Verdi - La traviata, October 1, 3m, 6, 8, 10, 2009. Royal Theatre. In Italian with English surtitles
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Operas > La traviata > Inside the Libretto

La traviata

October 1, 6, 8, and 10, 2009, at 8 pm
Matinée October 3 at 3 pm


Inside the Libretto

Synopsis


Act 1: The courtesan Violetta Valéry, recently recovered from a bout of consumption, hosts a lavish party where she meets Alfredo Germont, who has loved her from afar for over a year. At Violetta's request, Alfredo leads the guests in a toast to wine and love (Libiamo ne' lieti calici – Let's drink from the joyous chalice); Violetta counters that life is meaningless, love fleeting, and pleasure the only thing worth living for. As the guests begin to dance, Violetta becomes faint. Alfredo lingers protectively and ardently declares his love (Un dì, felice, eterea – One happy, heavenly day). Although Violetta is intrigued by the possibility of true love (Ah, fors'è lui – Perhaps he is the one), she declares that it's madness to expect such happiness and resolves to remain free and live only for pleasure (Sempre libera – Always free). Meanwhile Alfredo praises the mysterious power, the torment and the delight of love (misterioso, altero, croce e delizia al cor).

Act 2, Scene 1: Three months later, Violetta and Alfredo are living an idyllic life in the countryside (Di miei bollenti spiriti – My passionate spirit). Dismayed on learning that Violetta has sold her possessions to meet their expenses, Alfredo leaves for Paris to arrange to pay her back. Meanwhile Alfredo's father Germont arrives to urge Violetta to leave Alfredo. Although he quickly realizes Violetta is not the mercenary courtesan he expected, Germont insists that their scandalous relationship jeopardizes his daughter's pending marriage (Pura siccome un angelo – I have a daughter as pure as an angel). When he then points out that Alfredo will soon tire of Violetta anyway, she acquiesces (Dite alla giovine – Tell the young woman), and begs Germont to one day tell Alfredo of her sacrifice.

As Violetta is writing a farewell letter to Alfredo, he returns. Overwhelmed with grief, she pleads with Alfredo to always love her as she loves him (Amami, Alfredo). She then departs for a party in Paris at her friend Flora's. When her letter is delivered to Alfredo, Germont appears and attempts to comfort him, reminding him of his childhood home and the family who loves him (Di Provenza il mar – The sea of Provence). But Alfredo, certain that Violetta has returned to her former lover Baron Douphol, heads for Paris, followed by Germont.

Intermission

Act 2, Scene 2: At Flora's party Alfredo creates a scene, gambling recklessly, then hurling his winnings at Violetta to pay her for her services. The guests are shocked, and Baron Douphol challenges Alfredo to a duel.

Act 3: Deathly ill with consumption and nearly out of money, Violetta rereads a letter from Germont: Alfredo has gone abroad after wounding the baron; Germont has told Alfredo of Violetta's sacrifice, and both are on their way to her. When they arrive, the lovers dream of leaving Paris forever (Parigi, o cara , noi lasceremo – Dearest, we'll leave Paris). But Violetta knows it is too late (Ah! Gran Dio! Morir si giovine! – Oh, dear God! To die so young!). She gives Alfredo her picture, telling him to marry and give it to his wife as a remembrance of one who will be in heaven, praying for them both. Suddenly Violetta's pain subsides and she feels a surge of strength. But even as she cries out for joy, she dies.


Background of the Story


La traviata was inspired by a play, La Dame aux camélias, adapted by Alexandre Dumas, fils, from his novel of the same name. Alexandre Dumas, fils, was the illegitimate son of the well-known writer Alexandre Dumas, père, author of The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, and The Man in the Iron Mask.

La dame aux camélias was a shocking, semi-autobiographical best seller about Dumas' affair with a celebrated courtesan, Rose Alphonsine Plessis (who preferred the more upscale name Marie Duplessis). Young Dumas and Marie Duplessis had become lovers when they were both 20 and she was already established as a notorious Paris courtesan. He ended the affair less than a year later, deeply in debt, unable to support either her extravagant lifestyle or her numerous lovers.

Marie returned to her round of luxury and lovers (among them Franz Liszt). But her health deteriorated, and she died of consumption in 1847 at the age of 23. Dumas' novel appeared a year later; in it Marie was renamed Marguerite Gautier, her lover Armand Duval. The real Marie was quite different than either Dumas' idealized heroine or Verdi's Violetta. Marie Duplessis liked to say Lying keeps my teeth white. If she resembles any operatic heroine, it is the luxury-loving Manon Lescaut rather than the self-sacrificing Violetta Valéry. (Indeed in Dumas' story, Duval gives Marguerite a copy of Prévost's novel L'histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut – the story that later inspired the operas Manon by Jules Massenet and Manon Lescaut by Giacomo Puccini.)

In the preface to his translation of Dumas' novel, David Coward says,

La dame aux camélias has never been a novel for which persons of taste and discernment have been able to confess outright enthusiasm. When it appeared in 1848, stern judges declared its subject to be indelicate. Nowadays the blushes spring from a reluctance to admit openly that a four-hankie novel can claim to be literature or even have a serious call on our attention. By any standards, it is not a particularly good book: at most, it falls into G.K. Chesterton's category of `good bad books'... [Dumas fils] wrote better novels and more significant plays, but he wrote them with his head. La dame aux camélias is a young man's book, and it has all the faults and virtues of youth. It was a romantic indiscretion for which Dumas was never moved to apologize.

