Staging _La sonnambula_ in the Twenty-First Century

Over the last two decades, several of the most prominent theatres in the operatic world have mounted productions of Bellini’s La sonnambula, productions that have sought to conceive the opera in widely different ways for present-day audiences. This unprecedented directorial activity has coincided with a notable growth in the production and dissemination of opera videos: as a result, for the first time in history we have access to several recent mises en scène of La sonnambula (albeit mediated by video). This unparalleled situation affords a prime opportunity to observe this opera on stage from a comparative perspective. The present chapter takes advantage of such an opportunity by discussing seven of these Sonnambulas side by side: Federico Tiezzi’s for the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Florence (2000), Marco Arturo Marelli’s for the Vienna State Opera (2001, also staged at London’s Covent Garden, the Paris Opera, Barcelona’s Liceu and the Greek National Opera), Hugo de Ana’s for the Teatro Filarmonico, Verona (2007, revived in several other Italian theatres), Mary Zimmermann’s for the Metropolitan Opera, New York (2009), Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito’s for the Stuttgart Opera (2012, transferred to the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 2019), Bepi Morassi’s for La Fenice, Venice (2012) and Giorgio Barberio Corsetti’s for the Rome Opera (2018). Its primary aim is to investigate potential meanings of Bellini’s opera for the present and the very recent past. The object of enquiry is therefore the visual reception of La sonnambula rather than the verbal one: in an age like ours, dominated by images, when staging has taken on a pivotal dramaturgical function in opera, the primary key to what Bellini’s opera may mean today lies in how it has been visually reimagined for early twenty-first-century audiences.