And Rosa Ponselle, by the fervor, the dignity and the tonal beauty of her embodiment – which in its finest moments had even a touch of that fabulous, transfiguring thing, the “grand style” of the immortals – enforced and made eloquent this performance. Urban’s sacred oak in the “dim, druidical wood” of the first scene with the Metropolitan’s chaste moonbeame silvering her slim white figure and the kneeling awestruck crowd encircling the priestess, poured her remarkable voice into the lovely mold of Bellini’s “Casta diva,” the prosperity of this revival was a forgone conclusion.įor Norma herself, despite the musical importance of certain of the duets, is very nearly the whole thing in Bellini’s opera the other characters are mere “feeders.” It is the druid priestess herself, betrayed, revengeful, despairing and, at last, serenely and exaltedly self-sacrificing, upon whom Bellini and his librettist have centered almost all of the dramatic interest and the musical significance of the work. From the moment when Miss Rosa Ponselle, standing beneath Mr. He would assuredly have felt that Norma as revived last night almost a century after its premiere in Milan, and more than a generation after its last hearing at the Metropolitan, was anything but a fiasco – solemn or otherwise. If Vincenzo Bellini, miraculously restored to earth, had attended last night’s performance of his Norma at the Metropolitan, he would have had no cause to write afterward, as he wrote dejectedly to a friend after the premiere of the opera at La Scala ninety-six years ago” “I have just returned from the performance of Norma, and would you believe it – Fiasco! Fiasco! Solenne Fiasco!” Review of Lawrence Gilman in the New York Tribune Rosa Ponselle in Bellini's Norma, November 16, 1927
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