Baltimore Opera Company

Study Guide

La Sonnambula
The Sleepwalker

La Sonnambula’s tenors and their discontents

Regular patrons of the Baltimore Opera might find it hard to believe that La Sonnambula is by the same composer as last season's production of I Puritani . While the opera by Vincenzo Bellini performed last year dealt with soldiers, abducted queens and a religious war, this Bellini opera deals with shepherds, bickering sweethearts and village gossip. La Sonnambula is the odd man out in Bellini's works– most of his ten operas approach the tragic grandeur of I Puritani . In fact, La Sonnambula has been a major problem for those attempting to paint a coherent picture of Bellini's output as a whole, a problem made more pressing since it has always been among his most popular works.

La Sonnambula 's light tone, low-class characters and comic elements cause consternation because the overall trajectory of Italian opera in the nineteenth century seems to be one of increasing seriousness. At some point near the middle of the century, new comic operas almost cease to be composed. For many music historians, this fact became linked with the idea that the entire nineteenth century was "the Romantic Era," when operatic plots and music itself gradually ceased celebrating social order and convention, and began celebrating the unique inner emotional world of the individual.

The usefulness of "Romanticism" as a catch-all term to explain Italian opera in the nineteenth century has been seriously challenged, but Bellini did indeed put genuinely Romantic subjects on stage in his earlier works– above all in Il Pirata , based on an epic poem by the Romantic's Romantic, Lord Byron, but also in the dark, veiled heroine of La Straniera , or the queen driven to contemplate the murder of her own children in Norma . This leaves La Sonnambula looking not only out of place, but backward. This sense in increased by the fact that Bellini had begun an opera based on another über-Romantic subject, Victor Hugo's play “Hernani” (later to become an opera by Giuseppe Verdi), but abandoned the project in favor of La Sonnambula . Thus the semi-comic pastoral has been called a "retrenchment," a temporary repudiation of Bellini's progressive Romantic tendencies, a retreat from the main stream of music history.

Obviously this does the work a great disservice, and more recent writers have attempted to show how La Sonnambula 's underlying ideas are more Romantic than its idyllic setting and happy ending might suggest. Significantly, these interpretations often focus on the character of Amina.

Although she is a simple peasant girl, she has much in common with the typical Romantic heroine.

Recall again last season's Baltimore production of I Puritani . Like that opera's soprano heroine Elvira, Amina too is ill-treated by her beloved, is frequently thrown into confusion by events she does not comprehend, and– most importantly– she is prone to singing about things that only she sees in her sleepwalking scenes, a variant of the operatic convention of the mad scene. Among the many, many things that operatic mad scenes accomplish, they dramatically put on stage a terrifying disjunction between an individual, subjective, emotional reality and a conventional social reality– Romanticism in a nutshell.

However, showing how the character of Amina relates to other operas by Bellini leaves unanswered the question of why La Sonnambula is so unique. Certainly the lighter tone is most obvious in the scenes with the bickering couple Lisa and Alessio– at moments they appear to have been transported directly from an eighteenth century opera buffa. But the two of them do not appear on stage that much and are mostly irrelevant to the main plot.

The character of Elvino, on the other hand, couldn't be more central. And if Amina shares much with the soprano in I puritani , Elvino has almost nothing to do with I Puritani 's tenor hero Arturo. Arturo is forced into a tragic conundrum: should he let his queen be executed and stay faithful to his beloved, or should he save his queen and drive his bride to madness? La Sonnambula' s Elvino faces no such choice. In fact, he hardly faces any choices whatsoever. He simply believes what he sees. He is shown Amina in Rodolfo's bedroom; he concludes she has been unfaithful. He is shown Lisa's handkerchief from the same bedroom; he concludes that Lisa is unfaithful as well. By contrast, even the chorus of villagers (temporarily) believe Rodolfo when he swears Amina is innocent; they briefly allow words to trump images. Only Elvino remains unmoved– until, of course, the final scene when Amina's death-defying stroll on the rooftop visibly confirms the truth of Rodolfo's testimony for Elvino. So while a mad soprano like Amina or Elvira performs a disjunction between interior and societal reality, and a tenor hero like Arturo performs a disjunction between interior and societal obligations, poor simple Elvino just seems to have no interior at all. (A possible exception, his lament that though he knows Amina is guilty, he cannot fully erase her from his heart, is fleeting.)

This is not to say Elvino is uninteresting to listen to. Although the soprano arias are more famous, the tenor is given some of Bellini's most beautiful lyrical moments. As different as Arturo and Elvino are, they have one crucial thing in common: they were both written for Giambattista Rubini, one of the most famous singers of the early nineteenth century and certainly among the greatest tenors of all time. Rubini was sometimes identified as a "contraltino"– perhaps indicating a voice more similar to a modern counter tenor. In any case, it is clear that he was comfortable singing in what seems today an impossibly high range. Almost all of Elvino's music in La Sonnambula is traditionally transposed downward for the benefit of today's very different tenors. For example, the melody of Elvino's lament in Act 2, Scene1 repeatedly climaxes on D above high C; this is sung today as a more reasonable B-flat.

Abstract notes are one thing; how they sounded is a different matter. In La Sonnambula , as in almost all roles written for Rubini, the highest notes are not deployed in moments of violent passion or extroverted display, but rather in tender, intimate declarations of love. Where later composers would write a blaring tenor high note– perhaps at the moment of Elvino's discovery and denunciation of Amina in Act 1, Scene 2, for example– Bellini provides comparatively middle-range Fs and Gs.

The changes in operatic singing in the nineteenth century can generally be described as a long move towards louder, more piercing singing– sometimes suggestively termed more "muscular" or "athletic" voices. By the end of the century, this left the few early nineteenth century works that were still frequently performed, like La Sonnambula , to be uncomfortably reconciled with the new ways of singing, placing those muscular sounds into tender love songs where they would seem to least belong. This is true for all voice types, but it particularly glaring for tenors, for whom not only range and loudness changed, but also, it seems, the fundamental sound quality of the voice.

And here our discomfort with the character of Elvino collides with our discomfort with how he sings. Surely Bellini and his librettist Felice Romani wanted us to think of Elvino as a simpleton and a naïf, but he poses a problem for us now for the more specific reason that he seems so unconflicted– so sure of his own character and his uncomplicated relationship to reality. How un-heroic, how un-Romantic, how un-manly! The problem with Elvino's vocal lines is the opposite: he seems too conflicted, too divorced from what he is singing, talking of whispering zephyrs and babbling brooks (in the Act 1 duet) while singing ringing high As and Cs, for example.

Both of these issues are of course only our problems, not Bellini's, and I don't mean them to sound in the least like an argument against performing the work. I mean the opposite: it is precisely because of these strange moments of discomfort that listening to and watching the operas of Bellini can sometimes provide more engaging, more provocative and richer experiences in the opera house than more "seamless" works of the standard repertory written later in the century. Hearing vocal lines that seem somehow "out of place" might lead one to realize, not just in an intellectual way, but also viscerally, that operatic tenors did not always sing the way they do today. Elvino's failure to conform to stereotypes of operatic masculinity might lead us to not only think about, but also feel, how artificial and fragile those stereotypes might be. While Elvino's character might not have much depth, our reaction to him could have more depth than we can handle. It is our reality that La Sonnambula today might question. Perhaps La Sonnambula has the potential to inspire in its audience a mad scene of our own.

Gregory Bloch

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