LA SONNAMBULA: A STUDY GUIDE

A. SETTING THE STAGE

Sleepwalking usually occurs during the slow-wave stages of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep (stages of sleep in which eye movement does not take place) ... Persons affected with this disorder usually have their eyes wide open in a stare.

Episodes of sleepwalking typically occur during deep sleep (stages III and IV or slow wave sleep) ... Episodes of sleepwalking are also known to occur during all stages of NREM sleep and at any time during the night. Since most slow wave sleep occurs earlier in the night, sleepwalking is usually seen in the first one third of the sleep cycle and rarely during naps. The person is unable to respond during the event and does not remember the event. In some cases, it is associated with incoherent talking.

Sleepwalking occurs most commonly in middle childhood and preadolescence, with a peak incidence in children aged 11-12 years. This sleep disorder can have a genetic tendency and tends to run in families. Sleepwalking often lasts into adulthood.

[Associated medical conditions include] psychiatric disorders, for example, posttraumatic stress disorder, panic attack, or dissociative states (eg, multiple personality disorder).

Episodes range from quiet walking about the room to agitated running or attempts to "escape." Typically, the eyes are open with a glassy, staring appearance as the person quietly roams the house. On questioning, responses are slow or absent. If the person is returned to bed without awakening, the person usually does not remember the event.

In most cases, no treatment is necessary because sleepwalking rarely indicates any serious underlying medical or psychiatric problem.

(eMedicineHealth.com)

Medical reports show that about 18% of the population are prone to sleepwalking. It is more common in children than in adolescents and adults. Boys are more likely to sleepwalk than girls. The highest prevalence of sleepwalking was 16.7% at age 11 to 12 years of age. Sleepwalking can have a genetic tendency. If a child begins to sleepwalk at the age of 9, it often lasts into adulthood.

For some, the episodes of sleepwalking occur less than once per month and do not result in harm to the patient or others. Others experience episodes more than once per month, but not nightly, and do not result in harm to the patient or others. In its most severe form, the episodes occur almost nightly or are associated with physical injury. The sleepwalker may feel embarrassment, shame, guilt, anxiety and confusion when they are told about their sleepwalking behavior.

In a few instances, sleepwalking can result in violent behavior.

(stanford.edu/-dement/para.html)

Bel canto -- literally “beautiful song,” but more comprehensively an operatic style characterized by smooth and expressive vocalism, often with a minimum of dramatic impact or logic.

(Herbert Kupferberg)

If my music proves beautiful and the opera is successful, you may write a million letters demonstrating how composers maltreat poetry and so on, but you will have proved nothing. Engrave upon your mind in indelible letters: ‘In opera it is the singing that must move people to tears, must make them shudder and die’ ... Poetry and music, to be effective, demand naturalness and nothing else ... Do you know why I said that a good drama is one that has no good sense in it? Because I know full well what intractable animals literary people are, and how absurd their general rules of good sense.

(Vincenzo Bellini, letter to Count Pepoli)

By mid-July [1830] Bellini and [librettist Felice] Romani had decided that their opera would be based on Victor Hugo’s play, Hernani, which had been staged in Paris earlier in the year to enormous success. However, Romani ... did not begin to write Hernani until November. During December, Bellini worked on the score to Hernani, completing four numbers and beginning a fifth before abandoning the project. (Some of this music was in due course to find its way into Norma.) By the end of December, Bellini and Romani had decided to substitute La Sonnambula.

Why Hernani was abandoned is still not clear ... Whatever the reason, by early January the two men were already at work on La Sonnambula which they completed fairly quickly, though not in time for the original date of the premiere in February to be adhered to. The opera reached the stage on 6 March 1831.

The success of La Sonnambula was immediate, and has proved enduring. The day after its premiere, Bellini wrote to a friend, reporting “the resounding success that my opera had last night,” and adding that his principal singers, Rubini and Pasta, were “two angels, who excited the public to an enthusiasm bordering on madness” ... The opera’s pastoral charm and enchanting melodies have kept it popular whenever and wherever there have been singers able to do it justice ...

The plot of the libretto was taken from the scenario of a ballet, La Sonnambule, ou l’Arrivee d’un Nouveau Seigneur by Eugene Scribe ... The ballet in turn was derived from a two-act vaudeville by Scribe and Casimir Delavigne, first performed in Paris in 1819. The story of the sleep-walking village maiden became popular in several adaptations not only in Paris but also in London. Romani transferred the action from the French Camargue to a Swiss village in the early nineteenth century, altered the names of the characters, and wrote elegant verse for them to sing.

