More Beautiful Than One’s Dreams

La Sonnambula is an opera better understood by audiences than by critics. Vincenzo Bellini and Felice Romani were one of the greatest composer-poet teams in the history of opera, comparable to Mozart with Da Ponte, Gluck with Calzabigi, and Verdi with Boito, and this work is perhaps the purest specimen of their ability to distill human emotion into verse and melody. The work’s naive candor has invited condescension and misunderstanding from some sectors of opera’s intelligentsia, but the public has never made that mistake, and has loved it for nearly 200 years.

There may be no other great opera that so fully entrusts its message to the one central element of melody, and that makes it a perfect candidate for Teatro Nuovo’s experimental style, which puts the singer in the driver’s seat. The melodies take us to the heart of the situation, and the situation is of perennial appeal: we see the heroine’s innocence, while everyone around her sees what they think is her guilt. We suffer with her, and rejoice with her when she is vindicated - and all of this happens in music “more beautiful than one’s dreams” That is Wagner’s description - actually provoked by another Bellini opera, but uncannily appropriate for one set half in the dream-world. Read More.