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Bellini’s Norma: Tragedy in Its Purest Form München
Nationaltheater
05/22/2026 - & May 26, 29, June 2, July 17*, 20, 2026
Vincenzo Bellini: Norma
Elena Stikhina*/Vasilisa Berzhanskaya/Gilda Fiume/Sonya Yoncheva (Norma), Emily Sierra (Adalgisa), Najmiddin Mavlyanov (Pollione), Roberto Tagliavini*/Erwin Schrott (Oroveso), Aebh Kelly*/Shannon Keegan (Clotilde), Michael Butler (Flavio)
Bayerischer Staatsopernchor, Franz Obermair (Chorus Master), Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Giacomo Sagripanti (Conductor)
Jürgen Rose (stage director, sets & costumes), Jürgen Rose & Michael Bauer (lighting), Jo Siska (choreography), Peter Heilker (dramaturgy)
M. Butler, N. Mavlyanov (© Geoffroy Schied)
Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma (1831) occupies a singular place in the history of Italian opera. Premiered at La Scala on 26 December 1831, it crowned the bel canto tradition while simultaneously anticipating the heightened psychological realism of Verdi’s mature works. Although its première received only a guarded reception, it quickly established itself as Bellini’s masterpiece and one of the defining achievements of nineteenth-century lyric theatre.
Felice Romani’s libretto, adapted from Alexandre Soumet’s Norma, ou L’infanticide, was set in Roman‑occupied Gaul, where the Druid high priestess Norma had secretly broken her sacred vows by bearing two children to the Roman proconsul Pollione. The drama explored irreconcilable conflicts between public duty and private passion, spiritual authority and human frailty, creating a tragedy concerned less with politics than with betrayal, forgiveness and sacrifice.
Composed at the height of Bellini’s powers, Norma epitomised bel canto through its long-breathed melodic lines and seamless fusion of vocal beauty with dramatic expression. Bellini favoured sustained lyrical expansiveness over ornamental display, with his deceptively simple melodies concealing extraordinary emotional depth. Even Richard Wagner admired the “purely human” quality of his melodic inspiration.
The title role became one of opera’s supreme challenges, demanding not only flawless technique but also exceptional dramatic intelligence. Norma was required to embody priestess, political leader, lover, mother and tragic heroine, often within a single scene. The celebrated “Casta diva” represented only one aspect of a role encompassing both serene lyricism and devastating emotional intensity. Equally remarkable were Bellini’s duets for Norma and Adalgisa, which transcended conventional operatic rivalry to become one of the nineteenth century’s finest portrayals of female solidarity.
Lilli Lehmann famously remarked that it was easier to sing all three Brünnhildes in a single evening than one Norma. Maria Callas later transformed modern perceptions of the work, revealing its unique synthesis of vocal virtuosity and dramatic truth and establishing a benchmark against which every subsequent interpreter was measured. Although great sopranos from Joan Sutherland to Montserrat Caballé illuminated different aspects of the score, relatively few singers ventured the role after Callas. More recently, Joyce El‑Khoury in Athens and Vasilisa Berzhanskaya in Parma suggested that a new generation of convincing Normas might yet emerge. For devoted bel canto enthusiasts, a distinguished Norma remained an event worth travelling for, something reflected in Munich by the conspicuously international audience.
Yet to regard Norma merely as a succession of celebrated arias was fundamentally to misunderstand Bellini’s achievement. Beneath the seemingly effortless melodic abundance lay a work of extraordinary dramatic sophistication, in which the composer’s celebrated melodia lunga became the principal vehicle of psychological expression. Set against the backdrop of Roman occupation, where religious obligation, maternal love and political resistance collided with private desire, the opera possessed an almost Greek inevitability. Norma herself emerged as one of opera’s great tragic heroines, a Medea without vengeance whose nobility arose through the acceptance of her own destruction.
It was therefore deeply gratifying that the Bavarian State Opera continued to preserve Jürgen Rose’s magnificent 2006 production, now firmly established among Munich’s finest repertory stagings. At a time when Bellini’s masterpiece too often succumbs to fashionable reinterpretations, Rose’s staging remains a model of intelligent fidelity. Responsible for the direction, sets and costumes alike, he recognizes that Norma requires no conceptual reinvention, only a theatrical world in which myth, ritual and intimate human tragedy could coexist with complete conviction.
Rose’s visual world combined monumental simplicity with ritual dignity. Vast stone architecture, sacred groves and austere ceremonial spaces evoked an ancient civilization poised between spiritual authority and political collapse, while Michael Bauer’s subtle lighting enveloped the action in moonlight, twilight and sacrificial fire. Rather than illustrating the score, the production created the spiritual landscape Bellini’s music itself seemed to inhabit, from the metaphysical stillness of “Casta diva” to the ritual grandeur of the final immolation.
