After abandoning a political opera project, Bellini focused in 1831 on a light comedy inspired by a French hit: La sonnambula. The story of a young woman who sleepwalks and risks her marriage and happiness. Thanks to its spectacular arias, Bellini established himself as one of the main heirs of Italian opera after Rossini's retirement, achieving resounding success in Milan and around the world.
In 1830, when he received the commission to compose a new opera, Bellini was a very young musician —he had just turned 28— and yet extremely prolific, already accumulating six titles in a lyrical repertoire that, especially since the premiere of Il pirata (1827), had established him as one of the great stars of the Italian stage. That year, there was also a huge void on the opera throne: Rossini had retired in 1829, and the new style dominating the Italian language, bel canto, was in search of a new hero. Bellini was not the only candidate to fill this honored space —his contemporary, Gaetano Donizetti, was also experiencing a sweet moment— but he was undoubtedly one of the most solid values any promoter aspired to hire for an indisputable success.
In fact, the history of the composition of La sonnambula is linked to a rivalry between two competing impresarios. Pompeo Littla, a Milanese aristocrat, wanted to take control of the Teatro alla Scala in 1830 but did not achieve this goal: the city authorities —which at the time were under Austrian Empire control— decided to continue trusting the former manager, Domenico Barbaja. However, Litta persisted in directing an opera venue in Milan, and shortly thereafter managed to take over the Teatro Carcano, with which he aimed to compete with La Scala through a significant financial investment: he succeeded in contracting new operas by Donizetti and Bellini at the beginning of 1831 —the Carnival season was the best time of the calendar in Italy, the season reserved for major premieres— and both composers got to work.
«La sonnambula was Bellini's seventh opera, a resounding success in Italy and around the world that crowned him as the most brilliant composer of melodies of his time.»
Bellini abandoned a project he had just started at that time —an adaptation of Hernani, the drama by Victor Hugo, which he preferred not to continue due to its uncomfortable political approach—, and quickly found an agreeable story in a French piece that had triumphed in Paris two years earlier, La somnambule, a kind of vaudeville comedy written by playwright Eugène Scribe, which had also been adapted as a ballet-pantomime under the title La somnambule, ou l’arrivée d’un nouveau seigneur. Bellini worked at great speed, partly because his regular librettist, Felice Romani, presented him with an impeccable and well-cohesive text, but also because Litta paid him so generously that he decided to prioritize La sonnambula and delay the commission he had simultaneously received from La Scala, which would become Norma, also premiered in 1831.
La sonnambula was presented as a semi-serious opera, a melodrama with high emotional tension but with a happy ending. It tells the story of Amina, a young miller’s daughter from a village in the Swiss Alps, engaged to Elvino, a handsome young man. Just when they are finalizing the details of their wedding, an older man, Count Rodolfo, arrives in the village, showing great interest in Amina, admiring her beauty and the resemblance to a woman he met many years ago. This detail is not specified in the opera, but it is implied that Amina is Rodolfo's daughter, the result of a youthful extramarital relationship.
That same night, at the inn where he is staying, Rodolfo receives the visit of two women: Lisa, Elvino's former fiancée, who flirts with him out of spite, and Amina, who is unaware that she is a somnambulist and walks in her sleep at night. Amina tries to kiss Rodolfo, mistaking him for Elvino, and Lisa seizes the opportunity to accuse her of infidelity in front of the entire village, to the point that Elvino breaks off his engagement with her. But in the second act, Rodolfo will attempt to find a rational explanation for this whole mess: he explains what somnambulism is and that Amina was unaware of her actions, and in a final scene full of suspense, where Amina walks in her sleep again, putting her life in danger, the village realizes she is pure and innocent, and the marriage with Elvino moves forward.
The opera deals with a purely romantic theme —the passionate love, here accompanied by a conflict between superstition and science— with a musical language of transparent beauty. La sonnambula has some of the most perfect and difficult melodies of Bellini’s brief career, especially those of the lead role of Amina, and together with his last works before his premature death in 1835, Norma and I puritani, it forms one of the most irresistible repertoires of the golden age of Italian bel canto.