Vincenzo Bellini, La sonnambula (1831)

I needed something light after Parsifal, so I hit on this, Bellini's opera with the goofy-as-hell-sounding plot: Amina and Elvino are going to be married and they're rapturously in love, but SCANDAL! Amina is found sleeping in the bed of Count Rodolfo, who was staying at a local inn! Now Elvino won't marry her and they are sad. Oh, wait, turns out she was only there because she had been sleepwalking. Never mind.

A few surprises watching this: first, I'd kind of assumed it was going to be a zany, Donizetti-esque comedy, but it's really not that. It's a romance with a happy ending, but there's a fair bit of pathos and little overt humor. Second, it's actually not as goofy as all that. Sure, the sleepwalking business is a little silly, but it's pretty easy, I found, to get past that, and it doesn't make the whole thing seem excessively silly. I feel like people at the time were just learning about the concept of sleepwalking and being taken with the novelty. There's a scene here where the Count is explaining the concept to the townspeople and they're all "you're shitting us; that's not a real thing." You may know a rather famous nineteenth-century novel the denouement of which revolves around it. But anyway, the whole thing was okay by me, and the music is spectacular, so what more do you want?

Well, funny you should ask...this performance features Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Flórez being effortlessly charming, so that's all right. But it's a meta-production. It's set in a rehearsal space as singers are preparing to perform this very opera (better not think too hard about that). I get the unavoidable impression that the producers thought that the opera was too silly, and that therefore they needed to add this layer of postmodern ironic distance, but it's just incoherent, and seriously, the opera is not that silly, dammit. The most I can say for it is that at a certain point I got into it sufficiently that I was mostly able to see through all this to the story underneath, but boywould I ever have preferred something more traditional. I mean, you could probably find a way to poke a little fun at the story (which would only be fair) without going to these extremes.