The production’s greatest strength lay in its remarkable restraint. Nothing appeared imposed upon the work; every gesture arose naturally from the characters. The Druids were portrayed neither as picturesque relics nor modern political allegories, while the Roman occupation remained a constant presence without overwhelming the intensely personal tragedy. Rose kept the emotional relationships firmly at the centre: Norma’s conflicting identities as priestess, mother and abandoned lover, Adalgisa’s struggle between innocence and guilt, and Pollione’s irresolution. Their great confrontations attained exceptional psychological truth, especially the duets between Norma and Adalgisa, which unfolded as profoundly human conversations rather than opportunities for vocal display. Rose also handled Norma’s children with uncommon sensitivity, integrating them naturally into the drama without sentimentality.
The evening belonged above all to the singers, who embraced Bellini’s formidable vocal demands with both technical assurance and genuine dramatic commitment. Heard last season as Amelia in Simon Boccanegra in Berlin, Russian soprano Elena Stikhina proved an ideal Norma. Stikhina is an impressively versatile singer whose repertoire includes roles as diverse as Cio‑Cio San in Madama Butterfly, Brünnhilde in Die Walküre, Salome, Aida, Tosca, Tatiana in Eugene Onegin, Cherubini’s Médée and many more. This vast range enabled her to portray an ideal Norma, one capable of negotiating the demanding coloratura while bringing the role the expressive weight of a fuller voice. She conveyed Norma’s many facets -loving, desperate and vulnerable- with complete conviction. She brought considerable vocal opulence to the title role, combining the amplitude of a true dramatic soprano with an unexpected flexibility in Bellini’s long cantabile lines. Her “Casta Diva” unfolded with noble serenity rather than overt theatricality, sustained by beautifully controlled legato and finely judged dynamic shading. If occasional passages revealed a voice now richer than ideally suited to pure bel canto, the sheer intensity of her dramatic conviction more than compensated. In the great confrontations with Pollione and Adalgisa she charted Norma’s emotional disintegration with compelling psychological insight, while the final confession achieved genuine tragic grandeur rather than melodramatic excess.
Cuban-American mezzo Emily Sierra proved an admirable Adalgisa. Her warm, luminous mezzo-soprano blended beautifully with Stikhina’s fuller timbre, producing duets of exceptional beauty and balance. She resisted any temptation to portray the novice priestess as merely naïve, instead revealing a young woman torn between religious duty, friendship and forbidden love. The two women’s voices intertwined with remarkable sensitivity, reminding one that Norma is, in many respects, as much a study of female solidarity as of romantic betrayal.
After portraying a charismatic and towering Sergei in La Scala’s Lady Macbeth in Mtsensk earlier this season, Uzbekistan’s Najmiddin Mavlyanov sang Pollione with impressive stamina and ringing security across the demanding tessitura. His robust tenor occasionally favoured heroic declamation over Italianate refinement, yet he successfully conveyed the Roman proconsul’s arrogance, passion and eventual remorse.
Italy’s Roberto Tagliavini is an ideal bel canto bass. Admired as Banco in Munich’s Macbeth a fortnight earlier, as Don Basilio in Parma’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, and as Count Rodolfo in Vienna’s La sonnambula, Tagliavini brought commanding authority to Oroveso, his sonorous bass lending dignity to the Druid leader while avoiding excessive severity. Aebh Kelly and Michael Butler provided excellent support as Clotilde and Flavio respectively, completing an unusually cohesive ensemble.
An established Rossinian, as demonstrated by his conducting of Zelmira last summer in Pesaro, La Cenerentola in Barcelona and Il turco in Italia in Madrid, Giacomo Sagripanti proved himself an ideal Bellinian stylist as well. He resisted the temptation to inflate the score into proto‑Verdi, instead allowing Bellini’s deceptively simple orchestration to breathe with natural elegance and flexibility. Tempi flowed organically, always supporting the singers while maintaining dramatic momentum, and the great melodic arches unfolded with remarkable patience and refinement. Under his direction, the Bavarian State Orchestra played with luminous transparency, allowing the woodwind solos to emerge with exquisite delicacy while never overwhelming the voices. Bellini’s orchestration, often underestimated, revealed its subtle harmonic richness and expressive colour through Sagripanti’s meticulous attention to balance and phrasing.
Equally impressive was the Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera, whose disciplined singing lent genuine weight to the opera’s great public scenes. Their invocations possessed solemn grandeur without heaviness, providing an imposing dramatic framework within which the intensely personal tragedy unfolded.
In an operatic landscape increasingly dominated by conceptual reinterpretation, this Norma stood as a persuasive reminder that intelligence need not announce itself through novelty. Jürgen Rose’s production served Bellini rather than itself, allowing the composer’s sublime score and profound understanding of human frailty to emerge with undiminished force. Supported by distinguished singing throughout and by Giacomo Sagripanti’s elegant, idiomatic conducting, the performance demonstrated that genuine theatrical truth often resides not in reinvention but in thoughtful fidelity. Bellini’s masterpiece required no embellishment; in Munich, it spoke with timeless eloquence.
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