ACT I
A party is taking place at the home of Violetta Valéry, a beautiful Parisian demimondaine. Gastone arrives and presents a friend, Alfredo Germont, telling Violetta that Alfredo has long been a silent admirer and had even called daily during her illness to ask about her. Baron Douphol, one of Violetta's "protectors", is angered by the conversation and refuses to propose a toast when invited to by Gastone. Alfredo then accepts the invitation, and sings an impassioned tribute to beauty and love. Later, as the others go to another room to dance, Violetta is overcome by a fainting spell. Alfredo stays behind and confesses that he has been in love with her for a year. Violetta offers him friendship instead of love and gives him a flower, bidding him return when it is withered. Alfredo joyously accepts and bids her goodnight. When her guests have gone, Violetta thoughtfully muses on Alfredo's proffered love, but finally returns to her true character and declares that she must remain forever free to pass from pleasure to pleasure.
ACT II
Violetta is living with Alfredo in the country, having abandoned her life of ease and luxury in Paris. Annina, Violetta's maid and confidante, enters and tells Alfredo she has been sent to arrange the sale of Violetta's property, which must be sold to pay their debts. Alfredo suddenly understands the sacrifices that Violetta has made in order to live with him and leaves for Paris, determined not to be shamed by her sacrifice. Violetta enters. She receives an unexpected visitor, Giorgio Germont, Alfredo's father, who declares that Alfredo is ruining himself to keep her as his mistress. When Germont comments on the luxury of the country retreat, Violetta shows him the papers which have been prepared for the sale of all her possessions. He asks her to give up Alfredo, explaining that by continuing the liaison, Alfredo is endangering the impending marriage of his younger sister. Germont's insistence finally convinces Violetta, who agrees to leave Alfredo forever. She is preparing a letter as Alfredo returns. Germont has gone out into the garden. Alfredo, not realizing his father has already arrived, explains that Germont has written him a severe letter but that he feels sure he will approve of Violetta as soon as he sees her. Pretending to leave so as not to be present during the meeting of father and son, Violetta goes out. A messenger returns with her letter of farewell. Alfredo is stricken with grief at the loss of Violetta, and when his father tries to persuade him to return to his family, Alfredo refuses. Finding on the table an invitation which Flora had sent Violetta, he resolves to go to Flora's in the hope of finding Violetta.
ACT III
Alfredo arrives at Flora's house as the guests are beginning to gamble. Then Violetta arrives, escorted by Baron Douphol. Alfredo is incredibly lucky at cards, and explains that he who is unlucky in love is lucky at cards. The baron, incensed at Alfredo's insolence, challenges him to play. Alfredo accepts and beats the Baron repeatedly at high stakes. When all the others go to dinner, Violetta remains behind to entreat Alfredo to leave lest the Baron challenge him to a duel. Alfredo answers that he will leave, but only if she accompanies him. Unwilling to reveal that she must break off with him because of his father, Violetta declares that she is in love with the Baron. Alfredo, in a frenzy of jealousy, calls all the guests into the room and announces that without knowing it he has been living with Violetta at great sacrifice on her part. In a rage, he throws money at her feet and calls upon all to witness that he has paid her in full. Germont has entered just in time to witness Alfredo's caddish behavior and joins the others in reviling him for his conduct. Alfredo, realizing the lengths to which his jealousy has carried him, is contrite, but realizes that he is helpless to make amends. The Baron assures Alfredo that he must answer for the insult on the field of honor.
ACT IV
Violetta's illness has brought her to the point of death. Her physician, Doctor Grenvil, calling on her at home, examines her and tells Annina that she has but a few hours to live. Violetta reads a letter from the elder Germont, in which she learns that Alfredo has gone abroad after wounding the Baron in a duel. He knows now of the great sacrifice Violetta has made and is returning to beg her forgiveness. Alfredo returns and the two are reunited at last. But it is too late. Violetta, comforted by the presence of the man whom she has so tragically loved, dies in his arms.
The Traviata Saga
By Stephanie Von Buchau
It was Marcel Proust who said that, with La Traviata, Verdi had lifted La Dame aux Camélias into the realm of art. Listeners have not always agreed. When it was first preformed at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London in 1856, Traviata was called “foul and fulminating in its subject matter…” Yet no true opera lover, except for the audience at the opera’s disastrous premiere in Venice, has ever really disagreed with Proust. Today, La Traviata may have lost its power to épater le bourgeois, but it remains the most intimate and one of the most prodigally melodic of Verdi’s twenty-six operas.
Its heroine, Violetta Valéry, a traviata or “wayward one,” invites our admiration, sympathy, and finally our tears and love. She exercised the same fascination for the composer, who didn’t alter his score as one might expect after the premiere’s catastrophe. Instead, he wrote to a friend, “Am I wrong or are they? I myself believe that the final word on La Traviata was not heard last night.” This tone of calm resignation shows the thirty-nine year old Verdi in complete control of his craft. The “years in the gallery” were over; with Rigoletto (1851) and Il Trovatore (1853), Verdi had become a confident, mature composer. La Traviata is the masterpiece of his middle period.
