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Hear What Makes ‘Norma’ the Everest of Opera

Among the divas who have tackled the title role of Bellini’s “Norma” are, from left, Rosa Ponselle, Renata Scotto, Sondra Radvanovsky (who sings it to open the Metropolitan Opera’s season on Sept. 25) and Cecilia Bartoli.Credit...From left: PALM/RSCH/Redferns; Jack Mitchell/Getty Images; Nicole Bengiveno for The New York Times; Hans Jörg Michel

There are many roles that define a diva: Aida, Isolde, Violetta in “La Traviata.” But the title part in Bellini’s “Norma,” which opens the Metropolitan Opera’s season on Monday, Sept. 25, in a new production starring Sondra Radvanovsky, may be the greatest part of all — the one Maria Callas performed more than any other.

“This is the Everest of opera,” the soprano Renata Scotto, a brilliant, controversial Norma in the 1980s, said in a recent interview. “You want to climb the mountain. You know you are supposed to climb the mountain. But it is so difficult.”

But what is it, exactly, that makes this perhaps the most demanding part in all of opera? What about it stretches a singer to the limits of her abilities?

Before anything else, an aspiring Norma has to master “bel canto” technique. This school of singing, which dominated Italian opera in the early 19th century, is comparable to modern sports training, with its specialized drills to develop strength, speed and so forth. The goal of bel canto is to perfect the elaborate vocal gestures all over the role: trills, scales, arpeggios and leaps. (These are the roller-coaster fireworks you might hear when you think of opera. They’re also the way Norma, a druid high priestess, demonstrates her power.)

Even more important is the development of legato, the seamless movement from one note to the next, requiring a steady and even emission of breath. And since opera is more than mere “la-la-la,” you have to learn recitative style, halfway between song and speech.

One of the most pungent recitatives in opera comes in Norma’s very first scene. No one else onstage knows this, but she has violated her vow of chastity with Pollione, a proconsul of the Roman army that’s occupying her native Gaul. (He’ll be sung at the Met by the tenor Joseph Calleja.) Her disciples are eager to rebel against their oppressors, but Norma scolds them: “I can foresee the fate of Rome. She will die — not by your hands, but as a victim of her own sins.”

Some singers can’t truly command in recitative, but it was in this kind of declamation that Callas was at her best, precisely sculpting the music to enhance the words. She snarls with anger, then smooths out the tone consolingly. Finally, she intones her prophecy in a droning chant, as if possessed.

An even more intimidating challenge lies ahead: Norma’s prayer for peace, “Casta diva.” The cool, swirling melody includes long, extended phrases — a legato marathon — as well as delicate, soft curlicues of ornamentation and an ecstatic climb to a climactic high note.

“Right out of the gate, you have to do all the various vocal tricks,” Ms. Radvanovsky said in an interview. “Plus, you have to not run out of air. And you need to think about the soft high B-flat in the cadenza.”

Then comes a “cabaletta,” an upbeat closing section, in which Norma, in effect talking to herself, foresees a reunion with her lover. Like most cabalettas, “Ah bello a me ritorna” includes a profusion of coloratura, but Bellini makes the piece even more daunting by gradually adding more and more ornamentation as it progresses, until the final pages are a blaze of scales and trills.

But it’s not just raw agility: Norma needs musicality, the art of transforming mere notes, and a lot of them, into moving music.

Cecilia Bartoli, a rare mezzo-soprano Norma, said in an interview that this delicate shaping of the score “was probably the great challenge: to hear this music the way, somehow, Bellini had in mind.” This may sound a little vague, but it’s suggestive of how musicality is an intuitive skill, more felt than calculated.

When a young novice, Adalgisa (at the Met, the mezzo Joyce DiDonato), confesses that she has fallen in love, Norma recalls her own romance. Their duet, “Oh, rimembranza,” is based on a wistful melody so simple it might be a folk song.

