Pappano Conducts Verdi’s La traviata in Concert

About the Work

In February 1852 Verdi, in Paris with Giuseppina Strepponi, saw a new play by the younger Alexandre Dumas: La Dame aux camélias, adapted from the novel Dumas had published four years earlier. Its heroine was drawn from life. Marie Duplessis, a celebrated Parisian courtesan whom Dumas had known, had died of tuberculosis at the age of 23. Within a year Verdi had turned the play into an opera for La Fenice in Venice, with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave. The title means, roughly, ‘the woman who strayed’.

What Verdi wanted was something unusual for Italian opera of the time: a tragedy about contemporary people, in contemporary dress, in rooms the audience might have recognised. The Venetian authorities would not allow it. A courtesan as heroine was bad enough, and the theatre insisted that the action be moved back to around 1700. Verdi gave way on the costumes and on nothing else.

The first night, 6 March 1853, has become a legend of operatic failure. The audience grew restive, some of its mockery was aimed at the soprano, Fanny Salvini-Donatelli, whom they found implausible as a young woman wasting away, and Verdi wrote to a friend the next day that the opera had been a fiasco and that time would tell whose fault it was. Time did. He withheld the score until he could cast it properly, made some revisions to the second and third acts, and on 6 May 1854 it was given again in Venice, at the Teatro San Benedetto, with complete success. It has been among the most performed of all operas ever since.

The story is simple and moves fast. Violetta Valéry, admired, kept and already ill, is surprised at one of her own parties by a young man, Alfredo Germont, who loves her and says so. She gives up Paris to live with him in the country. His father, Giorgio Germont, comes to her in secret: the scandal is ruining his daughter’s marriage prospects, and he asks Violetta to give Alfredo up. She agrees, lets Alfredo believe she has tired of him, and returns to her old protector. Alfredo insults her in public. By the time father and son understand what she did, and come to her, she is dying.

These are concert performances, sung with surtitles: no sets, no costumes, the orchestra on the platform and not in a pit. For an opera in which so much happens in the orchestra and in quiet conversation, that is less of a loss than it sounds.

What to Listen For

The Prelude tells the story backwards. It opens with violins alone, divided, very soft and high, in the frail music that will return when Violetta is dying in Act III. Only then comes the warm, wide melody of her love for Alfredo, which will reach its full height in Act II when she cries ‘Amami, Alfredo’.

Act I is one continuous party, most of it in waltz time. The drinking song ‘Libiamo ne’ lieti calici’ (the Brindisi) is the tune everyone knows. Alfredo’s declaration, ‘Un dì, felice, eterea’, introduces a soaring phrase about love as the heartbeat of the universe, and when Violetta is left alone that phrase haunts her. Her great scene moves from the hesitant ‘Ah, fors’è lui’ to the glittering defiance of ‘Sempre libera’, with Alfredo’s voice heard from outside, pulling against her.

The centre of the opera is the long duet between Violetta and Germont in Act II. It is not an aria with interruptions but a negotiation in several stages, and the music shows her resistance giving way phrase by phrase, until ‘Dite alla giovine’ accepts the sacrifice in a broken, almost whispered line. Germont’s own aria, ‘Di Provenza il mar, il suol’, follows when he tries to console his son. The act ends at Flora’s party with a big ensemble after Alfredo throws his gambling winnings at Violetta’s feet.

Act III is spare. The Prelude’s opening returns, on few instruments. Violetta reads Germont’s letter aloud, speaking over a solo violin that recalls Alfredo’s love theme, and sings her farewell to the past, ‘Addio del passato’, its vocal line broken by rests as if she cannot find the breath. The lovers’ reunion duet, ‘Parigi, o cara’, is a gentle waltz of plans that both know are impossible. In the last moments the pain leaves her, she rises, says she feels life returning, and falls.