Vincenzo Bellini: NormaTheater an der Wien, Vienna

Norma is a woman caught between two systems. As a Druid priestess in an occupied land, she has the power to decide over war and peace. But she is also the secret mistress of the Roman Proconsul Pollione and has even born him two children. Her double life comes close to falling apart when she learns that Pollione intends to leave her for the younger priestess Adalgisa. Torn between love and the thirst for revenge, between strong emotions and reason, Norma is almost driven to murder her own children. She is saved only by her last-minute resolve to take a scarcely less radical step.

Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma of 1831 is his best-known opera and counts among the great masterpieces of Italian Romanticism, thanks in no small part to the legendary Act I aria Casta Diva.

Director Vasily Barkhatov, whose last production at the Musiktheater an der Wien was Weinberg’s Der Idiot, sets Bellini’s tragedy against the backdrop of a change of political system. Norma’s tragedy is that she is ground down between the millstones of ideology as the old idols are jettisoned and new ones installed in their place. Born in Moscow in 1983, the award-winning Barkhatov has been widely acclaimed for the spectacular narrative art of his stagings. The tales he tells leap confidently between the plush furnishings of history and the transformed world of today, unfurling gorgeous panoplies full of psychological finesse, precision directing and pointed social critique.