VERDI’S LA TRAVIATA
A SHORT GUIDE TO A GREAT OPERA
The opera and its composer
Who’s who and what’s what
The interval: talking points
Act by act
THE OPERA AND ITS COMPOSER
A fiasco. That was Verdi’s own description of the première of La Traviata (‘The Fallen Woman’) at La Fenice in Venice on 6 March 1853.1 The performers were apparently not up to their parts and the leading tenor was hoarse – they excused themselves by claiming that the music did not suit them.
Most of the blame is usually heaped on the Violetta, Fanny Salvini-Donatelli (1815–1891). She had been very much a second choice, because Verdi’s first choice was ill. For his prostitute dying of consumption, Verdi wanted a prima donna who was ‘young, had a graceful figure and could sing with passion.’ Fanny actually sang very well indeed. But, at the age of 38, she was obviously no longer the nuovo ed ardente sirena of her youth. And there was a worse, insuperable problem: she weighed 286lb, or over 20 stone.
For Verdi, the singer was expected to provide a ‘near perfect union of music and drama’, the one complementing and supporting the other, in perfect balance. La Traviata is a reminder of the importance of the singer, as a minimum, looking credible in the role – a matter usually, but far from invariably, attended to today.
At the première, the Prelude with which the opera starts was greeted with great applause. From the beginning of Act 2, though, the reception took a turn for the worse, and the audience began hooting. However, the production ran for nine nights and actually did quite well at the box office. Verdi withdrew it for fourteen months. After this, it was performed to great acclaim. Today, it is at the top of the list of most-performed operas.
Verdi had composed La Traviata under great pressure. He had been in Rome working hard on Il Trovatore, which was premièred there only seven weeks before. However, we should not be too surprised: this was a time when operas were produced like shelling peas – Donizetti had assembled L’Elisir d’Amore in about a fortnight.
Verdi had first encountered the story of La Traviata around a year earlier. During a visit to Paris,2 he went to a performance of an immensely popular play by Alexandre Dumas, La Dame aux Camélias, which was based on a novel of the same name. This romance features Marguerite, ‘a virgin who some accident had made a courtesan’, and who is always to be seen carrying a bouquet of camellias, ‘a pale, scentless, cold flower, but sensitive as purity itself.’ The 25-year-old Armand falls in love with her, but their affair ends in tragedy.
Over a hundred years earlier, Abbé Prévost had shown in his Manon Lescaut how a novel about a love affair between a young man and a courtesan/prostitute can attract a wide readership. And Dumas’s soft porn3 enabled the prurient to peep yet again behind the curtains of Paris, that ‘great mother-city of scandal’. It was a bestseller. The part of Marguerite has been played by great actresses such as Sarah Bernhardt and Vivien Leigh, and the lead roles have been danced by legendary ballet dancers such as Fonteyn and Nureyev. It has been filmed and made into musicals, and adapted as a modern play.
Verdi, having seen the play, immediately began to toy with its possibilities as an opera, but the following months were taken up with business and domestic matters, including the health of his father. Even in midsummer, he had not yet agreed a subject for the opera he had undertaken to have ready for Venice early in 1853. It was only in October that he settled on Dumas’s story. With one of his librettists, Piave,4 he put together a rough draft in about five days. Piave’s work has been called ‘a lesson in condensation’.
In December, Verdi had to be in Rome to prepare for Il Trovatore. It looked at one moment as if the La Traviata venture would have to be called off, with Verdi citing illness as the justification. It was very frustrating: he could not get the singers he wanted, and he did not like the production. Verdi wanted it staged as a contemporary drama, in modern clothes. But to get round the rigorous censorship, the opera had to be staged as a period piece around 1700 during the reign of Louis XIV.5 By the time of his arrival in Venice in late February, he knew it was going to be a disaster. But he had to comply with his contract so he could not cancel.
When La Traviata was revived in Venice in May 1854, Verdi made some considerable modification to the detail. The reception was completely different. In another theatre, with a different cast, there was ‘an uproar of indescribable applause’. Verdi famously commented, ‘Then it was a fiasco; now it is creating an uproar.’