Dumas adapted La dame aux camélias as a play in 1849; it premiered in Paris in 1852. When Giuseppe Verdi saw the play shortly after its premiere he was surely inspired to transform it into an opera, not just by the chance to épater les bourgeois with a depiction of unmarried love and a noble prostitute, but also by the fact that Violetta's plight mirrored Verdi's own life.

Verdi had recently become involved with Giuseppina Strepponi, the former singer whose influence had helped launch his career. They would marry in 1859 and remain together until Strepponi's death in 1897. But in 1852, as Verdi was casting about for a subject to fulfill his contract for a new opera with Venice's La Fenice Theatre, they had moved to the small town of Busetto in the Italian countryside, where their relationship caused a scandal. The townspeople ostracized Strepponi, appalled by her reputation – she had several illegitimate children from various fathers – and by the fact that she and Verdi were living in sin. Verdi chose to ignore the insults of the townspeople, protesting directly only when Antonio Barezzi, his benefactor and the father of Verdi's beloved first wife, criticized his living arrangements. Verdi responded to Barezzi's disapproval of their living arrangements with a letter from Paris on January 21, 1852:

You live in a town where people have the bad habit of frequently prying into other people's affairs and disapproving of everything that doesn't conform to their own ideas. I am not accustomed to interfere in other people's business, unless I am asked to, because I demand that no one interfere in mine. Hence the gossip, the grumbling prattle, the disapproval...
In my house there lives a free, independent lady who loves seclusion as I do, and possesses a fortune...Neither she nor I owe any accounts of our action to anyone...
Who knows whether she is or is not my wife? And if she is, who knows what the particular reasons are for not making it public? Who knows whether it is good or bad? Why might it not be a good thing? And even if it is bad, who has the right to condemn us? I will definitely say this much: in my house she is entitled to as much respect, or more, as I am myself, and no one is allowed to forget this for any reason whatsoever; she has every right to it, as much for her dignity as for her intelligence and her unfailing graciousness to others...

Barezzi did eventually accept Strepponi. But this letter and the complicated mix of love and disapproval in the relationship between Verdi and Barezzi seem to find an echo in La traviata in the complex character of Germont. He enters the opera as a conventional bourgeois father bent on splitting up the lovers to preserve his family honour. But he is soon surprised to find he can connect with and respect the woman who threatens his daughter's happiness and his son's position in society.

Verdi's sense of social justice infuses many of his operas. But La traviata is his most intimate work, imbued with a compassion and affection unequalled in any of his works, and some of that affection reaches even to Germont, the representative of the social conventions and double standards that destroy Violetta's happiness.

On being asked which was his favourite of his operas, Verdi is said to have replied, "Speaking as a professional, Rigoletto, as an amateur, Traviata."

Verdi's operatic adaptation has soared to the top of the repertoire and transcended its source. Opera America lists La traviata as the third most frequently performed opera in North America (La Bohème, that other great opera whose heroine dies of consumption, takes first place). Verdi had faith that Time would decide the fate of La traviata ... and so it has.


La Dame aux camélias in theatre and film


Dumas' play La Dame aux camélias was immensely successful at its 1852 premiere, and it became popular all over Europe and America. Over the decades the character of Marguerite Gautier was interpreted by such actresses as Lillian Gish, Tallulah Bankhead, and Sarah Bernhardt. In fact Marguerite became Bernhardt's signature role; she performed it in both the original French and in the English adaptation Camille. (In 1906 the New York Times reported that during a performance of Camille, Bernhardt had scolded a sparse Youngstown audience in French, calling them stupid and utterly lacking in appreciation. As most of the audience did not understand French, they applauded anyway.)

So impressed was Dumas by Bernhardt's performances of his play that in 1884 he gave her the original letter he had written to Marie Duplessis breaking off their affair. After Marie's death he had bought the letter back and quoted it in his novel.

Good-bye, my dear Marguerite. I am not rich enough to love you as I would nor poor enough to love you as you would. Let us then forget, you a name which must be indifferent enough to you, I a happiness which has become impossible.

La Dame aux camélias has also had many film adaptations, including a 1911 French movie starring Sarah Bernhardt and a 1921 silent with Alla Nazimova and a nearly unknown Rudolph Valentino. Although the 1921 silent film today seems charmingly exotic, with a lavish, over-the-top Art Deco set, it was envisioned as a contemporary treatment of the story. The film opens with the lines Why not a Camille of today? Living the same story in this generation?. The elaborate sets were designed by Natacha Rambova, who would later become Valentino's second wife, and who was rumored to be Nazimova's lover.

Most celebrated is the first English talking version, the 1936 classic Camille, directed by George Cukor and starring Greta Garbo in a performance for which she received an Academy Award nomination and the New York Film Critics award for best actress. Camille is considered by many to be her finest screen performance. Garbo's first talkie film, Anna Christie (1931), had been advertised with the proclamation: "Garbo Talks!" Some wags suggested that Camille should be promoted with the line "Garbo Coughs!" Robert Taylor played Armand Duval, and Lionel Barrymore his father. The film inspired Milton Benjamin to write a song called "I'll Love Like Robert Taylor (Be My Greta Garbo)."

Links


La traviata
La Dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas, fils
Le demi-monde by Alexandre Dumas, fils
Films

Inside La traviata