The rise and rise of Verdi’s “fallen woman” Flora Willson

The genesis of operatic works – especially of those that later became firmly anchored in the repertory – has often been the subject of mythmaking by their creators and admirers alike. Think of Wagner’s claim that the shimmering Eb major opening of Das Rheingold came to him in a dream; or of Verdi’s moment of revelation as the draft libretto for Nabucco, so carelessly tossed to one side, fell open at the magical line “Va pensiero, sull’ali dorate”. Indeed, even in comparison with Wagner – surely the nineteenth century’s most avidly self-mythologising composer – Verdi was a master of the genre, frequently touching up details of his earlier life and career with the benefit of hindsight. Witness the creation of the peasant boy from Busseto, battling adversity to make good on the international stage, or the Risorgimento figurehead, speaking to “the people” and sowing the seeds of Italian unification in his earliest works.

Amidst such tales of Verdi as a political and cultural revolutionary, the myths that collected around La traviata stand out in one obvious way: their focus is on the composer’s personal life, and certainly had no assistance from Verdi himself. In particular, commentators have long sought parallels between the opera’s story of love at odds with bourgeois morality and Verdi’s own relationship with Giuseppina Strepponi, his live-in partner from the late 1840s onwards, whom he agreed to marry only a decade later, in 1859. An acclaimed soprano (she was the first Abigaille in Nabucco), Strepponi attracted the same rumours of moral misconduct and subsequently tarnished reputation that accrued around many women appearing professionally on stage during the nineteenth century. There is little doubt, moreover, that Strepponi gave birth to several illegitimate children before her long partnership with Verdi. Yet the possibility that the composer could ever have imagined the courtesan Violetta as a homage or gesture to Strepponi is little short of ridiculous. We might bear in mind a famous letter he wrote in 1852 to Antonio Barezzi, the father of his first wife (who had died in 1840). In it, Verdi defends his right to live with Strepponi, whose absolute respectability he insists upon:

In my house there lives a lady, free and independent, who, like myself, prefers a solitary life, and who has a fortune capable of satisfying all her needs. Neither I nor she is obliged to account to anyone for our actions. But who knows what our relations are? [...] I will say this to you, however: in my house she is entitled to as much respect as myself, more even.

However sympathetic his portrayal of Violetta, it is simply inconceivable that Verdi might have intended her a covert portrait of Strepponi: such an insult would have been more than equal to any offered by Barezzi or the other outraged Bussetani. We might, though, pause for a moment over this long- established desire to hear in La traviata traces of a more direct Verdian communication – to see the opera as a mirror for its composer’s intimate feelings. It may well be that such emotionally charged interpretations point us towards the opera’s carefully negotiated balance between the mythological and the realistic.

La traviata was written at great speed, at the end of a decade of intensive composition that started with Verdi’s first major success – Nabucco at La Scala in 1842 – and eventually saw his achievement of unequivocal international fame, with his works performed across the operatic world. Verdi had signed a contract to provide a new opera for the prestigious Carnival season at Venice’s La Fenice in spring 1852. Months later, with work continuing on Il trovatore (which was to be premiered in Rome in January 1853), the composer still hadn’t decided on a subject. Familiar excuses were sent to La Fenice’s management: Verdi didn’t want to settle for “one of those ordinary subjects that crop up by the hundred”; he was concerned about the censor; and, more importantly, with the quality of the singers engaged for that season by the theatre. In October 1852, with the management now under pressure to clear the new opera’s subject with the police, Verdi’s librettist Francesco Maria Piave was dispatched to pay Verdi a home visit. A decision was finally made, and Piave’s synopsis, based on Alexandre Dumas fils’ play La Dame aux camélias, was approved by the Venetian censors on the condition that the opera would no longer be titled Amore et morte – love and death. On 1 January 1853 Verdi reported to a friend that he was writing a new work probably to be called La traviata; it was, he announced, “a subject for our times”.

As source material, La Dame aux camélias could hardly have been more contemporary. Dumas fils’ original novel, a fictionalised account of his own recent affair with the celebrated Parisian courtesan Marie Duplessis (who had died of tuberculosis in 1847), was published in 1848, appearing while Verdi himself was living in Paris. The play – in which Dumas fils had softened his previous depiction of the heroine and which provided the basis for the libretto – had opened at the Théâtre du Vaudeville on 2 February 1852. It is unclear whether Verdi saw the play while he was in Paris in February-March 1852, although the fact that it ran for one hundred consecutive performances certainly makes it likely. La France musicale, the influential music journal run by Verdi’s French publishers, the Escudier brothers, was in no doubt at all. When La traviata had its first Parisian production in 1856, the journal reported that Verdi had been so struck by Dumas fils’ play that, once back in Italy, he had scribbled down a scenario and then wrote the entire opera in a mere twenty days. Unfortunately for the Escudier brothers, the dates implied by their version of events simply don’t add up. Yet it is nonetheless clear that Verdi composed the score for La traviata extremely quickly – probably in the space of around six weeks – and, what is more, that he sketched out certain important melodic moments before receiving Piave’s libretto. Verdi clearly composed much of the opera while in Rome to supervise the premiere of Il trovatore, having especially requested that a piano be placed in his rooms there.