Verdi first made the acquaintance of La Dame aux Camélias in Paris, sometime shortly after its February 1852 premiere. The play was just based on a novel of the same title by Alexandre Dumas fils, illegitimate son of the famed author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Young Dumas had been spurred to literary activity by the tragic end of his love with Marie Duplessis, a celebrated courtesan. His quasi-autobiographical novella electrified and polarized French society, which, for all its famed licentiousness, was as hide-bound as the Victorians across the Channel. The shocking suggestion that unmarried love could be idyllic and that a creature of the demi-monde (an expression actually invented by Dumas in a later play) could have a noble heart outraged bourgeois morality, which the animated world of Paris, graced by such exotics as George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Eugène Delacroix and Franz Liszt, one of Marie’s real-life lovers, was delighted by it.
The truth, as usual, is considerably less romantic that Dumas’s fiction. In fact Marie Duplessis, born Alphonsine Plessis in humble circumstances, appears not to have had a heart at all. (“Lying keeps my teeth white,” was one of her cruel mots.) Dumas couldn’t afford to keep her in the luxurious style to which she had become accustomed and was forced to share her favors with richer “protectors.” For a few months after a flare-up of her consumptive illness, Marie and Alexandre seem to have led the idyllic life we witness in act two of Traviata. Yet it wasn’t Dumas père who came between them, but Marie’s greedy, insatiable desire for a life of pleasure. Rather than being a noble Violetta Valéry, Marie Duplessis seems to have been an amoral Manon Lescaut. The young Dumas finally wrote her a letter of farewell: “I am neither rich enough to love you as I would, nor poor enough to have you love me as you would want.”
Marie died of consumption at age 23, after marrying one of her wealthy lovers. Young Dumas was not at her bedside but in Marseilles, having just returned from a trip with his father to Spain and Africa. (Père Dumas seems to have been considerably wiser the père Germont.) When Alexandre arrived in Paris, it is said that he stood for a few minutes at her graveside, perhaps receiving inspiration for one of the most powerful passages in the novel, where Armand Duval (note that the initials are the same as Alexandre Dumas) has the body of his beloved exhumed.
Dumas called his fictional heroine Marguerite Gauthier and endowed her with all the fragile beauty – the white skin, the shiny black ringlets, the expressive eyes – that the real Marie possessed, as well as with a tragic insight into the French code of honor that Duplessis never had: “A woman, once she has fallen, can never rise again. God may forgive her, perhaps; the world, never.” Liszt, on the other hand, said of the real Marie, “Hers was a delightful nature in which practices commonly help to be corrupt, and rightly so, never touched her soul.”
La Dame aux Camélias (or Camille, as it is called in English) became so popular in its novelized form that it was inevitable that Dumas should turn it into a play. He shut himself in his suburban villa at Neuilly and in a few weeks transformed his gripping lyrical novella into idealized romantic theater in which the heroine’s few romantic flaws are expunged and she becomes that conventional cardboard figure: the repentant sinner. It was the kind of middle-brow sentiment later beloved of the movies, and it is not surprising that Dumas’s tear-jerker has been made into films starring Sarah Bernhardt (1912); Theda Bara (1917); Pola Negri (1920); and, the most celebrated of all Camilles, Greta Garbo (1936).
At the same time, corny as it is, the play (not the novel) inspired Herny James to write, “Camille remains, in its combination of freshness and form and the feeling of the springtime of life, a singular, an astonishing piece of work. Give it a great place among the love stories of the world.” This is the play that Verdi saw during the winter that he and Giuseppina Stepponi spent in Paris (1851–52). Most of Verdi’s biographers seem uncertain as to whether he had read the novel before he saw the play. In any case, the story, a powerful contemporary myth, made an indelible impression on the composer and he began work on La Traviata even though he was still preparing the first production of Il Trovatore for Rome.
In the same opera—Trovatore appeared on January 19 and Traviata on March 6 of the same year; today, when it takes two or three years to get a new opera on the boards, such prodigality boggles the mind—Verdi had also contracted with Venice’s La Fenice for a new work. He discussed subjects with his Trovatore librettist, Salvadore Cammarano, but also with his friend, the poet Francesco Maria Piave (librettist of Ernani, La Forza del Destino, Macbeth, Simon Boccangra, Rigoletto, Il Corsaro, Stiffelio, and Aroldo, as well as Traviata). Finally, it was decided that Piave, while staying at Sant’Agata, the Verdi country estate in Busseto, would write a libretto based on the Dumas drama.
