NORMA, OSSIAN, AND PAUL BEDFORD.
A vestal virgin with a husband and two children, a Roman Lothario, with an Irish friend, a Druidical temple, a gong, and an auto-da-fé, mix up charmingly with Bellini’s quadrille-like music to form a pathetic opera; and sympathetic dilettanti weep over the woes of “Norma,” because they are so exquisitely portrayed by Miss Kemble, in spite of the subject and the music. Such, indeed, is the power of this lady’s genius—which is shed like a halo over the whole opera—that nobody laughs at the broad Irish in which Flavius delivers himself and his recitative; few are risibly affected by the apathetic, and often out-of-tune, roarings of Pollio:—than which stronger testimony could not be cited of the triumph of Miss Kemble; for solely by her influence do those who go to Covent-Garden to grin, return delighted.
But Apollo himself could not charm away the rich fun that pervades the English adaptation; nor the modest humour of its preface. It has been, hitherto, one characteristic of the lyric drama to consist of verse; rhyme has been thought not wholly dispensable. Those, however, who are “familiar with the writings of Ossian,” (and the works of the Covent-Garden adapter), will, according to the preface, at once see the fallacy of this. Rhyme is mere “jingle,”—rhythm, rhodomontade,—metre, monstrous,—versification, villanous,—in short, Ossian did not write poetry, neither does this learned prefacier—so it’s all nonsense!
To burlesque such a work as “Norma,” then, is to paint the lily, to gild refined gold, to caricature Lord Morpeth, or to attempt to improve PUNCH. Yet the opportunity was too tempting to be wholly overlooked, and a hint having been dropped in one of our “Pencillings,” an Adelphi scribe has acted upon it. An enlarged edition of the work may, therefore, now be had at half-price. A heroine of six foot two or three in her sandals, with a bass voice, covers the stage with tremendous strides, and warbles out “her wood-notes” (being a Druidess she worships the oak) “wild,” with a volume of voice which silences the trombone, and makes the ophecleide sound asthmatic. In short, the great feature is Mr. Paul Bedford. The children he brings forward are worthy of their parentage. Pollio is made a most killing Roman roué by Mrs. Grattan; but Norma’s attendant does not speak Irish half so richly as the Covent-Garden Flavius.
But, above all, commend we Mr. Wright’s Adelgeisa. It is a masterpiece; all the airs and graces of the prima donna he imitates with a true spirit of burlesque. As to his singing, it astonished everybody, and so did the introduction of “All round my Hat,”—a most unnecessary interpolation, for the original music is quite as droll.