Besting Bellini

By William Bender

The countdown is on. Thirteen months from now Soprano Beverly Sills will at long last make her debut at New York's Metropolitan Opera. It will be an event both long awaited and long overdue. Sills will be 45 when she steps onto the Met stage in Rossini's The Siege of Corinth, and the question is whether, at an age when many divas fade, she will still possess the fabulous voice and technique. The uncertainty exists because she does have occasional off nights, and may be performing too much for her own good. But she is a crowned pro who never cuts down, even at rehearsals, and virtually never cancels.

She is less interested in protecting her reputation than in getting out onstage where she is happiest.

Blissfully Giddy. The only person who can resolve the voice question is Sills herself. Last week she did, in a way that should silence doubters and suggest to everyone else that she will go on singing for at least another ten years. At the New York City Opera, Sills took aim at one of the toughest operas in all bel canto, Vincenzo Bellini's I Puritani. When she was done, Bellini was on his knees, the capacity audience at the New York State Theater on its feet for a long ovation. In post-World War II productions of Puritani, only Maria Callas has achieved anything to equal Sills' limpid coloration, melting lyricism and blissfully giddy personification of a heroine whose luxury it is to have both a mad scene and a happy ending.

The full title of this seldom produced opera, I Puritani di Scozia, is never used any more. That is because Bellini's Italian librettist, Carlo Pepoli, thought Plymouth was in Scotland instead of southern England. The curtain rises to find the Puritans in league with Cromwell in his battle against the Cavaliers loyal to the Stuarts. The Puritan leader, Lord Walton, is even holding prisoner the widow of Charles I, Enrichetta.

Things get a bit sticky when Walton agrees to let his daughter Elvira marry a royalist, Lord Arturo Talbot. They get even more awkward when, on the wedding day, Arturo spirits Enrichetta away from the Puritan fortress to safety. Elvira does not understand that, and goes sweetly and pathetically mad, while Arturo is sentenced in absentia to death.

At the end, word arrives that the Stuarts have been defeated and Cromwell has pardoned all political prisoners. Arturo and Elvira are united, as they themselves put it, "in ecstasies of pleasure."

The production puts Sills back into English history, where in recent years she has triumphed in the Donizetti trilogy devoted to three queens--Elizabeth I (Roberto Devereux), Maria Stuarda and Anna Bolena. I Puritani was the last opera Bellini wrote before he died in 1835 at age 33. Its graceful and ornate vocal writing actually suits Sills' light voice better than Donizetti's heavyweight scores. This is music to float jewels on. Sills' succession of bravura displays in the mad scene ("Qui la voce sua soave ") is like a string of emeralds, each deeper and more lustrous in color. She enters from a high rear balcony, floats dreamily down a long ramp, chats nuttily with her father ("Who are you?"), begs for her lover's return, then collapses in a twirl of deranged rapture.

A Sills premiere somehow brings out the best in the City Opera. Stage Director Tito Capobianco and Designer Carl Toms have conceived a brilliant unit set that is essentially a huge castle hall into which ramps are slid and royally crested panels dropped. Julius Rudels conducting showed sympathy for both Bellini's elegant orchestrations (no Donizetti um-pah-pahs there) and his hovering rubatos for the singers.

In Bellini, everybody works hard, and that includes Elvira's lover Arturo. This is a tenor role that almost matches the soprano's in difficulty, requiring a clarion power at one moment, poetic softness at another, not to mention the ability to go to high D. Enrico DiGiuseppe managed all this handsomely, though with a voice drier than the ideal. He is one of the few tenors around who can sing the music, but he is, alas, shorter than Sills. Glad to have him, and eager to enhance his romantic stature, she obligingly sang most of the final duet either on her knees or curled in his lap. She could not have sounded better if singing from the bow of the Mayflower.

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