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Vincenzo Bellini

Callas, ‘La Sonnambula’, Edinburgh Festival 1957

1957. Kings Theatre, Edinburgh
A recording of a historic visit by Maria Callas to the Edinburgh Festival in 1957.
Composer Vincenzo Bellini
Conductor Antonino Votto
Singers Maria Callas, Fiorenza Cossotto, Nicola Monti
Genre Opera

Callas Sonnambula in Edinburgh

Imagine the excitement when Edinburgh announced that its opera for the 1957 Festival was to be provided by La Scala Milan.  For 8 of the first 10 festivals, Glyndebourne had been the resident company: for the 5 early years when Rudolf Bing was General Manager of both; then for a further 3 years from 1953 to 1955, with a total of 18 performances each year.  Hamburg State Opera, directed by Günther Rennert, supplied 18 performances of a still wider repertory with leading German-based artists at each of the 1952 and 1956 festivals.  But it was a major coup of the Festival Director Robert Ponsonby to secure the most famous name in opera, even if it came billed as la Piccola Scala and without Verdi and Puccini which would not fit on the stage of the King’s Theatre.  There were 18 performances of 4 operas: 5 each of Bellini’s Sonnambula and Donizetti’s Elisir d’amore; 4 each of Cimarosa’s Matrimonio segreto and Rossini’s Turco in Italia.  The stage directors were, respectively, Luchino Visconti, Franco Enriquez, Giorgio Strehler and Franco Zeffirelli.  The conductors were Antonino Votto and Gianandrea Gavazzeni, both of whom had assisted Toscanini at La Scala during the 1920s, and Nino Sanzogno, who had inaugurated la Piccola Scala in 1955.  The casts included undisputed stars led by Maria Meneghini Callas and Giuseppe di Stefano, Italian veterans like Carlo Badioli and Fernando Corena, and newcomers such as Fiorenza Cossotto and Renata Scotto.

Visconti’s exquisite production, with meticulously evocative period designs by Piero Tosi, had premièred at La Scala on 5 March 1955, conducted by Leonard Bernstein and received 10 performances.  Votto was in charge of the 1957 revival in Milan, where there were a further 6 performances that spring before it was toured first to Cologne for 2 performances in July before reaching Edinburgh in August.  The performance on 29 August which I attended as a 12-year-old boy was the last of the 22 performances Callas gave of the role.  Even so, the role of Amina ranks as her sixth most performed on stage.  Only Norma, Violetta, Lucia, Aida and Turandot surpass it in her ledger.  Yet, how atypical of her reputation as a fiery tigress was her characterisation of the meek Swiss peasant girl Amina.  She succeeded in scaling down her mighty voice, except during the big climaxes at the end of each act; and she looked as if she were a 19th century ballerina, modelled on Maria Taglioni, even placing her feet in fifth position in repose.  Tosi observed how she created the impression of falling in the perilous scene when the sleepwalking Amina crosses the bridge over the mill-stream: ‘Though she seemed to fall, I saw that she actually remained absolutely still.  As she ascended the bridge, slowly she began to fill her lungs with air, and this gave the illusion of flight, of floating upward, to the audience.  Then, when she had to fall, she quickly exhaled all her breath.  What can you say?  She was a theatrical wizard and knew all the tricks’.

On this live recording of the second Edinburgh performance on 21 August, you may hear how Callas charted Amina’s trajectory from victim to victor.  Her initial tone is fragile and she sounds vulnerable in her opening aria ‘Come per me sereno’.  She is submissive when Elvino arrives late for their betrothal, but when both are asked to declare what gifts they bring and Elvino boasts of his farm, his house, his name, you hear her unique ability to bring depth of colours in her modest reply, ‘Il cor soltanto’ (‘Only my heart’).  For the scene in which she sleepwalks into the Count’s bedroom at the inn, where Tosi describes her apparition as ‘a sylphide tripping on a moonbeam’, she adopts a blanched tone drained of emotion.  Awakened and disgraced, she acquires full tragic mode to lead the concertato finale ‘D’un pensiero’, expertly paced by Votto.  For the first scene of Act 2, when she and her mother encounter the now embittered Elvino, she wore a tailored chocolate-brown dress, but for the last sleepwalking scene and dénouement she was again the image of Taglioni.  During the slow ‘Ah non credea mirarti’, Visconti bathed her in a moonlit follow-spot, dimming the lights on the frozen ensemble, and she spun a gossamer thread of tone so that you dared not breathe for fear of disturbing the dream.  After the spell was broken, the house lights came up for the dazzling cabaletta ‘Ah, non giunge’ and she gloried in her triumph.  I recall waiting afterwards at the stage door, and hearing her descend the stone stairs with an improvised encore!

The supporting cast notably introduced the young Cossotto, whose brief cameo as Teresa promised a major career which was to include Adalgisa alongside Callas’s final Paris Normas in 1964 and 1965.

Nicholas Payne
16 October 2024

Vincenzo Bellini (1801 – 1835)

La Sonnambula

Track 1: Act 1

Track 2: Act 2

 

This recording was made from a relay from the Kings Theatre Edinburgh on 21 August 1957.

The recording is in the Tolansky/Tschaikov Collection at Music Preserved.

  • Nicola Zaccaria
    Count Rodolfo
  • Fiorenza Cossotto
    Teresa
  • Amina
    Maria Callas
  • Nicola Monti
    Elvino
  • Maria Luisa Gavioli
    Lisa
  • Dino Mantovani
    Alessio
  • Franco Riciardi
    A notary
  • Chorus of La Piccola Scala
  • Orchestra of La Piccola Scala
  • Antonino Votto
    Conductor

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