(Charles Osborne)

In the final instance, however, it is Felice Romani who represents the early melodramma and stands as one of the long line of premier Italian librettists. Romani is par excellence a transitional figure, for his poetic prowess looks backward to Metastasio, Goldoni, and the Favart pastoral, while his characterizational abilities and grasp of the brevita and directness of the melodramma look forward -- albeit with some trepidation -- to the full-blown Romanticism and melodrama of Cammarano and Piave ...

Romani is a transitional figure because he represents the values and attitudes of an older time within the framework of a very different age. He has been called “a classic writer who became a Romantic without knowing it,” but in fact he merely aped certain Romantic conventions without fully believing in them. Trained as a classical poet, he never ventured far beyond classicism, and although he dutifully used the work of such poets as Victor Hugo and Byron, he never concealed his dislike for all the tenets of Romanticism they stood for. His greatest achievements in the libretto lie in the quality and “musicality” of his verse, itself slightly anachronistic in a time when verse was being crushed under the heel of music; in the directness and brevity of his storytelling; and, primarily from a dramatic point of view, in the individuality and humanity of many of his characters ...

Romani, in common with most Italian poet-librettists, had an adaptive rather than a creative mind. All his stories were cobbled up from other sources; reworked against a deadline for a specific set of circumstances ... What this meant in Romani’s case was that many of his librettos suffer because of haste and overburdening, for he never could refuse a commission.

Two of Romani’s librettos for Bellini highlight the backward-looking orientation of the librettist. La Sonnambula is a slightly modernized pastoral in the Favart vein, with happy peasants disporting happily on a picture-postcard landscape. Norma, Romani’s finest achievement, is far more than a re-creation of the past ... Norma plays precisely to Romani’s classical training and temperament, and in so doing stands out as a splendid anachronism in the time of the emerging melodramma.

(Patrick J. Smith)

Romani had wanted to make Amina the Count’s long-lost daughter, born out of wedlock, but Bellini vetoed the idea. A trace of Romani’s suggestion, however, remains in the words of Count Rodolfo’s elegant cabaletta, “Tu non sai,” in which he is moved by Amina’s beauty to exclaim that she strongly resembles a young woman he loved long ago.

(Charles Osborne)

Bellini finally accepted insistent invitations to visit London and Paris ... Enthused about the performance of Sonnambula in which Maria Malibran was singing at the Drury Lane Theatre the evening of his arrival, he wrote to Florimo, “The first to come to greet me was [leading soprano Maria] Malibran who, throwing her arms around my neck in great exultation of happiness, sang those first four notes of mine: ‘Ah, m’abbraccia ...’ She could say no more; words failed her as they failed me.”

(Ruth Berges)

[Maria Malibran] died young, at twenty-eight. She had a riding accident and was wounded in the head. That very evening she played in Bellini’s La Sonnambule. For one last time she was sublime, wearing makeup and a wig that hid her bruises, in a role where the torpor of her injuries strengthened the strange, hallucinated aspect of the young girl who sings in her sleep. Then she lost her voice, and finally her sight. Six months later, still singing, in spite of everything, she died.

(Catherine Clement)

Bellini was naïve, even in his trivialities. He was one of the last of the naïve masters. His limited vocabulary was often inadequate for the scope of his emotions, but the emotions were genuine and flowed straight from the heart. With a God-given, if severely restricted, talent he gave to Norma and the somewhat weaker La Sonnambula the best that was in him. There are excellent things side by side with poor and outmoded stuff.

(Eduard Hanslick)

One of the most important musical events of the season took place at Her Majesty’s Theatre on Saturday night, when Mlle Etelka Gerster ... made her debut before an English audience, in the character of Amina in Bellini’s La Sonnambula. Her success was gratifying proof that our national habit of believing blindly (or, rather, deafly) in any worthless artistic material that impresarios think fit to impose on us, has not quite blunted our appreciation of genuine merit.

(George Bernard Shaw)

Our grandfathers and grandmothers regarded this opera with the greatest favor, and as one reviews its tuneful melodies, it simple, natural story, one grows disposed to congratulate them on their good sense. The opera was much beloved among debutantes, both Albani and Adelina Patti using it for their fist appearances in England. In the 30’s it was a novelty by a young and gifted composer; by 1850 it was part of every opera season, shining through a halo of great casts ... and it continued to be popular until the Wagnerian era brought a revulsion of feeling against the simplicities of the Bellini school. Early in the twentieth century, however, this very simplicity proved its charm once more, and came as a refreshing draught from the bubbling spring of “pure” melody in an operatic era which was to culminate with the Salome of Richard Strauss, and even more complex works.

