MUSIC
Norma. By Vincenzo Bellini. (Royal Opera House.)
BELLINI'S Norma is only revived, at least outside Italy, for a soprano (almost always an Italian by adoption, if not by birth) who can do musical and dramatic justice to the title-role ; and, as such singers are rare, we do not often hear Norma. Maria Callas was the occasion of the Covent Garden revival on November 8th, and to support her was a cast of three Italian principals and an Italian conductor. The two acts of the original version were divided into three, and this was probably a wise decision; for a modern audience cannot help being aware of the rhythmic monotony and the harmonic unadventurous- ness of Bellini's music, and these are less irksome if the great scenes of the opera are evenly spaced and the whole work aired, as it were, by an extra interval.
The role of Norma demands an exceptional actress as well as a most exceptional singer. She must be a queenly, imposing tragic figure, able to command immediate and instinctive obedience from her savage Gaulish congregation, and to strike fear into her fickle Roman lover ; but she must not on any account ben virago. She is altogether a woman, sunk until the last moment in her love for Pollione and her children, whom she cannot bring herself to murder. That she must be a great, not merely a highly, accomplished, singer goes without saying, for she must combine a powerful dramatic voice and style with great purity and flexibility of line over a wide range and the ability to convey every shade of meaning by vocal inflexion and colouring, with support but no real assistance from the orchestra. Mme Callas perfectly understood the dominating, tigerish side of Norma's character, and her stance and gait were often worthy of the heroine of Strauss's Elektra ; but she did not suggest so successfully the agonised indecision of the woman and the mother, or the rapt votaress of Carla diva. Her Norma, one felt, might have shrunk at the last moment from killing her own children, but she would not have hesitated to revenge herself on Pollione. And the quality of her voice reflected this one-sided conception of the part, fully and effectively dramatic in the recitatives and arias of indignation or fury but, for all its beautiful flexibility, not deeply expressive in passages of tenderness or devotion.
Ebe Stignani's Adalgisa had that effortless generosity and warmth of tone and faultless nobility of style which is what we most value in the best Italian singers ; and if the confession of her innocent infatuation to the guilty Norma (the finest scene in the opera) had not the ideal freshness and youthful quality, this was made less notice- able by the lack of womanly tenderness in the manner and voice of Norma herself. Adalgisa's absence from the final scene, where both convention and dramatic propriety surely demand her presence, is an inexplicable blot on Rornani's librettc—the two priestly proces- sions coming so near together in Act I are another—and must have been a bitter pill for many Adalgisas to swallow. Pollione, Pinker- ton's Roman forbear, was made an unnecessarily unattractive figure by the absence of all lyrical grace and amorous intensity from Mirto Picchi's voice. Who, unaware of the libretto, would have guessed that his opening cavatina recounts a lover's dream disturbed by the promptings of a bad conscience ? The Oroveso of Giacomo Vaghi seemed to be inhibited by his priestly beard, and the firmness of his character was not, alas, reflected in his voice.
Nevertheless, granted that we no longer have the material (largely because we no longer have the real desire) for a great performance of Norma, this was a most enjoyable and often a moving experience. Many listeners must have felt their hearts sink each time either chorus or orchestra relieved the soloists, for the narrowness of Bellini's musical range in writing for anything but the solo yoke shows all too plainly in these passages. The flute and trumpet— with trumpet taking the second soprano part—which sing in such unexceptionable thirds in the overture, the march of the Druids- Carabinieri and even the famous chorus in which war is declared ea the Romans, can hardly fail to raise a superior smile today ; andit was with surprised delight that we heard the violoncellos' trailer)' of Norma's Teneri, teneri fig!!, the one moment in the opera w a the orchestra succeeds in rivalling the singers. Vittorio Gui prove4a most sensitive accompanist, and very properly made no attempt to add a fictitious interest to Bellini's orchestral writing.
MARTIN COOPER
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