A sensitive artist will “bend” the tune, just as, for example, the jazz singer Sarah Vaughan personalized “My Funny Valentine” — with subtle alterations of the written rhythm (“rubato”), varied dynamics and well-timed breaths to segment the melody into expressive phrases.

Norma and Adalgisa, it turns out, are in love with the same man. The priestess’s jealousy explodes into a trio that at its climax suddenly shifts from minor to major in a glorious vaulting phrase. And yet a canny Norma can lend the moment extra luster by singing just a fraction ahead of the beat and brightening the timbre of her voice. According to her taste (and, ahem, her abilities), she may even insert a cry of triumph in the form of a high D natural as the curtain falls on the first act.

Though Norma is a vocal tour de force, it is if anything an even greater challenge for a singer as actress. This is a Meryl Streep kind of part, a woman trying to have it all.

“Norma has been portrayed as this strong warrior woman,” Ms. Radvanovsky said. “But she is a mother and a wife. She is like any of us nowadays: trying to have a big career, a formidable career, and at the same time trying to have a personal life. Trying to find that balance.”

The first scenes of the second act indicate Norma’s vast emotional range. The priestess, now off the public stage, agonizes over whether she should murder her children to spare them the indignity of slavery in Rome. Bellini sets her monologue to a fragmented recitative that resolves into the elegiac melody “Teneri figli,” as if she is mourning her children in advance of their death.

Unable to force herself to sacrifice them, Norma turns them over to Adalgisa. The two women’s duet, “Mira o Norma,” is so sensuously beautiful it is easy to overlook a significant detail: Norma gains perhaps the first female friend she has ever known.

A great Norma must draw on a fourth element, one more mundane than the others and yet every bit as essential: the stamina simply to reach the end of the opera without losing her voice or keeling over in a faint.

The music of the work’s final part begins with a long, formal duet with Pollione, “In mia man alfin tu sei,” which delves into the low, dark (and exhausting to use) chest register of the soprano voice. As Norma’s rage intensifies, her vocal line bursts into a flurry of trills, turns and scales spanning nearly two octaves.

Finally, Norma publicly admits her guilt, leading into the opera’s glorious “double” finale. She takes the lead in two big pieces, first entreating Pollione to join her in death, then tearfully begging her father not to punish her children for her sins. This ensemble builds gradually to a fortissimo climax, yet Norma is expected to send her voice — with its most shining brilliance and power — soaring above the din.

In the fall of 2001 at the Met, the Wagnerian soprano Jane Eaglen sang a Norma so vocally shaky and dramatically listless I was tempted to leave at intermission. Yet she redeemed herself in this final scene, steadily swelling her steely tone until the walls of the theater seemed to tremble.

For smaller-scaled voices, pacing is key. “I think you get to the end of the opera by remembering this is the most beautiful and best moment,” Ms. Scotto said. “And you must try not to cry.”

And yet even as the priestess hurls herself onto the pyre, the singer may still have fallen short of a truly memorable Norma. That last quality we’re looking for is one that’s hard to define, especially in English. Italians call it “anima,” which literally means “soul” or “spirit.”

But it’s something more than that, something so rare that there’s a standard term for its absence. “Manca la musa,” an Italian opera fan will say: “The muse never arrived.”

In my experience, the muse has been fully in attendance only once, at my very first “Norma.” It was in Houston in 1978, and Ms. Scotto was the star. Nearly 40 years later, I still recall clearly the furious glint in her eyes as she entered for that first scolding recitative, and the bittersweet ebb and flow of her soprano in “Oh, rimembranza.”

Most of all I recall a tiny scene in the second act, when Norma’s hopes for a reconciliation with Pollione are suddenly dashed. It is a recitative structured around two high C’s, one soft and one loud. Singing both these notes well is an act of breathtaking technical bravura.

But all I remember is the crash of Norma’s heart breaking.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Scaling the Everest of Opera. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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