(Victrola Book of the Opera, Sixth Edition, 1921)

With the presentation of his fourth opera La Sonnambula (“The Sleepwalker”), Vincenzo Bellini (1801-1835) firmly established his reputation as THE composer of opera in Milan and the world-at-large. To most, in this two-act masterpiece, he achieved true greatness ...

La Sonnambula was extremely popular in the nineteenth century, particularly because of the number of prima donnas around who could sing the female lead role, but in the early part of [the 20th] century it fell into comparative neglect, gaining popularity again only recently because there are as before a number of superior sopranos who can sing the demanding title role.

(Moss Music Group, notes to the Fonit-Cetra recording with Maria Callas)

In their production of La Sonnambula, Callas saw Amina as a simple rustic. [Director Luchino Visconti] demanded that she remain the sacred monster -- “Maria Callas PLAYING a village girl” -- and, teaching her tippy-toe steps, made her resemble the romantic ballerina Taglioni. Callas longed to be innocently natural; but for Visconti, she summed up the artifice of art.

(Peter Conrad)

As Callas restored the original strength and humanity embedded in Norma, so she reinstated the quiet hues and passions of Amina. Bellini, after all, wrote both roles for the same singer, an artist to whom Callas is frequently and justly compared -- Pasta. Only when one hears Amina in a voice that endows Norma with its proper humane dimensions is one aware of the depth to be found in Sonnambula. As Bellini designed the role of Amina, and as Callas reminded us, she is a creature of flesh and meant to move and not merely to delight.

The final scene is built around a remarkable brace of arias for Amina which are virtually a summing up of the work and its central figure. The recitative and cavatina of this scene are among the most moving pages in operatic literature ... Again Amina is sleepwalking, but her dreams are now bordered with sorrow ... The aria is concentrated melody ...

(John Ardoin)

The final scene contains ... the opera’s great finale, Amina’s andante cantabile aria sung as she sleep-walks, the exquisitely sad “Ah! non credea mirarti” and, after her awakening, the ecstatically joyous “Ah! non giunge,” the very epitome of the brilliant cabaletta, its fioriture used not for mere vocal display but to express Amina’s great happiness. Thus ends one of Bellini’s finest operas, a melodically prodigious work which Kobbe describes with impressive understatement as “a good evening’s entertainment.”

(Charles Osborne)

All Bellini’s work is moved by broken unions. There is a sudden moment of fragility, when the space to be jumped is too vast, when the chasm of rupture opens beneath the woman’s feet, and there sings the slow rhythm, the distraught fiancée’s mad lament ... This is how slowly your heart beats when you are asleep; this is the sleeping heart of dreaming sleepwalkers who cross worm-eaten footbridges with adorable steps and surmount obstacles with the song of the unconscious ...

Amina, a young peasant woman, in an innocent Switzerland that Rousseau would have recognized, is Bellini’sSonnambule, the sleepwalker ...

Asleep, she enters the room of a man who is not her fiancé; and she dreams of him in this other’s arms. There will be a heavy price to pay. She will have to risk her life. Just when the fiancé, who believes he has been betrayed, is about to marry someone else, the sleepwalking girl appears, through a window overhanging a mill. Far below lie the stream and the huge wheel that endlessly, rhythmically, keeps milling wheat.

And sleeping, Amina walks; and almost falls, on the rotten plank that gives. The only thing protecting her is sleep. A somnolent prophetess, she tells the truth in her sleep to the man she loves, whom she has lost in a dream. An originating scene: churning water, the original, living, dangerous force; the absolute danger of emptiness and death; the unconscious and the magical sleep of a threatened virgin.

... the ordeal was necessary; they had to cross the bridge, confront phantoms, and display their ecstatic bodies and distraught voices to everyone. Opera exacts this payment; it is the only one for which it will turn loose its prey. Even then Bellini is all tenderness for the women he creates; even then his music wraps them attentively in vigilance, weaving biological rhythms around them so the body can get its bearings.

