Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)
La traviata – a triumph of human nature
Verdi’s La traviata is not only one of the most popular and often performed operas ever written – it is also one of the few to have been turned into one of the most successful films of an opera, directed by Zeffirelli and starring Teresa Stratas and Placido Domingo. In the film, singing does not distract from the drama because of the essential dramatic truthfulness of this opera, whose mainly intimate, conversational, ‘chamber’ quality suits the close-ups which cinema can do so well. And the story lends itself to the romantic melodrama which is the stuff of a certain kind of film.
Verdi’s opera is immensely popular today, but early performances were greeted by many critics with hostility. Yet their reaction gives an unexpected insight into the piece. Times critic James William Davison, writing about the London performances in May 1856, is usually quoted as dismissing Verdi’s music as ‘of no value whatsoever’, but he was also making the point that ‘the book is of more importance than the music’, the latter being merely a vehicle for the utterance of the dialogue. La traviata, wrote Davison, can be regarded as a play set to music.
Verdi, if he read Davison, was no doubt pleased by this at least. It took daring to put Alexandre Dumas fils’ play La Dame aux camélias on the lyric stage, not only because of the subject matter, but also because it was a play of contemporarymores, and Verdi’s intention was that it be played in contemporary dress. As he wrote to his friend Cesare de Sanctis during the composition of the opera, it is ‘a subject of the times. Others would not have done it because of the conventions, the epoch and for a thousand other stupid scruples.’
Verdi, by the time he came to compose La traviata, wanted to change or abolish conventions in favour of musical and dramatic truthfulness – he had developed the confidence that his music could convince the audience of the rightness of his choice of subject matter. In the same letter to Sanctis, he wrote ‘everyone groaned when I proposed putting a hunchback on the stage. Well, I enjoyed writing Rigoletto.’
The failure of La traviata at its first performance in Venice in 1852 was due less to the radicalism of the choice of subject (toned down in any case by the censors’ insistence that the setting be changed from the present to Paris in 1700) than to the implausibility of the casting, especially the prima donna, who weighed in, it was said, at 135kg. The audience laughed at being asked to believe that she was dying of consumption! After the failure, Verdi insisted that the opera be revived only when he could control the casting and preparation, and he had the satisfaction, a few months later, of observing La traviata’s triumphant success at another theatre in Venice, remarking wryly that it was being played to the same audience.
Daring subject, daring treatment
Yet the subject was daring, and so was the treatment; the singers at the premiere were probably convinced that this opera would fail – where were the intrigues, the duels, the rescues, the usual trappings of high romance? Instead, there was a purely domestic background, admittedly with a scandalous tinge designed by the author of the drama to épater les bourgeois. Verdi did not set out to create a scandal. A few years earlier he had rejected Victor Hugo’s Marion Delorme as an operatic subject, saying, ‘The protagonist has a character I do not like. I do not like whores on the stage.’ Violetta in La traviata is, like Marion Delorme, a courtesan impelled by true love to renounce her past. But Marion Delorme’s past is a guilty secret, and her lover’s discovery and forgiveness of it is the pivot of the plot, whereas Alfredo knows all about Violetta. It is the role of Germont, the father, which gives the subject its appeal to Verdi. Germont père serves as the representative of the outside world, the ‘real’ world of bourgeois respectability and conventional morality.
The subject also resonated in Verdi’s own experience. It was at Passy, near Paris, that Verdi first began to live (‘in sin’, as the Germont family would have regarded it) with Giuseppina Strepponi, who was to be his companion (‘partner’, as we say) for 50 years, until her death, though it was some ten years before they married. Giuseppina, who had two illegitimate children by a previous liaison of the same kind, was familiar with the world of Marie Duplessis, the original of Dumas’ dame aux camélias, Marguerite Gautier. Duplessis was a famous Paris courtesan of great beauty and wit, whose liaisons included Musset, Liszt, and Dumas himself. Marie Duplessis died aged 23, of consumption, five months before Verdi came to Paris in 1847, but it is not impossible that Giuseppina knew her, as Paris hostesses engaged the Italian to sing at their parties. It is very possible Verdi and Giuseppina read Dumas’ novel with interest, and when Dumas turned it into a play, identified with the experience of the main characters.
A subject of personal interest
At the time when he became aware of the play, Verdi’s relationship to Giuseppina Strepponi was scandalising the citizens of Busetto to such an extent that his father-figure, Antonio Barezzi (father of his dead first wife) wrote to him rebuking him for his thoughtless behaviour. La traviata occupied a special place in Verdi’s affections, and was much more intimate and personal in style than anything he had written up to that time.
Choosing the subject was, then, daring. Verdi first gave it the highly romantic working title Love and Death, soon adopting instead the word Violetta applies to herself in her dying prayer, where she acknowledges that she has ‘erred and strayed’, which is what ‘traviata’ means. This focuses attention on the moral dimensions of the tale, necessarily perhaps if the prudery of bourgeois audiences of the 1850s was to be overcome – without a ‘redeeming’ end the play would seem shocking in its worldly realism.
