Maria Callas "Care compagne... Come per me sereno" La sonnambula (1955)

Like much of the bel canto repertory, Sonnambula virtually disappeared from the world’s stages in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, replaced by the more visceral, penetrating works of Verdi and Wagner and, later, by the blood-and-guts realism of verismo. It was not until the 1950s and the bel canto revival known as the riesumazione, pioneered by committed artists such as conductor Tullio Serafin and soprano Maria Callas, that Sonnambula returned to the stage, most famously in a legendary production at La Scala, Milan, in 1955. That staging, by the aristocratic film director Luchino Visconti, presented Callas at her absolute vocal peak and was conducted by none other than Leonard Bernstein, slumming in a genre that has rarely attracted the attention of major conductors. Callas and her collaborators not only exhumed but also rehabilitated Sonnambula and its forgotten brethren. What had been seen as pretty but inconsequential works became downright profound, thanks to Callas’ ability to infuse every musical moment with shades of meaning and complexity. For example, in Amina’s opening aria, “Come per me sereno,” a sincere expression of contentment, Callas lightened her voice to convey the fragility of an innocent teenage girl; at the same time, she invested a word like “mai (never)” in the phrase “never has the face of nature smiled with such radiance” with an uncertain plangency that suggested an underlying sadness, an awareness of the transience of happiness. Thus was bel canto reconstituted for the modern world. Interestingly, Visconti’s direction of the La Scala Sonnambula was an early incarnation of what is now called a “concept” approach. The director costumed Callas not in a traditional peasant dress but in a dazzling white gown and expensive jewelry. When Callas questioned this choice, Visconti famously responded, “You are Maria Callas playing a village girl, and don’t you forget it!” In other words, Callas was simultaneously playing Amina and also “the diva playing Amina.” The stylization extended to the female chorus, who were dressed as a corps de ballet, and to the lighting, which suggested a half-dreamed world. This spell was broken in the final five minutes when all the lights on stage and in the auditorium were brought up, as if to suggest that not only was Amina’s dream over, but that the opera itself had exited the world of illusion and was now existing concurrently with the modern audience.