Short answers, pulled from the story.
La traviata premiered on the 6th of March 1853 at the La Fenice opera house in Venice. The premiere ended in a humiliating fiasco with the audience jeering and the composer Giuseppe Verdi writing to a friend that the night had been a disaster.
The role of Violetta in the original 1853 production was sung by Fanny Salvini-Donatelli. She was a 38-year-old soprano who was considered too old and overweight to play a dying woman, which led to the audience reacting with scorn to her physical appearance.
Censors at La Fenice insisted that the story be moved to the past, specifically to the era of Richelieu around 1700, to make it more palatable to the public. Giuseppe Verdi and his librettist Francesco Maria Piave had originally intended to set the opera in the present day adapting Alexandre Dumas fils's 1852 play La Dame aux camélias.
La traviata was performed again on the 6th of May 1854 at the Teatro San Benedetto and this time it was a great success. The success was largely due to the portrayal of Violetta by Maria Spezia-Aldighieri.
The opera was first performed in the United States by the Max Maretzek Italian Opera Company on the 3rd of December 1856 at the Academy of Music in New York. This performance occurred after the opera had been performed in Madrid on the 1st of February 1855 and in Vienna on the 4th of May 1855.