PROGRAM NOTES

Dear Friends,

Just a few words from The Lady of the Camelias by Alexandre Dumas, fils.

…”it is because I shall not live as long as others, and I have promised myself to live more quickly.”
…”however short a time I have to live, I shall live longer than you will love me!”
— Marguerite Gautier (Violetta)

…”People would think it childish enough if they saw me lament like this over a dead woman such as she; no one will ever know what I made that woman suffer, how cruel I have been to her! How good, how resigned she was! I thought it was I who had to forgive her, and today I feel unworthy of the forgiveness which she grants me. Oh, I would give ten years of my life to weep at her feet for an hour!”
— Armand Duval (Alfredo)

…If I had known that I should only be taking a year of your future, I could not have resisted the longing to spend that year with you.”
— Maarguerite Gautier (Violetta)

Tito Capobianco,
Stage Director

Verdi and Violetta: A Subject of the Times

When Giuseppe Verdi described his idea for a new opera as “a subject for our times,” he was announcing a departure from the typical storytelling audiences had come to expect from the most popular opera composer in Europe. Before La Traviata, most of Verdi’s operas featured conventional characters; simplified emotions of love, jealousy, and hate; and situations underpinned with political and patriotic themes. All were set in the historical past and a few in exotic countries. This made for an entertaining evening, but one in which the operagoer’s emotional and intellectual investment in the story and characters might not last beyond the final curtain. The remoteness of setting, both in time and place, distanced the characters and their struggles from the daily concerns of nineteenth-century Europeans.

La Traviata was different. It was based on Alexandre Dumas, fils’ play La Dame aux camélias and featured a courtesan as its protagonist. Verdi set the work in the 1850s and focused on social issues of the day: prostitution, the place of women in society, and the malady of tuberculosis. Here was commentary on modern city life, disintegrating mores, and false judgment addressed directly, not clothed in period costume with historically removed characters. Indeed, opera patrons—particularly wealthy men with professional “companions”—may well have seen their own reflections in the characters Alfredo and Violetta.

That Verdi chose to comment openly on the perceived immorality of a certain type of woman may have been the result of personal experience. In 1847, he began his association with Paris, where Jérusalem (a revision of I Lombardi) was performed and where he would reside for the next two years. More importantly, Verdi renewed his acquaintance with the singer Giuseppina Strepponi, who had retired from the stage and was living in the city. By the following summer, the two were living together in Passy, a commune outside the capital. The relationship was based on mutual love and companionship, but Strepponi had a well-known past populated with multiple love affairs and three illegitimate children whom she abandoned. When the unmarried couple relocated to Verdi’s country home in Sant’ Agata near Busseto, Italy, the affair was scandalous to the local village gentry who counted among them Antonio Barezzi, the father of Verdi’s long-deceased wife.

The scandal must have seemed eerily evoked when Verdi attended La Dame aux camélias in 1852. Dumas, son of the celebrated author of The Three Musketeers, had published the novel of the same title in 1848, recounting in thin disguise his own affair with one of the most celebrated courtesans in Paris, Alphonsine Marie Duplessis. The novel was adapted for the stage and owed its success to the shocking nature of its lead character, Marguerite, a woman of pleasure. But Dumas sympathetically portrayed the courtesan as a tragic heroine who sacrifices her own happiness and, ultimately, her life for the redemption of her sins. Verdi found the play irresistible and by November, had decided, along with his librettist Francesco Maria Piave, to use it as the basis for his new opera.

The modernity of Verdi and Piave’s collaboration lies in the depiction of the principal character—named Violetta in the opera—and of her judgment by society, personified by her lover’s father, Germont. She is a demi-mondaine, a woman whose abilities as conversationalist and party hostess are as desired by wealthy men as much as her sexual offerings. In Paris during the Second Empire, the demi-mondaine was a distinct class of woman, not as morally low as a prostitute, but not as elevated as a wife. Her beauty, education, and poise (Germont, in Act II, is surprised by Violetta’s good manners in response to his insulting epithets) afforded her a special place in the moral hierarchy.

Violetta, who is suffering from tuberculosis, accepts society’s judgment of her moral decay. But Verdi does not allow her immediately to succumb to the disease as a reckoning for her sins. Instead, he shows a nuanced, transfigured character as Violetta is offered the prospect of true love by Alfredo. She abandons the life of “barren folly” and seems briefly to keep the consumption in abeyance in her new, virtuous role as devoted companion. Eventually, she must give up Alfredo for the sake of his sister’s honor. Not only does she forfeit happiness for her and Alfredo, but also she hastens her own demise. This ennoblement of the fallen woman and the audience’s acceptance of her redemption marked a new sophistication in Verdi’s operas and a new timeliness and immediacy in his drama.