(Catherine Clement)

Weber had found the romantic mind to be a grotto of guilty fears and superstitious credulity. Bellini, less aghast at the romantic traffic with demons, has his own view of this irrationality, in the fables of the villagers about their local phantoms. The urbane Count derides their folklore but capitulates to it when he mistakes the sleepwalking Amina for the legendary ghost. In Weber’s German forest, imagination conjures up devils; Bellini’s spirits are benign. The Count romantically suspends disbelief for a while, but analytically demolishes the illusion when he explains to her neighbors that Amina is a “sonnambula”: they don’t understand the term, and are told that it is compounded from the words “andare” and “dormir.” All charms fly at this touch of cold philology. Yet Amina’s experience remains a magical initiation. She envisions something and ... awakes to find it granted to her. Having lost Elvino, in her second sleepwalking scene she fancies they are reunited, and when roused finds him waiting to reclaim her ... La Sonnambula ends by placating those bogeys and investing them in the surrounding landscape as familiar gods. There they will, as Amina sings, make the earth on which we live a paradise of love.

(Peter Conrad)

B. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND WRITING

1. Bellini says that poetry and music “require naturalness to be effective.” Maria Callas, the great twentieth century singing actress whose performances helped to rehabilitate the bel canto repertory, wished to play Amina as a simple country maiden, but her equally great director Visconti wanted to her to represent the “artifice of art” (as Conrad puts it). How could such a story, and an opera based on it (especially a “bel canto” opera with its emphasis on vocal display), be “natural?”

2. Several commentators point out the transitional nature of La Sonnambula, rooted in classicism but tinged with romanticism. What is meant by those terms? What qualities in the work are classical, and what romantic? In this context, consider the descriptions of the work as a “pastoral” and the at the same time belonging to the genre of “melodramma.”

3. The once enormously popular Italian bel canto operas of Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini have periodically fallen from favor, and then re-emerged. As the sources point out (with some contradiction), they were neglected in the late 19th century but revived in the early 20th, or neglected in the early 20th but revived in mid-century. The first explanation attributes their revival to a reaction against the heavy complexities of such works as Richard Strauss’s Salome. The second says that they came back to life because of singers who could do them justice, such as Callas. We seem, in the early 21st century, to be enjoying another bel canto revival. Why do you think these operas have become popular yet again?

4. Is La Sonnambula all about the singer(s) and the singing? Does it have any interest beyond pretty tunes sung prettily?

5. Is Amina, as Ardoin claims, “a creature of flesh and meant to move and not merely to delight?” In other words, is she a believable character?

6. Most bel canto operas that are not out-and-out comedies end tragically. La Sonnambula is a serious opera with a potentially tragic outcome, yet it ends happily. Are you convinced by the happy ending?

7. Catherine Clement brings an imaginative, feminist perspective to this work (and many others), in which she examines how women are perceived in opera largely through the eyes of their (male) creators. Here she calls attention to Amina’s vulnerability, virginity, and status as an object for display, who is actually protected by sleep. Also, Clement finds symbolism in the churning water and “biological rhythms” in Bellini’s work. What do you think of this interpretation?

C. PROJECTS AND FURTHER RESEARCH

1. Find out more about sleepwalking. There has been much research in recent years devoted to sleep disorders, and abundant information available in books, journals, and online. How medically accurate is this opera’s representation of sleepwalking?

2. Probably the greatest sleepwalker in literature is Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth. Compare that portrayal of a sleepwalker with Romani/Bellini’s. Verdi’s opera Macbeth makes the Lady’s sleepwalking scene a tour de force of dramatic vocal display, but very different from Bellini’s. Listen to it or watch a video version, and consult the study guide elsewhere on this site.

3. Meet other literary sleepwalkers, such as Lucy Westenra in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Consider the uses to which sleepwalking has been put in literature, such as plot device or metaphor.

4. Other Bellini operas in the Met repertory are Il Pirata, I Puritani, and the queen of bel canto operas, Norma. See the study guides at this site, get to know the operas, and compare them to La Sonnambula.

5. Lovers of bel canto can’t resist comparing singers to each other, and recordings make detailed comparisons possible. Listen to the final scene of La Sonnambula as interpreted by great sopranos past and present, especially such mid-twentieth century divas as Callas, Sutherland, Caballe, and Sills, as well as the singers preserved on early twentieth century recordings and today’s bel canto superstars. How much difference do a voice, a vocal technique, and an interpretation actually make?

6. The opera Romani and Bellini DIDN’T write, Hernani, was later composed by Verdi (as Ernani) and became one of his earliest successes. It’s in the Met repertory; see the study guide. Listen to it. Imagine how Bellini’s version would have been different.

7. Write a story, play, or musical work in which sleepwalking is a major component.