Among the well-founded objections to a performance of Vincenzo Bellini's semiseria opera "La Sonnambula" (from 1831), two weigh particularly heavily: that the title role is hellishly demanding, which is why one can immediately forget the matter at an intermediate level;

and that the plot is neither original nor plausible, but rather far-fetched.

Paul Ingenday

Europe correspondent for the feuilleton in Berlin.

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The Teatro Real in Madrid, where there hadn't been a "Sonnambula" for 22 years, met the first problem by pairing two brilliant young voices: Nadine Sierra as Amina and the internationally much less known Basque Xabier Anduaga, who was only 27 years old .

Sierra's supple soprano, which shines powerfully even in the high register while shaping the pianissimi as intimate as it is poignant, carried the opera from beginning to end, accompanied by Maurizio Benini's elegant conducting and the chorus and orchestra of the Teatro Real.

Since the American of Portuguese-Puerto Rican origin also has an enormous stage presence, the game was won musically early on.

Anduaga's love aria “L'anel ti dono” also evoked the applause for the male part, which Nadine Sierra had received several times before.

In order to give the plot a touch of modern psychology and to make Amina understandable as a woman, the Catalan director Bárbara Lluch made several radical choices.

In Cristof Hetzer's stage design, the village, which we otherwise imagine as the setting for a pale pastoral, becomes a place between backwardness and the devastation of industrialization, inhabited by tough, superstitious people.

As in a film by the Coen brothers, two hanged figures hang high up in a lonely tree.

The members of the choir, which develops an aggressive presence, appear through their expressions like enraptured zealots, the few children on the stage stubborn and withdrawn.

Even in this no-man's-land of the provinces, the rumor has it

Protective cloak against the hostile world

The dangerous loneliness of the title character has long since begun.

Again and again, Amina encounters her own demons in the form of dancers with blackened faces, who buzz around, grab, press and carry her from here to there like agile large reptiles (choreographed by Iratxe Ansa and Igor Bacovich).

It is the art of the ten dancers to leave the scenes with Amina in ambivalence: while they seem to overwhelm the helpless female figure at one moment, the next they look like their personal bodyguard and a protective cloak against the hostile world.

Of all the characters, Amina is the only one to whom Bárbara Lluch's staging allows an unconscious.

Two other directing accents caused murmurs among the older audience: firstly, the suggestion that Count Rodolfo could have raped the sleeping girl who accidentally groped into his room.

And then the end of the opera, which denies us the quickly mended happiness of the two lovers.

Of course, that is not the case in Felice Romani's libretto, which in turn is based on a ballet pantomime by Eugène Scribe;

but the woman in white singing her moving "Non credea mirarti" so delicately and rapturously high up on the roof of the church has already stepped so far out of her narrow circle that there is no turning back and one simply cannot imagine , she could put up with the villager Elvino.

The small differences are funny

The "Sonnambula" is the Teatro Real's offer for the Christmas season with thirteen performances in three weeks.

It ends on Epiphany.

Because the lead actors couldn't manage the vocal strain, a second cast of similarly high quality had to be found: with Jessica Pratt as Amina and Francesco Demuro as Elvino.

Funny are the small differences between the evenings.

The second Count Rodolfo (Fernando Radó) has such a muscular upper body that he carries it for longer walks on stage and is allowed to harass Amina half-naked, while the first Count Rodolfo, after he has got out of the bathtub, modestly veils himself.

But he - namely Rodolfo Tagliavini - is a descendant of the great Ferruccio Tagliavini, who left us one of the most beautiful "Sonnambulas" ever in 1952 with Lina Pagliughi and Cesare Siepi at Cetra.

What both evenings had in common was that philistines coughed wildly into delicate pianissimi, as if they themselves belonged in the dumb village that we saw on stage.

The phenomenon is so well known in Madrid that the newspapers stopped commenting on it a long time ago.