of seeing. It’s rare for an audience to be so still and so captivated, especially a first-night Coliseum audience. For once I felt as if I were taking part in a shared experience.

The first indication that it would be an exceptional evening was in the opening chords of the Overture, a belligerent and energetic piece with a surprising ethereal coda, conducted, as was the whole opera, with masterly pacing and fluid tempi and plenty of rubato by Stephen Lord, and immaculately played.