The unbearable conflict between love and the thirst for revenge, between religion and reason and between her own tradition and an empire almost drives Norma to murder her own children - before she decides to take another, hardly less radical step. With the role of Norma, Bellini has created a female character who goes through every conceivable human state in a short space of time and expresses these with musical means from bel canto to screaming. Vasily Barkhatov interprets the tragedy against the backdrop of a change in the political system. Norma gets caught up in the millstones of ideological upheavals in which old idols are replaced by new idols.