A canon from Bologna duly censored it to make it suitable for the Papal States and Naples, and the critic of The Times denounced its ‘foul and hideous horrors’ at the London première in 1856. But two years later, on 25 May 1858, all three musical theatres in London – Her Majesty’s, Covent Garden and Drury Lane – were performing La Traviata at the same time. When you have a compelling story, you have a hit as well. It has been like that ever since. Handkerchiefs are a necessary accessory.
As Tito Gobbi pointed out, ‘it is Violetta’s evening or it is nothing.’ She has been sung by such legendary stars as Christine Nilsson, Adelina Patti, Nellie Melba and Tetrazzini. It is not a role for which every star is ideal: Victoria de los Angeles, Kiri te Kanawa, yes; Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, no. When Maria Callas tried to create a sickly quality in the voice of Violetta, the critics said, ‘Callas is tired.’ Some stars sensibly confine themselves to recorded excerpts, such as Joan Sutherland.
Pavarotti sang the role of Alfredo in his early years, but subsequently he had too much in common with that first soprano, Fanny, to make him a sensible choice. Placido Domingo made his debut as a lead tenor as Alfredo, in Mexico, aged 20. He later conceded that he ‘had not yet learned to control his emotions’. He accepted that he was not technically ready, and he found it a difficult role subsequently. He starred with Teresa Stratas in a highly acclaimed film version directed by Franco Zeffirelli.
Because Verdi’s characters ‘are not make-believe, but are real’, this opera is enduringly successful.
Giuseppe Verdi, whose life spanned the 19th century, brought the development of Italian opera to its ultimate conclusion. He was born on 10 October 1813 in northern Italy, at Le Roncole, near Busseto in the Duchy of Parma. He died in Milan on 27 January 1901. When La Scala reopened after his funeral, the programme, conducted by Toscanini, included the prelude to the death bed scene in La Traviata.
His studies in Milan were sponsored by a local businessman, Antonio Barezzi, whose daughter he subsequently married. But she died, as did their children, early on. After this, Verdi lived with (and eventually married) Giuseppina Strepponi, the daughter of the organist of Monza cathedral. She had an ‘endearing personality’, but also a ‘reputation’ for depositing unwanted children around the place. She was a star in the late 1830s and was the prima donna of Verdi’s early opera Nabucco, best known for the Chorus of Hebrews yearning for freedom. From early on, Verdi (and his name) was associated with the Italian nationalism spearheaded by Mazzini and Garibaldi, and this relationship contributed to his success.
By 1851, Verdi had composed or arranged eleven operas including the first of the three ground-breaking operas of the early 1850s Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata. He set himself up as a gentleman farmer on an estate he acquired at Sant’Agata, near his birthplace. It was a difficult time for the tactless, humourless and unforgiving workaholic. He felt he owed no thanks to the people of his birthplace who did not hide their outrage at his living openly with Giuseppina. His house was robbed by the servants; his mother died; he had major rows with his father about finances and with his father-in-law about family matters. This was the context in which he was working on Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Traviata.
After the subsequent few years, which produced Les Vêpres siciliennes, Simon Boccanegra, Un Ballo in maschera and La Forza del destino, Verdi slowed up. Only four operas were composed in the last 38 years of his life. After Don Carlos (1867) and Aïda (1871), he had a long pause. However, at the end of his career, he was persuaded by the publisher Giulio Ricordi to compose the two operas for which Arrigo Boito contributed the libretti, Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893). These considerably added to his greatness. The Requiem (1874) was written for the funeral of the writer, poet and novelist Alessandro Manzoni.
Towards the end of his life, he took up with Teresa Stolz, one of his prima donnas.
There was a great divide between the adherents and style of Verdi and of Wagner. Bruno Walter, the conductor, tells of how, in the reign of Cosima Wagner, daughter of Liszt and Wagner’s widow (who lasted 47 years beyond his death), it was forbidden to mention the name of Verdi. Bruno Walter said something to her about the astonishing development in Verdi’s work between Ernani and Aïda and finally Falstaff. Frau Wagner went icily frigid: ‘Development?’ she asked. ‘I can see no di...