During his stay, Verdi also received a visit from Giovanni Battista Lasina, the impresario for La Fenice’s forthcoming Carnival season. There was, it seemed, a problem with the new opera’s theme after all: Verdi wanted to depict this “subject for our times” in an unprecedented contemporary setting, whereas the theatre management required the action to be moved safely back into the past. Verdi refused to comply, insisting (according to Lasina’s report) that he needed to create a certain musical effect in the first two acts, which only a modern setting would be able to convey, and that he “desires, demands and begs” that the costumes be those of the present. The composer’s wishes alas had little impact. Shortly afterwards, with Verdi back in Italy, Piave was once again sent to visit him; and once again the librettist achieved what others had not, reporting that “Verdi agrees very much against his will that the period should be put back in time – but he won’t allow wigs”. The absence of powdered headpieces notwithstanding, Verdi had obviously lost this particular argument with La Fenice’s censor-shy management. La traviata was duly transported to “c.1700”, where it nominally remains even in today’s scores. Yet his desire for a modern setting was a clear symptom of broader changes gradually taking hold in the operatic world. In a dawning age of so- called realism in literature and visual art, La traviata was the first opera to address a contemporary social problem (that of prostitution); the first to raise a woman identifiable as a courtesan to the status of tragic heroine; and the first to depict death onstage from TB – an unmistakeably modern urban disease. In other words, with La traviata, the once unfathomable distance between the plush-and-gilt interior of the opera house and the noisy, crowded, socially complex urban landscape outside was decisively bridged.

What is more, Verdi’s score contradicted its enforced eighteenth-century ambience in ways that the censor could not control. The opera is, for example, saturated with the sounds of the waltz, an archetypal modern dance that – in a meeting of art and real life characteristic of La traviata – Marie Duplessis herself was famous for having enjoyed. Indeed, the waltz was so fashionable in mid-century Paris that many considered it morally dangerous. The problem was that it was a “close couple” dance: as the French writer Edmond About put it in 1854, “in the waltz, men and women closely folded, become intoxicated with the music, the movement, and especially with one another”. Worse still, and as its association with Duplessis suggests, the dance was often imagined not only as a threat to young female respectability, but also as physically dangerous, and intimately connected to the spread of urban diseases such as tuberculosis. The waltz’s “fever-heat” (as another journalist described it in 1852) was a central element of the lifestyle understood to cause TB’s accelerated consumption of its sufferers’ lifespan.

It was not only the deadly glamour of the waltz, however, that Verdi wove into the soundworld of La traviata. In the opera’s final act, Violetta’s great farewell aria, “Addio, del passato”, draws to a close with the heroine, now too ill to complete her own long musical phrases, assisted by a mournful solo oboe. As the composer later explained, “there should be no cough in the last act of La traviata”; the work’s realism is instead written into its musical fabric. In a dramatic undermining of opera’s basic mode of communication, its consumptive heroine is ultimately unable to sing. Even more striking is that “Addio, del passato” is immediately followed by the intrusion of a bacchanal chorus heard from offstage. This musical revelry situates Violetta’s tragedy in a particular time (Shrove Tuesday) and place (Paris), suddenly expanding the drama beyond what is depicted and heard on the stage to produce a sense of three-dimensional operatic realism.

With hindsight, it is hardly surprising that La traviata’s Venetian premiere on 6 March 1853 was not a success. Verdi had been concerned from the start about the singers on offer: the Germont père, baritone Felice Varesi, who had previously created both Macbeth and Rigoletto, was past his prime; the Alfredo, Ludovico Graziani, was apparently in poor health. Most damaging, though, were reactions to the soprano Fanny Salvini Donatelli, who by no means embodied the “elegant figure who is young and sings passionately” requested by Verdi. Stout and approaching forty, Salvini Donatelli was spectacularly unconvincing as the youthful consumptive. It is clear that, as serious opera approached more closely to contemporary urban existence than ever before, the audience demand for visual realism – for dramatic believability – also became more pressing.

The La Fenice “fiasco” was not, of course, the end of La traviata. Reluctant to allow further stagings before finding a suitable cast, Verdi eventually agreed to a second production in May 1854, this time at Venice’s Teatro San Benedetto. In preparation, he made various alterations to his score, in particular to the Violetta-Germont père duet in Act 2. This second outing was a huge success, paving the way for productions all over the world. By the time La traviata was performed at the Théâtre Italien in Paris in December 1856, French journalists could report that it had been seen “in Naples, in Rome, in Florence, in Turin, in Milan, in Bologna, in Geneva, in London, in St Petersburg, in Madrid, in Lisbon and in Rio de Janeiro”. The critics of the self-styled capital of nineteenth-century opera clearly felt some bitterness that a work so thoroughly Parisian should only be premiered in the city after reaching so many other stages. But La traviata was by that time unstoppable: its waltz- driven, hectic course – not to mention its unconventional, iconic heroine – had become, and remain, a permanent feature of the operatic universe.