La traviata

• 1. Introduction

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  La traviata, whose title translates as "The Fallen Woman", opened at La Fenice opera house in Venice on the 6th of March 1853. The audience jeered. Verdi wrote to his friend Emanuele Muzio the very next morning in what would become perhaps his most famous letter: "La traviata last night a failure. Was the fault mine or the singers'? Time will tell."

  Time did tell. The opera became one of the most frequently performed in the world during Verdi's own lifetime, and it remains near the top of that list today. What lay between that catastrophic first night and that astonishing later vindication is a story of creative argument, censorship, casting disasters, and a composer whose instincts proved right in the end. And at the center of it all is Violetta, a courtesan dying of tuberculosis, whose music Verdi shaped to change as she herself changes across three acts.

• 2. A Subject for Our Own Age

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  In February 1852, Verdi and his companion Giuseppina Strepponi attended a performance in Paris of La Dame aux camélias, a play by Alexandre Dumas fils. According to Verdi's biographer Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, the composer immediately began imagining music for what would become La traviata. His colleague Julian Budden adds that Verdi had probably read the Dumas novel some time before the play, since the novel had appeared in 1848. By the time the couple returned to Italy after seeing the performance, Verdi was already assembling, in his mind, an ideal cast.

  Dumas had based his play on his own 1848 novel, and both works depicted the life and death of a Paris courtesan. The subject matter was bold. Verdi wrote to his friend De Sanctis with barely contained excitement: "For Venice I'm doing La Dame aux camélias which will probably be called La traviata. A subject for our own age."

  His librettist, Francesco Maria Piave, was equally enthusiastic. In a letter quoted in the source, Piave called Verdi "this true wizard of modern harmonies" and predicted that "everything will turn out fine" and that a new masterpiece would follow. What neither man fully anticipated was the obstacle that stood directly in their path.

• 3. The Battle Over Setting

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  Piave and Verdi had a clear artistic wish: to stage the opera in contemporary dress, as a story of their own era. The authorities at La Fenice refused. They insisted the action be displaced to the past, set at around the year 1700. A later requirement pushed the period further, demanding the story unfold in "the era of Richelieu" - the 17th century.

  Verdi had been through this kind of fight before, most recently over Rigoletto, which had premiered in Venice in March 1851. He understood Venetian censorship intimately. Yet he held on to the idea that La traviata could be staged in modern dress, just as his earlier opera Stiffelio had been. Piave was dispatched back to Sant'Agata, Verdi's home near Busseto, to try to persuade the composer to yield on the point. He could not.

  It was not until the 1880s that Verdi and Piave's original wish was finally honored and productions appeared in contemporary costume. A synopsis had been sent to Venice under the working title Amore e morte - Love and Death - but the opera was eventually titled after its heroine, Violetta, and only at a late stage settled into the name La traviata.

• 4. Casting and Catastrophe

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  Verdi arrived in Venice on the 21st of February 1853 for rehearsals, already filled with premonitions of disaster. The soprano chosen to play Violetta was Fanny Salvini-Donatelli, who was 38 years old. Though she was an acclaimed singer, the management of La Fenice had ignored Verdi's attempts to have the role recast with a younger woman. The 15th of January deadline for securing a different soprano had come and gone without resolution.

  At the premiere on the 6th of March, the audience's hostility concentrated on Salvini-Donatelli. Violetta is a young woman consumed by tuberculosis, a figure of fragile youth; the audience found it impossible to accept a 38-year-old, and one they considered overweight, in the role. Verdi made his unhappiness clear to the singers during rehearsals, but there was nothing more to be done.

  The first act ended with applause and even cheering. Then the mood shifted. In the second act, the audience began to turn against the performance, particularly after the singing of the baritone Felice Varesi and the tenor Lodovico Graziani. By the close of the evening, the premiere had become the fiasco Verdi feared.

• 5. Redemption at San Benedetto

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  Impresarios from cities across Italy wanted the opera even after the failed premiere. Verdi refused them unless he could be certain of the singers' quality. As Julian Budden wrote, it fell to Venice itself to make good the disaster: Verdi eventually allowed a performance at the Teatro San Benedetto.

