A druid with attitude – how Bellini's Norma cast a spell on me

Opera in 19th-century Italy achieved the feat of being both high art and popular entertainment. The music of the leading composers of the day – Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini and Verdi – was loved by a substantial and socially diverse public; even those who did not attend theatres would have heard the most famous extracts from their operas ground out on barrel organs or whistled in the street.

The group of composers prominent during the early decades of the century has come to define what is known as the bel canto tradition. “Bel canto” means simply “beautiful singing” but the operas of Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini demand a good deal more than that – their works require singers to do extraordinary things with their voices, not in a spirit of ostentatious showing off, but rather placing their virtuosity in the service of heightened dramatic expression. Accounts of the great artists of the day, such as the soprano Giuditta Pasta, describe their ability to move audiences profoundly, emphasising that they were great physical as well as vocal actors.

Later in the century, Richard Wagner pushed the form in a new direction and this kind of singing fell from favour. Wagner, who disliked Italian opera, nevertheless had an enormous admiration for the works of Bellini, whose music, he insisted, maintained the closest relationship with the text, and hence with the essence of the drama.

Born in Sicily in 1801 into a family of church musicians, Vincenzo Bellini studied in Naples and made his operatic debut with Adelson e Salvini, a half-serious, half-comic work performed by his fellow students in February 1825. Its success won him a commission for another opera, which in turn led to a commission for Milan’s prestigious La Scala.

The ultra-Romantic Il Pirata, written in 1827 was a collaboration with Felice Romani, Italy’s leading librettist of the day. Romani was in such demand that he frequently delivered late, causing composers major problems as they raced to meet deadlines and the invariably fraught opening night. Yet despite the haste with which he worked, the results are not only beautifully written but artistically purposeful: like Bellini, Romani’s focus is always on drama.

Together the two would create several exceptional works, but Norma – premiered in Milan in 1831 with Pasta in the title role – is usually regarded as their masterpiece. It was based on a play by Alexandre Soumet set in Roman-occupied Gaul, its central character a druid priestess who has conducted a long but secret relationship with the enemy of her people, the Roman Pollione. Halfway through the opera, Norma learns that Pollione has transferred his affections to another priestess. The resulting personal and political tensions drive the drama towards a shocking yet simultaneously sublime conclusion.

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English National Opera’s production of Norma that opens this week will be the company’s first. I have undertaken the translation – which has been challenging but immensely stimulating. While I make no claims for the result, I hope it will convey the essence of Bellini and Romani’s great drama clearly and directly. There are, of course, opera-lovers for whom translation represents a betrayal of the intentions of the work’s creators, though I’m not aware of any composer or librettist ever having expressed such a view. During the 19th-century alone, Norma was sung to local audiences in German, English, Spanish, Hungarian, Czech, Russian, Croatian, French, Dutch, Finnish, Danish, Swedish, Romanian, Polish, Portuguese, Norwegian and Bulgarian. Pasta’s pupil Adelaide Kemble sang more than 40 performances of the opera in English at Covent Garden in 1841-42, winning huge acclaim.

There’s an Italian expression, traduttore, traditore, very similar in meaning to the French, traduire, c’est trahir. Both compare the act of translation to that of betrayal, and of course there’s a sense in which any translation – let alone one that has to fit pre-ordained rhythmic or metrical structures as closely as possible – has to compromise on something. My fundamental principal has been to place a premium on clarity of meaning on the basis that the argument for opera in English is above all about immediacy of comprehension.

Some years ago I happened to attend five different productions of Madam Butterfly in the space of a few months. In the event, I was slightly surprised that the one that most palpably moved the audience – myself included – was an arena staging at the Royal Albert Hall, an intelligent, visually beautiful realisation by David Freeman. Both cast and conductor were excellent, but I’m quite sure that the crucial factor was Amanda Holden’s fine English translation, which obviated the need to think consciously about the Italian text or even to look at surtitles – it just affected you spontaneously.

Other elements in a translation matter, too. Romani worked as a journalist but was himself a poet, and indeed a translator (from French). His text is economical and elegant, never self-consciously poetic or fussy, but rather clean and specific in its prosody. Trying to get somewhere near to his brevity and neatness was a challenge in itself.

One of the reasons Italian has proved to be such a wonderful language for sung music is the purity of its vowel sounds, which allow the voice to flow without a break. English, by contrast, contains numerous diphthongs that tend instead to close it down. And then there’s the consonant clusters – the word “consonants” itself is an example. Singers aren’t being fussy in disliking them. Their ability to hold an expressive line up in the air – one of the main devices in their expressive armoury – is compromised if consonant collisions act as disruptive hurdles to the flow of tone.

Several people asked how I was going to translate the opening words of the opera’s most famous aria, Casta diva, Norma’s invocation to the moon goddess. Bellini sets Romani’s four syllables over 14 notes in a characteristically ethereal melismatic gesture that seems to encapsulate the druid priestess’s unique and direct connection to the divine. The literal meaning of the words is “Chaste goddess”, but Bellini’s notes require four syllables, not three. After weighing up various possibilities – “Holy goddess” would have fitted – I eventually went for “Virgin goddess”, which is what Marjorie Owens, who performs the title role in ENO’s production, sings here.

There may be an element of compromise in translation, though I hope not of betrayal. I have come to regard the translation process as one of creative negotiation, between the needs of Romani and Bellini, words and music, meaning and sound. And finally, in one or two places a reference that would have required no explanation in Milan in 1831 but might in London in 2016 had to go: in the theatre you can’t have footnotes.