Vincenzo Bellini’s “I puritani,” a bel canto opera in three-acts that was the Italian composer’s final work, will return to the Metropolitan Opera beginning April 17. The production is a revival of Sandro Sequi’s 1976 staging, which has served as a showcase for famous stars of opera, including Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti. Russian soprano Olga Peretyatko will make her debut at the storied opera house in the role of Elvira, a young woman driven to hysteria over the love of two men, alongside Lawrence Brownlee and Mariusz Kwiecien as Arturo and Riccardo respectively, the two men fighting over her heart.
“I puritani” premiered at Théâtre-Italien in Paris on January 24, 1835, eight months before Bellini’s death from acute inflammation of the intestine. The libretto was written by Carlo Pepoli (whom Bellini reportedly did not get along with, the composer finding fault with Pepoli’s inexperience writing for the voice) and based on the play “Têtes rondes et Cavaliers” by Jacques-François Ancelot and Joseph Xavier Saintine, itself based on Walter Scott’s novel “Old Mortality,” the most well-regarded piece of the writer’s “Tales of My Landlord” series.
In a review of the 2006 revival of the same production, New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini called Sequi’s take on Bellini “dusty” and an example of “the stand-and-deliver school of directing.”
Michele Mariotti, Peretyatko’s husband, will conduct, the first time the couple have worked together on Bellini’s opera. Peretyatko previously sang the role of Elvira at the Lyon Opera and the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, and was recently seen as Zerbinetta in Richard Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” at the Hamburg State Opera. Mariotti first appeared at the Met directing Bizet’s “Carmen” last season, followed by the production of “Rigoletto.”
Bellini’s “I puritani” will run through May 10 at the Metropolitan Opera.
