Opera Preview: The culture war over 'La Traviata'

Riccardo Iannello and Zulimar López-Hernández
Photo © Ron Lindsey, 2014 | All Rights Reserved

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[This weekend Union Avenue Opera opens its twentieth anniversary season with Verdi's La Traviata]

Nothing dates faster than relevance. The more a work of art addresses uniquely contemporary issues, the quicker it becomes stale and even, eventually, quaint.

When Verdi's La Traviata opened at the Teatro alla Fenice in 1853, it was very relevant. Based on Alexandre Dumas fils's 1852 stage adaptation or his 1848 novel La Dame aux Camélias, Francesco Maria Piave's libretto was, as they say, “hot stuff”.  The heroine (Marguerite in the original, Violetta in the opera) was clearly based on the recently deceased Alphonsine Plessis, one of the most famous members of the demi-monde, a term invented by Dumas to describe a class of women in Second Empire France who were “kept” by wealthy lovers in high style. They were often patrons of the arts and apparently knew how to throw one heck of a party, but were shunned by polite society. The sympathetic treatment of Violetta in the opera, therefore, was something of a scandal, especially when combined with Verdi's own flouting of “middle class morality” by openly living with his mistress, the soprano Giuseppina Strapponi.

The premiere itself was a bit of a disaster, capped by the fatal miscasting of a soprano whose girth made her attempts to portray a consumptive beauty laughable rather than tragic, but that didn't make it any less of succès de scandale. The theatre's management tried to blunt the impact by forcing Verdi to set the action a century earlier, but I doubt that anyone was fooled. Certainly the censors and conservative critics weren't conned, and future productions were routinely attacked by the blinkered guardians of public morality.

The status of women in Western society has changed greatly over the last century and a half, however, so some of the drama now looks rather old fashioned. And yet, the work is still immensely popular and is generally regarded as part of the core operatic repertoire.

Why?

Debra Hillabrand and Phillip Bullock
Photo © Ron Lindsey, 2014 | All Rights Reserved

The answer is obvious to anyone who has ever heard the score. Verdi lavished his genius on La Traviata, filling the stage with brilliant choruses, ravishing duets and arias, and spectacular ensemble numbers. The finale of Act II, as Alfredo scorns Violetta for her supposed infidelity and is then scored in turn by Violetta's friends and nearly disowned by his father, is musical theatre at its best. The cultural context may be dated, but the emotions are universally human.

But perhaps it's not so dated after all. The clash between the hedonistic and creative bohemians of Paris's left bank and the scandalized middle class is not unlike the culture wars that have been raging here in the USA since the 1970s. Sadly, the opera's portrayal of the casual cruelty of the morally smug still has resonance. It's not difficult at all to imagine Giogio Germont's pompous and destructive moralizing in Act II coming from the mouth (say) of any random member of the Republican Party.

Maybe everything old is, in fact, new again.

Union Avenue Opera presents La Traviata Fridays and Saturdays at 8 PM, July 11 through 19, at the Union Avenue Christian Church, 733 Union at Enright in the Central West End.  Note that there is a parking lot at the church, but it tends to fill up early, so arrival by 7:30 is advised.  For more information: unionavenueopera.org.

This originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.