by JAYATI GHOSH
http://youtu.be/iF15LBVJeLw
German soprano Diana Damrau as Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata” at the Metropolitan Opera in New York gave a riveting performance that captured the passionate intensity of this young woman’s situation.
VIOLETTA in Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La Traviata is one of the great tragic heroines of the western classical musical canon. She is “the lost one” of the title, lost in the conventional sense of the “fallen woman”, but more profoundly in terms of the way in which—despite her own spirit—she seems lost to happiness, buffeted by both fate and society.
The opera is set in Paris in the mid-19th century, but its theme is universal, which is one of the reasons it has become one of the most famous and popular operas of all time. (Verdi’s wonderful and highly affecting music is, of course, the basic reason.) The story is based on the autobiographical play “La Dame aux Camelias” (The Lady of the Camellias) written by Alexandre Dumas the younger, based on his doomed affair with the demi-mondaine Marie Duplessis. The camellias are relevant because the heroine is an upper-class courtesan who is unfortunately suffering from tuberculosis. She wears these flowers with a purpose: white to indicate when she is available for lovemaking, and red when she is feeling too ill for such activities.
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But this is essentially Violetta’s story, and the opera is really all about her, about the plight of a woman who has to battle for everything in her life in the face of social conventions, and to keep doing so with all the outward appearances of grace simply for her own survival.
It is said that Verdi took this on (after previously refusing to do an opera about a prostitute) after his marriage to Giuseppina Strepponi, a singer who was also vilified by polite society because of her chequered past. This made him more sympathetic to the plight of women who did not adhere to society’s rigid conventions.
So the role of Violetta is both demanding and satisfying for a singer. This is especially so as the opera’s success depends largely on the soprano who sings the role of Violetta, and her ability to express the required musical virtuosity but also to take on the musical challenges of this role.
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