Study Guide for Giuseppi Verdi (1813 1901): La Traviata
Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave
Directed by Franco Zeffirelli, 1982
Violetta Valéry (a courtesan, dying of tuberculosis): Teresa Stratas
Alfredo Germont (young poet in love with Violetta): Placido Domingo
Giorgio Germont (Alfredo"s father): Cornell MacNeill
When Alexandre Dumas fils ("junior") fell in love with a notorious if charming courtesan named Marie Duplessis, his father was not amused. As the author of such hugely best-selling novels as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, he was both highly respectable and very wealthy. He feared that his naive son would ruin his reputation and his fortune by becoming involved with such a woman, and he forced the young man to break off the relationship.
Not much later, she died of tuberculosis, then called "consumption," the most commonly deadly disease in the 19th century. The younger Dumas avenged himself against his father"s interference by creating a novel, then a play, in which an idealized courtesan named Marguerite Gautier who loves camelias proves to be more loving and generous than the hero"s father. Both works became hugely popular under the title La Dame aux camélias (or in English, Camille).
The story is a quintessential romantic attack on conventional bourgeois morality, arguing that a good heart is more important than propriety, that the social distinctions which split the beau monde (high society) from the demimonde (the world of illicit sex) are cruel and hypocritical, and that true love must triumph over all. That the story ends tragically is today often smugly said to indicate that the 19th-century readers could celebrate sexual freedom only when they doomed those who exercised it. But this is unfair. Dumas is expressing the romantic notion that the highest virtue in a human being is a good heart. If some people are too good for this world, that is the world"s loss.
To understand the story, it is important to keep certain facts in mind.
In mid-19th-century France, almost as much as in England, sexual hypocrisy was widespread. Prostitution and gambling were extremely popular and widespread even as they were being publically condemned on every hand. Men were expected to have mistresses whom they supported financially, but they were expected to conceal that fact, and they were expected not to fall in love with them. Such courtesans were not classed with common prostitutes, but there should be no illusion about their motivation for participating in these affairs: they were in it for the cash and gifts, and were faithful to their lovers only so long as it suited them.
Any woman who slept with a man before marriage was thought to be "ruined" (i. e.
, rendered unfit to be wed), and should be shunned as a social leper. For many such women, some form of prostitution was the only means of survival. Respectable women feared and detested the courtesans, and would not permit them to mix in "polite society," as it was then called. Further, they were presumed to be predatory temptresses, bent on extracting their wealth from guileless young men, then abandoning them. The very most respectable families would not even want to be associated with another family in which one of the members was entangled with such a creature. It is this stereotype that Dumas set himself to break.
It is a commentary on the complexity of moral attitudes during the time that the result was wildly popular.
In 1853, one year after Dumas dramatized his work, the Italian Giuseppi Verdi turned the story into one of the most popular operas ever written: La Traviata ("The Wayward Woman"), retaining the Parisian setting but changing the heroine"s name to an Italian one: Violetta . The Italians were considera bly more conservative in sexual matters than the French, and Verdi removed most of the seamier scenes from the original play and made his Violetta an almost angelic creature whose self-contempt and fear of risking love is almost incomprehensible unless one knows what everyone then knew: that she was a courtesan, loved only for her body and her high spririts, destined to die young and alone. This production hints at the shallowness of the affection her friends have for when, at the end of the first scene, one of her female guests placidly steals a valuable snuffbox off the mantle as she departs.
In Franco Zeffirelli"s striking production of the opera, while the overture is being played, we scan across Paris to the lavishly decorated apartment of Violetta, where we see her as she will appear in the last scene, abandoned, destitute, dying, her belongings being carted off to pay her bills. One of the young men who has come to help transport the goods is entranced by her portrait, and then catches of glimp se of her.
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