La Sonnambula

La Sonnambula is an opera better understood by audiences than by critics. Vincenzo Bellini and Felice Romani were one of the greatest composer-poet teams in the history of opera, comparable to Mozart with Da Ponte, Gluck with Calzabigi, and Verdi with Boito, and this work is perhaps the purest specimen of their ability to distill human emotion into verse and melody. The work’s naive candor has invited condescension and misunderstanding from some ...