Melodramma in two acts
Music by Vincenzo Bellini
Libretto by Felice Romani
In Italian with German and English surtitles

Premiere: February 16, 2025

Conductor: Francesco Lanzillotta
Director: Vasily Barkhatov

Wiener Symphoniker
Arnold Schoenberg Choir
Conductor: Erwin Ortner

Norma is a woman caught between two systems. On the one hand she is a chaste druid priestess in an occupied land and as such decides between war and peace; on the other she is the secret lover of the Roman general Pollione, and even has two children with him. But when Pollione reveals that he intends to leave her for a younger priestess, Adalgisa, and return to Rome, her double life is in danger of discovery. The unbearable conflict between love and a thirst for vengeance, between religion and rationality, and between her own traditions and an empire almost drives Norma to murder her own children – before she decides to take another, scarcely less radical step. Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma, written in 1824, is his best-known opera and a masterpiece of Italian Romanticism. In Norma, Bellini created a character who goes through every human condition imaginable in a short space of time, and he expresses them using musical techniques ranging from bel canto to screams. Director Vasily Barkhatov, whose most recent production at the MusikTheater an der Wien was Weinberg’s Der Idiot, interprets the tragedy against the background of a change of political system. In the opera, Norma is a priestess of the moon goddess and is caught between the millstones of ideological turmoil which sees old idols being replaced by new ones. The title role will be played by one of today’s most celebrated singers, Asmik Grigorian, who takes on the role for the first time.