Piave (1810–76) did his work well, keeping strictly to the outline of the original, but pruning scenes and cutting minor characters. In only one place, the break between the first and second acts, does this compression hurt the dramatic coherence of the libretto. At the end of act one, Violetta makes up her mind to stick to his life of heedless pleasure (“Sempre libera”), yet at the beginning of act two, without explanation, she and Alfredo have been living together in the country for several months. Still, Piave’s compressions, like those of Boito in Otello, often strike the modern reader as an improvement on the original (pace, Shakespearean scholars!). For instance, when M. Duval, Armand’s father, insults Marguerite, she reveals her breeding with a long and eloquent speech which Piave had reduced simply to: “I am a woman, sir, and in my own house. Allow me to leave you, more for your sake that for my own.” It is not surprising that such terse dignity forces an admiring exclamation from the outraged Germont: “Quai modi!”
Verdi worked on Trovatore and Traviata simultaneously, writing music for the later while supervising the premiere of the former. This feat of separation excites our admiration, for no other two operas from the same hand could be more different than the romantic, fiery, heroic Trovatore and the gently, intimate, pathetic Traviata. Verdi scholars (notably Frank Walker, author of The Man Verdi, one of the first and most restrained “psycho-biographies,”) speculate that the Traviata subject was so sharply clarified in the composer’s imagination because its domestic milieu paralleled his own household arrangement.
By 1853, when Traviata had its world premiere in Venice, Verdi, thirteen years a widower, had been living for some time “in sin” with Giuseppina Strepponi, the original Abigaille in Nabucco (1842). For whatever convoluted psychological reasons, the composer refused to regularize their union, causing Strepponi, a devout Catholic, much distress. The censorious, provincial Bussetani, offering both slights and direct insults, made her life miserable. Between the couple, both of whom suffered ill health during the wet, dreary winter of 1852–53, stood the patriarchal figure of Antonio Barezzi, a wealthy landowner and arts patron, Verdi’s former father-in-law, financial adviser, father-surrogate and possibly the only person the composer ever loved unconditionally. Barezzi, as a bereaved father, naturally disapproved of Verdi’s liaison with Giuseppina, though they were later reconciled and she came to love him as much as Verdi did. One can go too far in assigning real-life motivations to artistic inspiration, but it is not possible to dismiss the similarities between the triangular relationship of Verdi, Giuseppina and Barezzi and that of Alfredo, Violetta and the elder Germont.
However, speculation on what the composer “felt” personally about the subject matter of his operas remains just that—speculation. Verdi was notoriously close-mouthed about his personal feelings. (If you want some amusement while stuck in a traffic jam, try to imagine Giuseppe Verdi as the “guest” on Geraldo or the subject of a Barbara Walters interview. Wagner, on the other hand, would have loved it!) The only facts we have about the composition of Traviata are sketchy. Apparently Verdi arrived in Venice alone only thirteen days before the scheduled opening. Giuseppina remained behind in Busseto, bored to death with a rigid diet for her dyspepsia. The story goes that Verdi orchestrated the entire opera in those two weeks. Creatively, this would have posed no problem—like Mozart, he conceived music in finished form in his head before writing it down—but his preoccupation with the score probably played havoc with his supervision of the production.
Reports had already circulated to Sant’Agata of the Fenice’s inadequate cast. An anonymous letter from Venice warned that unless the tenor and bass [baritone] were changed, there would be a fiasco. But the tenor and baritone were the last of Verdi’s problems. At one point, he officially asked for a new soprano, having Piave write to the Fenice management that the composer “insists with renewed firmness that to sing Traviata one must be young, have a graceful figure and sing with passion.” Like Richard Strauss, Verdi as a man of the theater was as concerned with how singers looked and acted as with how they sang. When Piave was still working on the libretto, Verdi told him that the role of Violetta must be taken by an “elegante.”
Instead, the company soprano at the Fenice was Fanny Salvini-Donatelli, about whom standard reference books are virtually mum; she goes down in history as the woman who singlehandedly destroyed La Traviata, an unfair and inaccurate assessment. Salvini-Donatelli was born in Florence in 1815; made her debut as Rosina in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, which means she was probably a coloratura specialist; Violetta was her only major creation and she died in Milano in 1891. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera enthuses: “Highly regarded as a Verdi interpreter,” yet Julian Budden, whose three-volume work on Verdi’s operas is the standard textbook, mentions Salvini-Donatelli only in the context of La Traviata. So much for “high regard.”
