La sonnambula

A peaceful idyllic village in the Swiss Alps: Amina, the beautiful foster daughter of Teresa the miller, and the young and well-to-do farmer Elvino want to get married. To do this, Elvino has already deliberately broken off his existing engagement to Lisa, the innkeeper. Count Rodolfo, the son of the late feudal lord of the village, has returned to it incognito after a long absence and has moved into Lisa’s inn. He right away starts courting Amina, arousing Elvino’s jealousy. When Amina is found the next morning sleeping in Rodolfo’s room the village community is appalled and the wounded Elvino breaks off his relationship with Amina in spite of all of his fiancée’s protestations of innocence. Only at the last moment can she convince Elvino of her fidelity.

After Gioachino Rossini stopped composing, Vincenzo Bellini and Gaetano Donizetti had come to be Italy’s foremost composers. With his opera »La sonnambula« (»The Sleepwalker«), premiered on 6 March 1831 in Teatro Carcano in Milan, he finally celebrated his greatest success with the public thus far. The story of the beautiful sleepwalker Amina proceeds musically in seemingly endlessly flowing sweeps of melody typical of Bellini’s style, making the role a standard for every lyric coloratura soprano. The figure drawn in Felice Romani’s libretto of superficially wholesome community life in a Swiss Alps village however constituted for Bellini only the backdrop for a story of the fragile abyss of human existence whose ambiguity is hidden behind the façade of the rustic-bucolic elements of action.