Natalie Dessay's CD of Bellini's 'La Sonnambula': Ladies do we still want the fairy tale?

Natalie Dessay/Juan Diego Florez/La Sonnambula/The Met simulcast

Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Florez together again for La Sonnambula. She's live from the Met and on CD

Natalie Dessay, the French coloratura soprano who came to SFO last June, has a romantic and magical CD of Bellini’s La Sonnambula. She just sang it live broadcast from the Met. This is for both young and old women and women like me sleepwalking through middle age anxious and single . . . do you still want the fairy tale? If not then have you awoken in bed with a stranger recently? Do you wonder why?

Every time I believe I just get burned but I'm a sucker for Cinderella as if it's my middle name. Perhaps it's all been a dress rehearsal. In any event Dessay's voice rings clear and pristine as Alpine air in spring and it's uplifting . . .

If you caught Dessay and the live broadcast from the Met you know what I mean. Dessay’s La Sonnambula is like your Sunday morning coffee, soothing and stimulating at the same time. I listened to this CD and it renders me languid. The music melts into the background as if it’s mixing with the air I breathe and one’s subconscious, that’s the hypnotic quality. Like KDFC says, it’s your island of sanity.

The librettist at Berkeley Opera Scott Marley disagrees with me and says the repetition of Bellini bores him but that pattern in my humble lay person’s opinion is part of the charm. This is a story about innocence after all. The sleep walking girl is an orphan, a waif caught in circumstances and accused by the villagers and her beloved of betrayal with a handsome count. Does even the poor girl think it true as she protests her innocence haplessly? Unlike Dessay’s Lucia di Lammermoor who goes mad and kills when separated from her young beloved and has to marry for politics, this sweet village girl becomes tormented and fragile but remains docile. She couldn’t hurt anybody and just withers like the little flower she is but is able to come to her senses when everybody else does.

Part of it is the simplicity of the story and the setting, a bucolic village in the Swiss Alps where you can almost feel the intoxicating oxygen fill your lungs. It was like moving to Mount Diablo and having a mountain in my backyard after I got married and left downtown Oakland. Yeah well I don’t live in that world anymore either. Similarly the Met production places the story in a less than pastoral urban rehearsal hall, like a converted warehouse with high ceilings and industrial size windows. The opera will stage La Sonnambula and the story unfolds in the actors’ lives. This is a twist a director would appreciate, focusing on the nexus where actor and character meet. The urban sophistication makes Amina’s sheltered life and subsequent innocence a little less plausible but as host Deborah Voight said, the story has credibility issues to begin with. But that’s the nature of a fairy tale isn’t it? As if Deborah’s Wagner with his epic Ring Cycle or mythic Flying Dutchman gets more realistic?

Pictured below, Amina arrives for rehearsal of La Sonnambula as the actors play out the story in their personal lives.

Natalie Dessay/La Sonnambula/Met simulcast

Pictured below, the scandalized townsfolk assemble around the sleeping beauty. Note that's SFO's Jeremy Galyon in his Met debut standing tall on the right, playing the persistent farmer facing unrequited love by the stage manager.

La Sonnambula/Natalie Dessay/Met simulcast

But returning to Amina as she sleepwalks, first alone as a phantom to the count Rudolfo's bed in the studio; then to the astonishment of all across the studio's window ledge. At the Met Dessay basically walks the plank over the orchestra pit, the floor board extending like a diving board under her bare feet. She actually sleepwalked down the aisle of the orchestra section to the stage in her little white cotton nightgown and barefeet.

La Sonnambula/Natalie Dessay/Met simulcast

Compare that to her arrival in her pristine winter white coat and sunglasses with a Breakfast at Tiffany’s feel. The cast sings Viva! Viva Amina!

Natalie Dessay/La Sonnambula/The Met simulcast

Yet the music evokes the spirit of the pastoral setting of the traditional production in a Swiss village, as if the actor really is channeling the spirit of Amina. Even one of the songs sounds like a gentle yodel, In Elvezia non ha rosa. Any drama that takes place in this tiny village will be put into perspective by the majesty of nature. Like the changing of seasons, the townsfolk weather the melodrama and it rights itself in due course as spring follows winter. It’s refreshing and you walk out of the theater feeling so, it renews.

Here she is in a more traditional production, sleepwalking across the bough of a tree . . . like the nursery rhyme, if the bough breaks and the cradle should fall, down will come baby cradle and all . . . with our heroine, this delicate waif producing the kind of rousing high notes that shatter crystal . . .

What I didn’t know when watching the live simulcast from the Met was that Amina is an orphan. Not only that, Rudolfo, the man she is accused of betraying her beloved fiancé with, the handsome young farmer Elvino, is actually her long lost father. That’s why she is so strangely drawn to this older man Rudolfo when he mysteriously reappears in the village. He asks for directions to the castle. She indeed is why he was banished by his family and he’s not just an expatriate. His family exiled him after he fathered a child with a village girl out of wedlock; the woman died of shame and sorrow after the birth of Amina, leaving her orphaned. So is Amina, as the writer of her CD liner says, subconsciously looking for her father when she sleepwalks to his room that night?

If she were turning psycho in her desperation things could have gotten so much worse, say if Oscar Wilde had put his Biblical twist on things as in Salome. John the Baptist rejects the princess and she has his head. The sociopath Salome, a girl desperate to escape the debauchery of her royal family, comes to SFO in October. However that’s for the fall when things take a dark turn; right now, it’s springtime and the year is young.

(to be continued)

Photos: Ken Howard and the Metropolitan Opera House

For more info: www.SFOpera.com

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