It is safe to assume that an inadequate soprano could severly dampen the impact of an opera in which she is not only the leading character, but the only flesh-and-blood creation, yet why was she so bad? The critic of La Gazzetta di Venezia greatly admired both her singing and Verdi’s opera, but the real reason usually given is that Salvini-Donatelli was “troppo prosperosa,” which means exactly what it sounds like—overweight. Supposedly when Dr. Grenvil sang in act four that Violetta had only a few hours to live, the theater erupted in cat-calls and laughter. Yet in our own era, robust sopranos such as Joan Sutherland, Beverly Sills and Pilar Lorengar have scored major successes as the consumptive heroine of La Traviata. A sensitive audience will accept most physical sizes and shapes if the artist is musical and exhibits intense identification with a role.
It seems likely that Salvini-Donatelli was simply no Violetta, temperamentally, vocally or physically. Yet though the soprano has borne the blame for one of the blackest nights in the history of Italian lyric theater, there were other elements at work to fuel a disaster. The tenor, Lodovico Graziani, went hoarse in act two, probably at the thought of having to sing Alfredo’s rigorous cabaletta, “O mio rimorso.” Then the baritone, Felice Varesi, who had created Macbeth and Rigoletto, and simply hated the part of the elder Germont, gave a perfunctory performance and later had the bad taste to write a letter to the editor of the Gazzetta, in which he pontificated that while he didn’t intend “to set myself up as a judge of the musical worth of La Traviata, I maintain that Verdi has not known how to make proper use of the vocal resources of the artists at his disposal.” Translation: not enough arias, especially for the baritone.
Whatever the unseemly wrangling afterward, the premiere itself started well. That is, Verdi was called out for bows after the prelude, brindisi and act one duet. Think about it. La Traviata is just about the point at which Italian opera stops being tied to “numbers” and becomes “music drama.” Yet how could dramatic plausibility—even given a soprano as slender as Twiggy—possibly be maintained when star-struck first nighters were constantly hooting for the composer, like baseball fans demanding that Will Clark take a “curtain call” after hitting one out of Candlestick Park? How Verdi must have hated it! No wonder he was such a Gloomy Gus about the state of musical theater in Italy.
The day after the premiere, the composer penned obituaries to his close friends, telling Emanuele Muzio tersely, “ La Traviata last night—fiasco.” To Tito Ricordi, son of his publisher, Verdi wrote, “I’m sorry to give you sad news, but I cannot conceal the truth. La Traviata was a fiasco. Let’s not inquire into the reasons.” To the impresario of Rome’s Teatro Apollo, he was a little more forthcoming: “The outcome is a fiasco. A definite fiasco. I do not know whose fault it is; it’s better not to speak of it. I will say nothing to you of the music, and allow me to say nothing about the performers, either.” [Italics mine.] This latter, cryptic remark, given the maestro’s typical dry tone, strikes me as an indication that he blamed the entire failure on the singers. Indeed, when Angelo Mariani, a distinguished conductor who was one of Verdi’s closest musical associates until they had a falling out over the favors of the soprano Teresa Stolz, tried to secure a further performance of Traviata by informing the composer that he had the services of several of the original artists, including Fanny Salvini-Donatelli, Verdi said absolutely not!
A final suggestion may account for the abject failure of the first Traviata performance. The composer envisioned the piece as a contemporary work. Only three months before the premiere, he had written excitedly, “I am doing La Dame aux Camélias for Fenice … it is a contemporary subject. I can imagine another composer not wanting to do it—because of the manners [“costume” in Italian, which also means costumes], the contemporary period and a thousand other awkward reasons. I am doing it with every pleasure.” Yet when the curtain went up at La Fenice on March 6, it revealed a setting in the year 1700, in the region of Louis le Grand. Can you imagine this swift, tender little romance smothered in the stiff formality of the Sun King’s court? The artificial wigs and panniered skirts of the period would effectively nullify the reverse morality of Verdi’s dazzling concept. For Violetta Valéry is no Mme. De Maintenon, and the point of La Traviata is that wealth, power and respectability do not necessarily go hand-in-hand with a noble heart and a pure soul.
Oddly enough, when the Gallo family of Venice approached the composer to suggest that Traviata be revived in their tiny Teatro Gallo di San Benedetto the following year, the work was still not presented in modern dress. Indeed, Verdi appears never to have insisted on it again. The 1850s did not become a popular period for staging Traviata until its fashions were so quaint that they appeared as much “costume” as did the dress of ancient Rome. Much ink has been spilled psychoanalyzing the cowardice of audiences who couldn’t swallow Verdi’s medicine if they saw themselves up there on stage—not, mind you, as the demi-monde, but as the narrow-minded burghers who condemn a woman to a lonely death merely because she does not bend to their ideal of chastity.
Never mind. Thoroughly rehearsed and starring Maria Spezia, who is described as young, pretty and full of passion, this second Traviata production was a triumph. Verdi, now in France, had the grim satisfaction of writing to an Italian friend: “Everything that was heard at the Fenice is now being heard at the San Benedetto. Last time it was a fiasco; this time it is a furore. Draw your own conclusions!”
This article was published by San Francisco Opera in 1991.
