Opera: La Traviata

La Traviata - Giuseppe Verdi Opera in four parts. Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave. Based on a play by Alexandre Dumas fils. First performed at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice on 6 March 1853. The exquisite Violetta Valéry lives a life of freedom, excess and pleasure as a celebrated courtesan on Paris’ extravagant social scene where the rich and mighty get to do as they please. Although she is inundated with attention from men who covet her, only one man, Alfredo, cares enough to look beyond her façade and see from her pale face that she is not well. When he passionately declares his love, she begins to hope that the loving monogamous relationship she thought out of reach might be possible. But in a society where appearances matter, does a woman treated as a possession by so many have the right to love and be loved? In the early 1850s, Verdi was at the center of a scandal when he lived unmarried with the soprano of the production he was supervising in Paris. To get his own back on the moral hypocrisy of Italy’s fashionable society, he adapted a play by Alexandre Dumas fils, “La Dame aux Camélias”, the story of an impossible love between a gentleman and a courtesan. He provocatively named this new work “La Traviata”: “the fallen woman”. Despite its controversial reception when it premiered in 1853, “La Traviata” went on to become an iconic and timeless masterpiece, here entrusted to the care of director Christoph Koncz. Amélie Niermeyer brings it to the stage in a world of boundless energy and inhibition, showing us why the themes of Verdi’s classic opus remain so universal. In Italian, overtitled in French and German Duration : 2h30 with intervals. Age limit : form 12 years.