count down
by Douglas Messerli
Francesco Maria Piave (libretto, after the play La dame aux camellias, by Alexandre Dumas fils), Giuseppe Verdi (music), Willy Decker (stage director), Gary Halvorson (director) La Traviata / 2012 [The Met Opera HD-live broadcast]
In some respects, this expressionistic set
overstates everything, and certainly does not allow any dramatic tension about
the inevitability of the plot. But it does free up the characters to
symbolically enact a ritual which, after all, is not about story in the first
place, but centered on the intense musical relationships of the three major
characters: Violetta (Natalie Dessay), Alfredo (Matthew Polenzani), and his
father Giorgio (Dimitri Hvorostovsky).
Dessay, a trained actress, begins the
opera as a performer about to go on stage, the way many have described Judy
Garland offstage just before her entry, her small frame suddenly rising into a
figure slightly larger than life. Violetta, having recovered from a recent
consumptive attack, is weak, not at all sure she might be able to attend the
party she is throwing that night. But bit by bit she pulls together,
transforming herself into the party girl in short red dress her guests—men and
women all dressed in black and white suits—have come to expect. This
“bacchanal,” however, is closer to a mined performance of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge than it is to Verdi’s
original salon party. The champagne they drink is from empty glasses, the
camellia obviously a silk flower. Dessay has not only to sing of “Sempre libera
degg’io,” but, raised and lowered, on a red couch, must balance herself and
dance upon the prop. She is, in short, less a consumptive woman confined to a
couch than a jumping, singing acrobat. And any joys she may have in her
party-life seem those that come from a successful theatrical performance than a
lust for life. If Dessay was contrite, during the intermission, for having
missed one of her high notes, it was easy for her appreciative audience to
forgive her given her otherwise beautiful singing during her energetic apologia
to the “good life.”
It is little wonder that we find her, in
the second act, having capitulated, escaping with Alfredo to the country. In the
flower laden landscape of Alfredo’s world, Violetta becomes almost young again,
wrapped in a flower-laden housecoat, playing hide-and-seek among the
flower-covered couches. Indeed, she becomes one with the couches, becomes
herself something and someone other than her former self. In this production it
is immediately apparent why Violetta has given up her Parisian life; even the
dreadful clock, ticking down the hours left to her, is half-covered in the same
pattern, and the elliptical has become a kind of garden. The snake creeps into
this paradisiacal world with her servant’s revelation that Violetta is selling
her Paris belongings to support her country life. Alfred is determined to
rectify the situation, rushing off to Paris, allowing the more horrific Satan,
Alfredo’s bourgeois father Giorgio, time to destroy her momentary joy in
life.
For Giorgio, Violetta is, at first, nothing
more than a selfish courtesan out to steal his son’s money and affections.
Gradually, however, when that vision proves difficult to sustain, he employs the
usual tricks of men who cannot escape the petty limitations of a societally
controlled life: his beautiful daughter will lose her fiancé if Alberto does not
return home. Crueler yet, Giorgio tells Violetta of her own destiny, her loss of
beauty and betrayal, perhaps, by Alfredo himself. As Violetta notes, the
punishment for her libertine lifestyle comes not from God but from man. Even
Giorgio, however, finally comes to recognize Violetta’s sacrifice, singing in a
beautiful aria (Hvorostovsky at the top of his form) of her love and
generosity.
So pure is Violetta’s love that she
agrees, most reluctantly, to give up Alfredo and return to Paris, knowing now
that her fate will be an early death. Accepting an invitation to her friend
Flora’s costume ball, she pretends to take up once more with her former
protector Baron Bouphol.
While in Verdi’s original, the costume
ball was replete with gypsies and bullfighters, the new Met version has mixed
these with costumed performers from the partygoers, along with a male dressed as
Violetta in mockery of her return to their world. If the whole scene is a kind
of confusing mish-mash at times, it still makes more sense than the presence of
these “types” at the grand ball, and their taunting tales only reiterate what we
know, Violetta’s life as a grand courtesan is over. The clock itself is now
transformed into a gambling table where Alfredo, who in revenge has rushed back
to Paris, wins, tossing his winnings at and stuffing them into Violetta’s
orifices in what is clearly a kind of capitalist rape. Even Giorgio, having
followed his son to the party, is shocked by Alfredo’s behavior, but then
propriety is at the heart of his torturous demands.
The party-goers, now carnival celebrants,
reenter this cold waiting room once again, this time with another women, clad in
red dress, strapped to the clock. Violetta is no longer the life of the party;
she has almost been drained of life.
Sick and suffering, with just a few hours to live, she awaits the return
of Alfredo who, having survived his duel with the Baron, has discovered the
truth of Violetta’s abandonment and has written of her determination to see her
once again. As in any grand opera, the lovers reunite to imagine the possibility
of life as they once lived it, a reunification that the audience has known is
impossible from the start. For a second, just before her death, the courtesan is
relieved of all pain and age, until she faints away, both Alfredo and Giorgio
left to face their own failures of faith in her
love.
Some of the subtlety of this opera may
have been lost in the symbolic posturings of Decker’s and Gussman’s vision, but
the overall dramatic impact, particularly in Dessay’s powerful performance,
remains, and La Traviata seldom
wavers in its musical splendor as this grand courtesan had in her
past.
Los Angeles,
March 15, 2012
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2012).
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