  The revised production opened on the 6th of May 1854. Between the premiere and this new staging, Verdi made revisions to the opera, mostly affecting the second and third acts. The decisive difference this time was the soprano. Maria Spezia-Aldighieri took the role of Violetta, and her portrayal transformed the reception entirely. Piave, who had overseen the production in Verdi's absence, reported back with dry satisfaction: "Then it was a fiasco; now it has created a furore. Draw your own conclusions!"

  From Venice, the opera traveled quickly. Spezia-Aldighieri appeared again as Violetta when the revised version was first performed in Madrid on the 1st of February 1855 at Teatro Real, and again in Vienna on the 4th of May 1855. Barcelona followed on the 25th of October at the Gran Teatre del Liceu.

• 6. Moral Controversy Across Borders

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  England received La traviata on the 24th of May 1856, performed in Italian at His Majesty's Theatre in London. Church leaders considered the opera morally questionable and attempted to block it; the source notes that "the heads of the Church did their best to put an injunction upon performance". Queen Victoria refrained from attending, though, as the source records, "the music, words and all, were not unheard at the palace".

  The United States premiere came on the 3rd of December 1856, performed in Italian by the Max Maretzek Italian Opera Company at the Academy of Music in New York. Objections to its morality were raised there too. George Templeton Strong noted in his diary that people called the plot immoral, though he saw little that distinguished it from other operas. The critic of the Evening Post drew the same comparison, writing that anyone who had sat through Don Giovanni could hardly find much to blush at in La traviata.

  France heard the opera in Italian on the 6th of December 1856, at the Salle Ventadour in Paris, performed by the Théâtre-Italien. A French-language version under the title Violetta, adapted by Édouard Duprez, appeared on the 27th of October 1864 at the Théâtre Lyrique on the Place du Châtelet, with Christina Nilsson in the title role. The published French libretto appeared in 1865.

• 7. The Music Itself

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  The prelude opens with very soft, very high strings depicting Violetta's fragility before the main love theme enters on the lower strings while the higher instruments trace the melody above. This delicate atmosphere dissolves when the curtain rises and lively dance music fills the theater.

  Waltz rhythms run through much of the first act, building a Parisian atmosphere around the famous Brindisi, the drinking song "Libiamo ne' lieti calici" - Let's drink from the joyful cups. The first act closes with Violetta's solo scene, full of vocal decoration and feverish ornamentation as she swears to stay free in "Sempre libera". Verdi requires these coloratura effects only in the first act; the character does not call for them again.

  La traviata is the only one of Verdi's operas set entirely indoors. Unlike Il trovatore, which Verdi composed at the same time, La traviata is an intimate piece built on tender lyricism. The crucial duet between Violetta and Alfredo's father Giorgio in the second act is multi-sectioned, its music tracking each shift in the dramatic confrontation. Violetta's music changes across all three acts: from hectic, almost hysterical coloratura in the first, to more dramatic passages in the second, to the spiritual quality of her final scene as she dies in Alfredo's arms.

• 8. Legacy on Stage and Screen

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  La traviata reached the screen in 1967 in a film version by Mario Lanfranchi, with Anna Moffo as Violetta, Franco Bonisolli as Alfredo, and Gino Bechi as Giorgio Germont; the orchestra of the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma was conducted by Giuseppe Patanè.

  Franco Zeffirelli directed a celebrated film version in 1983, with Teresa Stratas as Violetta, Plácido Domingo as Alfredo, and Cornell MacNeil as Giorgio Germont. A 2012 documentary, Becoming Traviata, followed rehearsals for a production directed at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, featuring Natalie Dessay and Charles Castronovo.

  The opera's music has been arranged and reimagined beyond the opera house. Donato Lovreglio, an Italian flautist and composer who lived from 1841 to 1907, wrote a Concert Fantasy on themes from La traviata for clarinet and orchestra, published by Ricordi in 1865. The Spanish composer Julián Arcas, who lived from 1832 to 1882, wrote his own Fantasía sobre motivos de La traviata. The opera's reach stretches even to a 2025 Italian miniseries, Sandokan, where an excerpt is heard - though the series is set in 1841, twelve years before Verdi composed the work.