The major challenge, however, was to prove that the subject was suitable for music. Here the London critic Chorley, who unlike most of his colleagues could look past the ‘immorality’ of the subject of La traviata, had a more interesting objection to it: ‘It might have been seen that, whatever was the temptation of the spoken drama, La Dame aux caméliaswas a story untenable for music. Consumption for one who is to sing! A ballet with a lame Sylphide would be as rational.’
If this was La traviata’s only irrational feature, then it came much closer to dramatic realism than almost any opera before. Its handling of its themes combines romanticism with psychological authenticity. The heroine progresses from determined resistance to deep emotional involvement, until a genuine love creates a struggle within her. This is ultimately resolved in favour of love, but too late to enjoy it.
Costume for Violetta for the premiere, 1853. Artist:
Dumas’ play is, in 1850s terms, ‘slice-of-life’ realism. Verdi wanted to make these characters sing, and this meant that they needed opportunities for lyrical expansion – here was the crux of the librettist’s task, and Piave, in making the adaptation of Dumas’ play, filled his task very effectively: he simplified Dumas’ plot somewhat, but kept much of the actual wording of the characters’ speeches, in places such as the duet for Violetta and Germont. In some respects, Piave perhaps improved on the play, no doubt with Verdi’s prompting: the transition, for example, from the subdued pathos of the orchestral prelude, imaginatively using a novel texture of divided strings, to the brilliance and conviviality of Flora’s party in full swing is great operatic theatre.
From there on, the interchanges between characters give Verdi the opportunity for a display of psychological understanding unprecedented in his work, and indeed perhaps since Mozart.
Two examples will serve: the first is Violetta’s intimate conversation with Alfredo in Act I, ‘Un dì felice, eterea’, where Alfredo’s music is all tender passion, but Violetta takes up the triplets he has been singing, breaking the legato line with hectic pauses and making an entirely different rhythmical use of them, as she tells him to avoid her, because she doesn’t know what love is.
The other example is in one of the longest duets Verdi ever wrote, the conversation between Violetta and Germont in Act II, beginning with tentatively sparring exchanges as they face each other, gradually discovering with surprise that their prejudices were misplaced – this is subtly underscored by the music. The sentimentality of the elder Germont’s dwelling on his daughter’s future eventually prompts Violetta to a desperate show of resistance. This is followed by a long pause, in which she recovers her composure a little, while Germont tries to wear down her resistance, until she surrenders, beginning at the words ‘Dite alla giovine’. Verdi’s music has evoked sympathy for both characters’ predicament, although Germont’s ‘win’ has been achieved by a kind of complacently bourgeois moral bullying.
Preserving operatic convention in this ‘slice of life’ drama
In placing this kind of detailed interplay of character at the core of his opera, Verdi set himself a problem: how to preserve enough of the conventions of opera to give his singers, and the audience, the opportunities they would expect. Germont’s one solo, the aria ‘Di Provenza al mar’, sung in his exchange with his son which follows, seems a lyrical opportunity for a baritone with a good top register, but in its context it humanises Germont’s complacency. It is easy to forget how unusual this aria is, and how different from the baritone heroics, of, say, the Count di Luna in the very different opera Il trovatore which Verdi had completed only a matter of weeks before.
Violetta’s big solo scena at the end of Act I is unconventional, too, in closing an act without participation of the chorus. Here Verdi deliberately made Violetta’s part a challenge to any soprano capable of riding the orchestra in the great outbursts of the second act, especially the frenzied ‘Amami, Alfredo!’. The dizzying coloratura of ‘Sempre libera’, which ends Act I, is no mere gratification of the prima donna, but has superb dramatic point. The singer should sound stretched to the limit, as though she hardly has the breath to manage the daring coloratura.
Verdi’s characters in La traviata are ordinary people – the composer and his Giuseppina, as we have seen, may have met their models. To experience the dramatic point of the singer-friendly lyricism in which La traviata abounds, it must emerge naturally from the pacing of the conversational drama. Treating La traviata as a masterly setting of a play to music enhances its effect, and Verdi’s inventiveness does the rest.
It seems almost unfair, to other composers at least, that Verdi had the range to produce such superb music drama while also bequeathing to the world some of its most memorable tunes. No accident that his La traviata keeps the stage now that Dumas’ play has ceased to be a favourite vehicle for great actresses of the spoken drama. The critic Vincent Godefroy once attended, on the same day, a performance of the play, followed by a performance of the opera. He felt they were two totally different works: ‘the play was a slice of life, so shot through with realism as to be disturbing, and not in the least uplifting. The opera was…grand, bright, lofty, epic…sang of souls rather than bodies, immortality rather than death, hope rather than despair.’ It was Proust who said that in La traviata Verdi had lifted La Dame aux camélias into the realm of art.
First published in the program for a concert performance by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra in 2002.