La Traviata
A review by an Opera Virgin
There would be something indescribably magical about the Opera, so say those who know such things. Running into the Royal Opera House from a drizzly Covent Garden just late enough to be in a slight panic, I noticed that everyone around us was in a similar rush. The foyer was packed, not with the well-dressed, cultural elite but with normal people wearing jeans and un-tucked shirts. My husband quickly removed his tie which I had insisted that he wear. It is hard, on such occasions, to believe that we are in the grips of one of the worst recessions of the last half century. Had all these hundreds of people forgone food for a month in order to buy their tickets?
Inside the theatre, the opulence of the surroundings is breathtaking; the garish ceiling, a work of art in itself. I had been made aware, via the internet when booking our tickets, that we would not have armrests on our seats and that sufferers of vertigo were not advised to sit in such altitude-scaling seats. I was expecting shoddiness indeed, I was expecting to have seat-envy for the duration of the performance but no; we were not the highest ticket-holders by some way. Some poor opera desperados were even standing for the duration of the performance. Visibility, due to the steep gradation of the seats, was excellent.
When the curtain was raised, the lavishness of the scenery and the exquisite delicacy of the orchestra’s ‘Preludio’ promised so much. When the singers began, a screen above the stage gave a translation of the Italian into English. I had not expected this and perhaps it was rather a distraction. It is not really necessary, or should not be necessary, for the lyrics to have such precedence when the point of opera is surely that the music says all. Still, a nice touch if you were finding the plot of Traviata complex. But really, you would have to be an imbecile if you could not follow the plot of Traviata!
Before long, we are plunged into “Libiamo ne’ lieti calici” which is a bawdy waltz in which Alfredo, performed by Piotr Beczala, sings of the pleasures of wine and he and Violetta interact for the first time, flirting publicly. As that was the track on the CD that I had listened to most I felt that I was actually enjoying the music. Although, according to Roberta Montemorra Marvin it is ‘one of La Traviata’s least ‘proper’ and most sexually suggestive numbers’ and ‘the duet’s facile, waltz-like tune certainly would have made it a quick favourite’[1]. So, you see, I have unrefined tastes. Following on from this, Alfredo is soon offering to look after Violetta and admitting that he has loved her since he first saw her over a year ago. They sing of this in “Un di felice, eterea” which showcases some of Ailyn Perez’s stunning high notes which bounced around the auditorium to great acoustic effect.
It is not surprising then, given the exertion that must be required to sing like this, that there are two intervals of half an hour each. In fact, if the intervals are discounted, as well as the pause given over to a scene change, and the endless clapping after each ‘number’, it is surprising how little there is to an opera. Indeed, what began with such sensory promise soon began to seem slightly juvenile. If the music does not sustain you, it seems to me that there is very little else in an opera to do so.
We know that Violetta will die, not just from watching Moulin Rouge, but because she has tuberculosis. Audiences in the 1850s understood consumption very little. Indeed, a physician of the time, Cesare Vigna believed in the curative effects of music on his patients. The opera plays with this illusion that consumption can be delayed or reversed. This is evidenced in the final act when Violetta revives to sing plaintively with Alfredo. By this point, however, I was willing her to die sooner rather than later. The melodrama was lost on me; I felt no sort of emotional potency. It is hard, in the twenty-first century, to suspend our disbelief and not to question the honesty of this old morality tale. La Traviata is a simplified version of the play by Alexandre Dumas fils, La Dame aux camelias. This in turn was a simplified and sanitized version of his novel by the same name, which in turn was a dramatic retelling of his own affair with the notorious courtesan of the time, Marie Duplessis. Verdi evidently felt a bond of sympathy with the story as he himself was pursuing his own affair with a prostitute, Giuseppina Strepponi, whom he later married against the wishes of his family. So, we are already someway from truth when the first performance of the opera was given in Venice on 6th March 1853. By 2011 didactic art makes us suspicious.
Violetta is made a victim by Verdi and Dumas before him. And indeed she is. The real Marie Duplessis was sold by her father to a local paedophile when she was eleven. Once she escaped, she fled from Normandy to Paris where she made her living through prostitution and eventually died, at the age of twenty-three, of consumption. But if Verdi wants to create a moral out of this, surely he himself, and Dumas and the hero Alfredo are the perpetrators of evil, for prostitution cannot exist without the men who exploit this service. Dumas maintained that ‘The French economy could not function without the funds put in circulation through sexual commerce.’ It seems to me that, far from being a critical attack on a society that endorses prostitution, La Traviata is actually a defence of the prostitute in all her frail, consumptive beauty. For in 19th-century literature and painting consumption was commonly idealized, its symptoms of pale skin, red cheeks and sparkling eyes being thought to denote great beauty. This is sinister fetishism indeed.
But we must not interrogate meaning too much. Opera is music. It is music which is performed with great skill, with beautiful costumes, sumptuous scenery and it can confer celebrity on its talented stars. But the music is all and perhaps it would be better to close your eyes and shut out all the other sensory delights, stop thinking and just perceive where the music takes you.
