Great expectations | 11 February 2012

Bellini’s Norma is an opera that I not only adore: it obsesses me, too. Whenever I listen to it, I have to hear it again very soon, and parts of it lodge in my mind, playing over and over again, to an extent that very few other pieces do. It was the work through which I first came to realise Callas’s lonely greatness, and it was through her that I came to see how great Italian opera could be, too, having childishly dismissed it tout court as superficial compared with the great German traditions. I still think that Norma operates on a level different from any other work by Bellini or his contemporaries, or even, I am inclined to think, Verdi. The only Italian composer who rivals it for purity and passion is Monteverdi, to whom Bellini owes nothing and has no resemblance.

The trouble for the opera-goer is that Norma is almost never performed.