Norma, Vincenzo Bellini’s most important opera, returned to the Metropolitan Opera this season for the first time since Sir David McVicar’s production premiered on opening night in 2017. Then, the opera was a vehicle for the stellar soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who delivered a solid and critically praised performance. This time the title role went to the Met’s reigning dramatic soprano in Italian works Sonya Yoncheva, who was unfortunately plagued by illness for much of the run and cancelled a number of performances—but fortunately not the one under review.
Norma had a rocky premiere at Milan’s La Scala on the day after Christmas in 1831, but it enjoyed an enthusiastic reception in its first decades. Emerging within the bel canto school, which prized expository singing above all else, it stood out for the immediacy of its music to the drama and its uncommon directness of emotional expression. The bel canto school lost its primacy within about 25 years of the premiere, but Norma remained on the books as a veritable ‘Mount Everest’ for serious sopranos. Bellini’s successors praised the work, even as many excoriated bel canto and moved in the direction of what Richard Wagner, who loved Norma, called ‘music drama’ rather than ‘opera.’ Giuseppe Verdi, who was still under 20 years old when Norma premiered, revered most of its features throughout his life and emulated them in his own intensely dramatic works. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called Bellini’s opera “a tragedy of extreme perfection.”
Norma’s staying power was sufficient to guarantee it a spot in the Met’s repertoire as early as 1890, long after most of the bel canto repertoire had decisively fallen out of performance. It only lasted a couple of seasons, but returned to dominate the mid twentieth-century international repertoire, which witnessed a Renaissance of the bel canto school led by the performances of such renowned sopranos as Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Zinka Milanov, and Montserrat Caballé. Like them, their successors almost unanimously attempt the role, and now Yoncheva has given it a solid try.
Yoncheva’s voice is creamy and appealing, with a beautifully rounded middle register and a strong technique for powerfully high ascents. Her starring appearances in the title role of Umberto Giordano’s Fedora earlier this season figured among that opera’s musical highlights. Here, however, Yoncheva tested some limits. Norma, a Druid priestess in Roman Gaul, has been betrayed by her lover Pollione, the Roman proconsul and thus her political enemy. Their union has produced two children, but Pollione has abandoned Norma for Adalgisa, a younger priestess whom he fantasizes about marrying in his very first aria “Meco all’altar di Venere.” Norma learns of the affair and viciously swears vengeance, motioning to murder her and Pollione’s children. Later relenting, she embraces Adalgisa and offers Pollione his life if he will leave her rival. When Pollione refuses, Norma summons her tribe for war and promises to denounce a traitor in their midst, ostensibly Pollione but in reality herself. Condemned to death by her father, the high priest Oroveso, she proceeds to the stake, only to be joined by Pollione in redemptive death and fatal union.
The title role requires fire and brimstone levels of rage. Yoncheva lacked that flame in crucial moments, though comparative listening across performances, including multiple live broadcasts, suggests that Maurizio Benini’s pedestrian conducting may well have been the culprit. Yoncheva had all the necessary notes, the refined technique, and the stage presence, but Benini hemmed her in and prevented her from unleashing the character’s temper, as any very good Norma would race to do. Particularly flat was the dramatic trio that ends the opera’s first act. More sedate set pieces, like Norma’s signature aria “Casta diva”—an apostrophe to the moon goddess to heal her heart—came out rather more appealingly. The overall impression was that of a great singer underserved by poor leadership from the podium. One might just wonder, though, whether the times and their dubious sensibilities are no longer suited to outsized emotional outbursts by women.
Benini’s conducting may also have affected Yoncheva’s Pollione, the talented American singer Michael Spyres, whose celebrated range has led him to be called a ‘baritenor.’ Spyres delivered a virtuoso performance in the title role of Mozart’s Idomeneo earlier this season, but here the voice sometimes sounded woolly and downbeat. Once again, lackluster direction vitiated what probably could have been a much stronger effort.
The normally stentorian bass Christian Van Horn similarly suffered as Oroveso. The usual clarity that allows his low strains to radiate with demonic appeal seemed curiously absent. It was really the Russian mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova who emerged as the performance’s star. She may have been less burdened by Benini than the two leads, but whatever the reason she offered a well balanced and purring interpretation of Adalgisa’s music. “Mira, o Norma,” her duet with Yoncheva, emerged as the evening’s best singing.
Despite all the immolation, McVicar’s production did not exactly set the world on fire when it premiered six years ago. Like much of his work, his Norma is dark and gloomy in palette even if it avoids the oppressive stylization that has marred some of his other work. The Druids’ forest is nocturnal and foreboding. Norma inhabits what one critic infelicitously called a “cavernous yurt” that dominates the stage with browns and grays but hardly gestures toward the inviting or homey. The fire at the end was dramatic enough, but so dominated by smoke that one got only a vague impression of the finale. And, although the full moon is an apposite image to foreshadow “Casta diva,” it was downright odd to see it projected on the show curtain both in this opera and in the Met’s new production of Wagner’s Lohengrin, which overlapped with the revival.
Above all, the absence of the controversial Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, whom the Met’s management stupidly fired for asinine political reasons last year, remains keenly felt. Yoncheva is a capable and even an alluring singer, but deputizing her into Netrebko’s repertoire cannot fill the gap and burdens her with unfair expectations. Netrebko’s continuing European career illustrates the utter absurdity of New York’s bizarre cultural politics, where she just won a sizeable arbitration award for canceled performances for which the Met declined to pay her, despite a contractual clause requiring the company to do so. As a dismal new season approaches, there are ample opportunities to find her abroad.
