We all remember the Greek myth of Medea, the bloodthirsty priestess of Colchis, who fell for Jason, helped him win the Golden Fleece, and bore him two children. She and Jason went to Corinth where Jason left her for Glauce, the daughter of King Creon. Medea took this badly, and poisoned Glauce and Creon, before cutting the throats of her own children (at the end of Soumet’s play Norma murders her own two children). Medea then fled to Athens, where, amongst other terrible things, she married Aegeus. Different authors have treated different parts of the myth. The Medea of Euripides deals with the events in Corinth, as does Corneille’s 17th–century French version. Cherubini’s opera Medée (1797) is the most famous of several operas on the Medea theme, but Romani and Soumet were probably more familiar with Simon Mayr’s Medea in Corinto; Romani because he wrote the libretto for Mayr, Soumet because it ran in Paris from 1823 to 1826. Veleda, the German hermit–prophetess mentioned in Tacitus, organised opposition among the Bructeri against Roman rule around 70 AD. She was known to Soumet through Chateaubriand’s 1809 treatment of the story, his novel, Les Martyrs, where she is a Gallic priestess of early Christian times. As in Norma, the bards in the Chateaubriand talk of cutting mistletoe from a sacred oak with a golden sickle; they also worship a sacred dead tree called Irminsul. Velléda falls in love with and seduces a Roman soldier, Eudore, who is a Christian. She then cries rape and calls on the Gauls to revolt against the Romans. During the battle she has a further change of heart, confesses her guilt, and cuts her own throat with the golden sickle. Spontini’s La Vestale (1807) was a great hit in its day. Napoleon said it was his favourite opera and it was admired by Berlioz and Wagner, powerful advocates for what many now regard as insipid stuff. The heroine is a vestal virgin, a priestess of Vesta pledged to chastity so that she can concentrate on tending the sacred flame. She conducts a hazardous affair with a Roman general and during a big duet the flame goes out. A lightning bolt happily comes to relight it, so all ends well. From these sources Soumet put together his verse drama Norma ou L’Infanticide for the famous tragedienne Mme
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Georges. It was first produced in 1831 in Paris. He had become extremely successful and the fame had gone to his head, for he immodestly claimed in a note in the text of the play that Mme Georges traversed ’the entire range of passions to be found in the female heart’ – he mentions Niobe, Lady Macbeth, Chateaubriand’s Velléda – rising in the final scene ’to heights of inspiration which will probably never again be climbed’: in the fifth act Norma goes crazy, and having, Medea–like, murdered one of her children, throws herself over a precipice with the other. Romani, ever ready to seize upon the latest success, adapted the play for Bellini, who had a commission for an opera to open the 1831 December Carnival Season at La Scala, Milan. In Soumet’s play Oroveso is the head druid but not Norma’s father. Norma’s children have important speaking parts, and one of these children has the dream given to Pollione in the opera. Clothilde is a Christian and in an extended scene explains her religion to Norma’s children. There is no druidic ceremony nor any ceremonial Cutting of the Mistletoe, though the set contains the oak of Irminsul and an altar. Norma has been held prisoner in Rome for three years before the play starts. She keeps the recently–conquered Gauls peaceful, enabling Pollion to govern the province. He appreciates her help in this but finds her love cloying, and is becoming interested in the attractive young priestess, Adalgise. He is embarrassed in this flirtation by his promise to take Norma and his children back to Rome, and, of course, by Norma’s growing suspicious jealousy. Romani concentrates the plot, reducing Soumet’s five acts to just two. He moves the action back to 50 BCE, soon after Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, which simplifies the religious background – Clothilde cannot be a Christian. He removes most of the fifth act, the mad scenes, the murder of the children and the suicide, and devises a different end: Norma sacrifices herself, and mounts the pyre both because she can bear life no more, and to show Pollione what a noble heart he has spurned. To understand the extent of Norma’s betrayal of her people, we need to remember that Gaul’s wounds were fresh. Caesar’s final victory over the Gallic tribes had been hard–fought and painful; hard–fought on both sides, and painful particularly for the Gauls, for the campaign against