By Nikita Gourski

The gowns, the romance, the tragedy! La Traviata is an opera filled with the passion and pathos opera is known for, but did you know that it stands for so much more? Check out our top 11 things you need to know about Verdi's romantic epic, La Traviata, and get your tickets before it's too late! 

1. Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901): Defining Italian Opera 

From the 1830s until his death, Verdi was the reigning opera composer in Italy. Over the course of his career the art form underwent significant changes, including shifts in preferred subject matter, staging conventions and techniques of composition. Verdi was front and centre in driving many of the innovations that modernized Italian opera. 

2. Private Drama

La Traviata is based on the French play La dame aux Camélias (1852) by Alexandre Dumas fils, which the author had adapted for the stage from his own best-selling novel of the same name (1848). Dumas’ play attracted Verdi’s attention because it offered a new and invigorating realism. In this story, morality did not necessarily triumph, the scale was intimate and personal, focusing on people’s private lives, and the characters and situations were recognizably contemporary, speaking to all manner of issues that were relevant to, and vigorously debated by, the public in mid-1800s Europe. As Verdi wrote to a friend, it was “a subject of the times. Others would not have done it because of the conventions, the epoch, and for a thousand other stupid scruples.”

3. Too close for comfort

Verdi fought, but lost, to have La Traviata set in the present day—he wanted the sets and costumes to be continuous with the clothes and rooms of his 19th-century audience, as the opera depicted a part of their quickly changing, heady cultural world. But wherever Traviata was staged during Verdi’s life, censors and theatre managers demanded that the time period be pushed into remote history—around 1700 was the preferred chronological remove—to dilute the shock and social critique inherent in the work. Its relevance to contemporary society was not lost on audiences, however, as evidenced by denunciations of La Traviata in many cities and countries. After its English premiere (1856), for example, The Times protested against the opera’s “foul and hideous horrors,” and sale of the English translation of the libretto was forbidden in the U.K. 

4. A Mediocre Beginning

La Traviata’s premiere on March 6, 1853 at the La Fenice opera house in Venice received decidedly mixed reviews. The next year, staged in another theatre and with some alterations to the score by Verdi, La Traviata triumphed magnificently, and has only grown in popularity since. One unverifiable legend claims that in the last hundred years, there has been a performance of La Traviata every single night somewhere in the world. 

5. A complicated heroine

La Traviata translates to “the woman led astray,” and Violetta is without a doubt one of opera’s most interesting examples of the “fallen woman.” As she changes throughout the opera, Verdi gives her unforgettable music that charts an authentic psychological trajectory of change and growth, making her not only of the best-loved heroines in opera, but one of the most real and complete as well.    

6. Violetta’s real-life inspiration

Dumas, the author of the novel and play that served as the basis of La Traviata, really did fall in love with a famous Parisian courtesan named Marie Duplessis (1824-1847) who was the model for the doomed heroine of La dame aux Camélias, as well as Verdi’s opera. Duplessis was born in Normandy and by the time she was twelve her alcoholic father had forced her into prostitution. Three years later she came to Paris and worked briefly at a dance hall, and then gradually made her way into wealthier and more refined circles as a courtesan. In addition to her physical beauty, she was graceful and charming; having learnt to read and write, she amassed a library, read broadly, and was a smart and fascinating conversationalist. She charged extraordinary rates for appearing with clients in public and cultivated expensive tastes. Camellias, her preferred flowers, cost three francs each, roughly the daily salary of a labourer. She had many famous lovers drawn from high society, including a passionate affair with the composer Franz Liszt. Like Violetta she suffered from, and ultimately succumbed to, tuberculosis.  

7. 19th-century specifics

Unlike Rigoletto, for example, in which the music does not carry any explicit messages about the historical or geographic setting of the action, La Traviata does. Verdi quite deliberately gives us music that is infused with the local colour of Paris in the mid-1800s. He does this by using and making frequent reference to the waltz, a dance that was symbolic of the very rhythm, pace and structure of 19th-century society, especially the fringes of respectability where courtesans and other persons of doubtful morality would have been located. 

8. Living fast and dangerous

Tuberculosis in the 19th century was thought to be closely connected to city-living and the moral recklessness it entailed, so Violetta’s ailment very specifically reflects her occupation and position in society. That being said, the illness also had a romantic aura. In the words of William Berger, suffering from it was the period’s “version of ‘heroin chic.’” 

9. Verdi’s favourite

When Verdi was asked later in his career which of his operas was his favourite he replied “Speaking as an amateur, La Traviata, as a professional, Rigoletto.” 

10. Acclaimed young director

This production is staged by Arin Arbus—“a star in the making” (New York Times)—who sets the work in the exciting demi-monde of 19th-century Paris, a world of parties, pleasure and debauchery, which Verdi’s opera depicts with such pin-point accuracy.

11. Stunning costumes

Costumes by Cait O’Connor are both decadent and playful, befitting the excesses that constitute the opera’s cultural ethos. Take a closer look at the designs with costume designer Cait O'Connor here, mobile version here.

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To learn more about La Traviata and to buy tickets, click here.

Charles Castronovo as Alfredo and Ekaterina Siurina as Violetta in the COC’s production of La Traviata, 2015. Photo: Michael Cooper.