With its production of Vincenzo Bellini’s most famous opera, Norma, Palm Beach Opera has ended its season on a bel canto note, and that is a good thing. The genre—opera’s most lyrical and expository—remains popular, but look for it in vain in the current season at the Metropolitan Opera, which features no bel canto works. Nor, for that matter, any early music, Russian or Eastern European operas, or Richard Strauss; next season is notably devoid of Wagner.
Norma, based on a French play by the Napoleonic bureaucrat and man of letters Alexandre Soumet, is set in ancient Gaul at the time of Julius Caesar’s conquest of the region for the Roman Empire. The title character is a Druid priestess who has secretly fallen in love with the Roman proconsul, Pollione, who has sired two children by her. He has, however, moved on to the younger Adalgisa, another conquest from the enemy camp, and dreams of bringing her back to Rome instead of Norma and their children. Norma discovers Pollione’s treachery and assigns all the blame to him, allowing her to reconcile with Adalgisa in a touching scene of feminine friendship. Fortunately, Adalgisa’s intervention saves Norma’s children, when, in shades of Medea, their mother considers killing them in a pure but deranged act of revenge. Confronting the faithless Pollione, Norma threatens to turn him over to her tribesmen for fatal punishment unless he gives up the other woman. When he steadfastly refuses, Norma moves to denounce him, only to tell the assembled druids that she is, in fact, the guilty party. Sorrowfully condemned to death for sleeping with the enemy—by her father Oroveso in the opera, rather than by an unrelated high priest as in Soumet’s play—she mounts the funeral pyre only to be joined by a repentant Pollione, who embraces her in fiery death.
A flop at its premiere in 1831, Norma’s fortunes turned almost immediately for the better. A melodramatic hit that penetrated the restraint of bourgeois and aristocratic audiences alike, it lasted as one of the most popular operas in the repertoire for the rest of the nineteenth century, championed by the famous Giuditta Pasta, who created the role and outlived Bellini by thirty years. Bel canto’s general eclipse by the high Romantic and expressionist schools relegated the opera to obscurity for some decades, until exceptional singers—beginning with Rosa Ponselle, then Maria Callas—championed the title role as a vehicle.
All the more enticing in Palm Beach’s production was the last-minute replacement of the scheduled lead soprano by the iridescently talented Angela Meade, who arguably owns the role internationally. As the arts rise in Florida, we have more of this to look forward to—the fans, their patronage, their donations, and their tastes are increasingly present here, even as New York and our other fading northern capitals watch their institutions fade, contract, and sometimes even disappear.
Meade has come a long way since she started singing the role over a decade ago. Her first forays were cautious and cool—perhaps too much so to deliver the fiery character, who must balance public and private life, cycle through betrayal and revenge, and resign herself to forgiveness and self-sacrifice. The German soprano Lilli Lehmann reportedly claimed that one performance as Norma was harder than all three incarnations of Brünnhilde in Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Niblelung combined. Meade has, however, mastered the challenge and labored to produce a magnetically insightful interpretation that floated gorgeous glissandos and mastered the role’s intricate coloratura runs. Her sense of wrong floated palpably into the hall, and her emotional journey was truly arresting. The set piece aria “Casta diva” (“Chaste goddess”) harkened back to the standard of opera’s Golden Age. Her second act aria of confrontation “In mia man’ alfin tu sei” (“You are finally in my hands”) menaced Pollione with hair-raising verve. Paired with the talented young mezzo-soprano Ashley Dixon, who gave a fresh and radiant Adalgisa, the female duets, especially the famous “Mira, o Norma” (“Behold, oh Norma”), were models reaching the art form’s highest standards.
Alas, the male singers fared less well by comparison. The Sicilian tenor Paolo Fanale has a sweet voice that serves him well in lighter romantic parts, but it was poorly suited to Pollione’s more martial idiom, which is better cast with strong dramatic tenors. After his introductory aria “Meco all’altar di Venere” (“With me at Venus’s altar”), Meade simply overwhelmed him in their scenes. His high notes were dry and wobbly. Fanale missed much of the role’s gravitas, and some boos were unfortunately audible at curtain calls. The French bass Nicolas Testé made a stronger impression, though he occasionally sounded throaty in his priestly pronouncements. Still, he has a fine legato and delivered Oroveso’s late evening aria “Ah, del Tebro al giogo indegno” (“Ah, the humiliating yoke of the Tiber”) with a firm sense of righteous outrage.
Carlo Montanaro is a welcome presence on the Palm Beach podium and led an exciting performance, drawing out the overture’s ebullience and the darker tones that accompany much of the action. The read was rattling good and perfectly well paced for the action. The chorus, alas, was too small to leave a strong impression of angry Gauls at war. But what they lacked in vocal power emerged in a strong show of sharp weapons.
Keturah Stickann directed a production taken from the Cincinnati Opera. Her work in Palm Beach includes its stunning staging of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot in 2020. In this effort, Norma rises from the plains of Gaul to mountain peaks, perhaps those of France’s Massif Central or some remote part of the Alps. The Druids’ life is suffused with ritual, including the sacrifice of eagles that look eerily like the eagles on the captured Roman battle standards that adorn the Druid encampment. Stone structures serve for dwelling space, though they give the impression of having been destroyed once or twice before. The sky is a bright, grayish blue for most of the opera, but a kind of crimson solar eclipse appears toward the end when Norma and Pollione go to their fiery deaths.
