Traviata 2017 articles.qxp_Traviata 2017 9/13/17 1:52 PM Page 5

B Y C H R I S T O P H E R H U N T

FLOWER GIRLS

Violetta, Marguerite, Camille, and Julia Roberts’ Pretty Woman all stem from the same source: the 19th-century Parisian courtesan

Marie Duplessis

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© Greta Garbo in the title role of the 1936 George Cukor film Camille.

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aris is corrupt to the core,” Charles Dickens his first literary success. It was published in 1848 as La Dame aux huffed when he visited the French capital in Camélias, the sobriquet by which staff at the Paris opéra had sup- “ February 1847. “For a number of days every posedly referred to Marie, who had her own box at the opera house Pquestion—political, artistic, and commercial— and habitually arrived carrying a great bunch of the flowers that had been neglected by the newspapers. everything is wiped out by eventually gave her her best-known literary name. an event of the highest importance, the romantic death of one of The book’s success was such that Dumas was quickly persuaded those glories of the demi-monde, the celebrated Marie Duplessis. to produce a stage version, but three years had to pass before it you would have thought it was a question of the death of a hero or a could be shown publicly. Parisian, and indeed all european society Joan of arc.” Dickens’ familiar brand of english puritan morality was changing. Dickens had used (and perhaps momentarily blinded the writer in him to coined) the right phrase for the curious phe- what might be worthy of serious litera- nomenon of the mid-19th-century Parisian cour- ture in the preposterously premature tesans: theirs was indeed a demi-monde, a death of an unusually magnetic society- half-world filled with life and glamor, but private, woman, no doubt because he could dis- a world not to be mentioned in public, least of miss Duplessis as a mere prostitute. That all in the popular theaters to which respectable she had been among the elite of her world families took their well-brought up daughters. cut no moral ice for him. The luxury of the high-level courtesans’ world, one of her recent French lovers, how- where young women like Marie Duplessis held ever, had no such scruples. alexandre court in grand town mansions, began to crum- Dumas fils was an aspiring young writer ble as the revolutions of 1848 convulsed laboring in the shadow of the vastly europe. The hidden half-world had been short- famous writer-father whose name he lived, no more than a quarter of a century at shared, author of The Three Musketeers and its height. The women who, like Marie, rose The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas père, to its level had invariably begun life in

moreover, may himself have been one of poverty, and were often barely if at all edu- S

Marie Duplessis’ passing lovers. For some e cated. Those whose beauty was allied with

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23-year-old Dumas—the same age as Marie— M than “legitimized prostitution.” began his romanticized account of their affair. The book took him four weeks to write and was

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marie’s case was typical: 1915 with Clara Kimball play- the illiterate daughter of a ing the title role. (The floral normandy peasant, whose sub-text is not incidental. family could not afford her, dumas called his title heroine she may have been sold as a marguerite, the French word 12-year-old to her father’s for daisy; Verdi and his libret- clients and friends. at 15, she tist Francesco maria Piave s e g

had a child, quickly given a italianized her to Violetta, m away for adoption. But her i echoing not only the name of n a m

rare grace, darker, taller, and e another flower but also the g d slighter than convention i image of violation.) Violetta- r expected, was linked to an B marie-marguerite-Camille’s fate unusually sharp intelligence. The Act I aria “È strano” makes a brief appearance in the 1994 film has not lost its power: it is By the time she was 18 she The adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the desert. still used to evoke sympathy had been the mistress of first in surroundings pretty far one, then another Parisian aristocrat. Unlike the thousands of from dumas and Verdi: remember richard gere testing Julia women whose lives were hidden and destroyed in the murky depths roberts’ sensitivity in garry marshall’s 1990 film Pretty Woman by of the Paris sex-markets, marie was already a celebrity. Born alphon- taking her to san Francisco to Traviata; or the delicious australian sine rose Plessis, she had renamed herself marie and prefixed the movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert four years later, pseudo-noble “du” to her surname. she must have been a truly with a drag-queen miming “È strano” to Joan Carden’s voice? unusual person: her lovers included the composer Franz Liszt. “she emotionally evocative as these strains may be, the story was the first woman i ever loved,” Liszt wrote to marie d’agoult nonetheless poses for many people a fundamental question of cred- when duplessis died. “Hers was truly an exquisite nature, and what ibility, especially in Verdi’s operatic version: the central motivating is generally (perhaps accurately) described as corruption, never event is a sequence of actions so far distanced from present-day touched her heart.” social conventions. But as long as there has been writing from The radical changes in Parisian society-life after 1848 fast eroded male-dominated, pre-contraceptive history, there have been stories most of marie’s demi-monde. ironically, the changes allowed her revolving for better or usually worse around “immoral” women, world to take on its later public role. Within three years, the sensa- women who fail to conform to the sexual behavior that would pre- tional dumas roman was on the Paris stage as his no less sensation- serve male possession and/or the certainty of paternity. is then the ally successful play. This was the form in which Verdi encountered it. force of Verdi’s opera now no more than a sentimental historical He may even have been at the premiere on February 2, 1852 at the curiosity? Certainly giorgio germont’s atrocious moralizing might Paris Théâtre du Vaudeville. The first performance of the opera which be thought an insuperable obstacle to La Traviata’s emotional he derived from the play—called Love and Death (Amore e Morte) at impact. But it is not so, though we may wish it were: rejection of the first and only as it neared completion La Traviata, “the one who went partners chosen by one’s children is certainly not out-of-date. astray”—took place barely a year later on march 6, 1853 at Venice’s art has a way of making us accept its invented world even La Fenice. it was one of the first operas to break with the iron tradi- when that world is entirely fantastic; as long as it continues we tion that only humorous works could deal with contemporary subjects. believe in it, warts and all. so any particular incredibility at the The power of Verdi’s music is the most obvious cause of the turning-point in dumas-Verdi is in this sense irrelevant: Violetta, Lady of the Camellias’ endurance. But longevity of this kind is like any good artistic creation, lives in her own world, opera’s own determined by more than its incarnation as a supreme operatic fantasy demi-monde, but she is more than a character in that drama. The dumas play and the book before it were already land- make-believe republic of localized truths. art on this level stands marks in a slow transformation of social attitudes and sympa- for greater issues than its immediate subject, and La Traviata thies. The play, it is true, is rarely staged now, but for generations appalls and delights because there remain in society groups and it was a vehicle for the most celebrated actresses of the time— individuals who we can feel are unjustly alienated, scorned, or sarah Bernhardt, eleonora duse, and edwige Feullière are but rejected: every one of us may belong at some point in our lives to three of the names made familiar across the world through their one or more of these categories. Violetta stands for them all. no identification with the sad dumas heroine. The original book is matter the Camellia-Lady has recurred in so many guises. small still read and well worth reading. Frederick ashton created a ballet, wonder, too, that so many of those transformations have been in Marguerite and Armand, in 1963 for margot Fonteyn and rudolf another half-world: film, the most forceful artistic instrument for nureyev, and the american choreographer John neumeier made social change of the past 100 years, just as literature and opera his own version in stuttgart for marcia Haydée 15 years later. were for the preceding century. it is in film that the dumas tragedy has had its most varied exis- tence. Cinematically, marie is best known as Camille, from the title Christopher Hunt was a former artistic administrator with San of the 1936 george Cukor film with greta garbo, though Camille Francisco Opera. This essay was published in a previous edition of san was already the name of an american film by albert Capellani in Francisco Opera magazine.

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