Opera Company's flapper 'Traviata' (1st review)

Verdi's La Traviata was based on an 1848 novel by Alexandre Dumas the younger, which in turn was based on the real-llife story of a Parisian courtesan who died of consumption in the 1840s at age 23. Yet when Traviata was first performed in Venice in 1853, the local authorities, perceiving sympathy for a courtesan as a threat to the social order, insisted that the opera be set not in the present, as its composer desired, but in the distant past, circa 1700.

With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to suggest that those stiff-necked Venetians effectively proved Verdi's point: That is, they stifled his individual expression just as Verdi's fictitious courtesan heroine Violetta was crushed for the greater good of society.

In our tolerant age, when unmarried celebrities parade their out-of-wedlock children on "Good Morning America" and even at the Republican National Convention, it's easy to denounce those Venetians (and most bygone governments) as heartless and repressive. But such retrospective condemnation is unfair. The Venetians, like most governments in the Victorian age, were struggling to cast off the medieval past and create civil societies based on manners and mutual respect rather than coercive laws; and, lacking the institutions that we take for granted, that fragile experiment depended to a large extent on appearances.

Avoiding scandal

La Traviata concerned the sacrifices an individual— in this case, a woman with a libertine past who finds true love for the first time— must make for the greater good of a civil society. Having renounced her demimonde Parisian life to live in the country with her true love Alfredo, Violetta is visited by Alfredo's father, Germont, who asks her to give up Alfredo. Germont explains that his daughter's engagement is threatened by the scandal of Alfredo's unmarried relationship with Violetta.

Germont points out that the affair will ultimately ruin Alfredo as well. If Violetta really loves Alfredo, Germont says, she will give him up. And so she does, nobly and selflessly, even though she's dying of consumption.

The Arabian solution

Is this a cruel fate? Certainly. But in the Middle Ages, a scarlet woman like Violetta would have been hanged as a witch. In present-day Saudi Arabia she'd be beheaded or even stoned to death. Violetta and Verdi alike got off relatively easy.

With La Traviata, Verdi was speaking very much to his own times, reminding his contemporaries that ultimately a civil society is worthless without compassion and forgiveness. This was more or less the same message that Jesus brought 1,800 years earlier to a Roman Empire that was all puffed up about its advances in statecraft, military science, bridge construction, road engineering, irrigation and public health but that had somehow omitted love from its grand equation. It's a valid message at any time or place, to be sure, but less necessary in a society like ours, where pop songs constantly remind us that love is all you need and 41% of all babies are born out of wedlock with hardly a raised eyebrow.

I mention all this because Robert Driver has chosen to set the Opera Company of Philadelphia's latest production of Traviata not in the Victorian 1840s but in the Roaring 1920s, that liberated age of jazz, gangsters, bathtub gin and flappers.

Slender but powerful

Let me say at the outset that this is a first-rate production, with two ideally cast new faces in the leads. Soprano Leah Partridge makes a credibly gaunt Violetta, displaying remarkable range and vocal power for such a slender body, especially since the staging calls for her to sing many of her parts seated or prone. Charles Castronovo as Alfredo possesses a tender tenor voice that's ideally suited to his innocent and impressionable character as well.

The party scenes in the first and third acts are well orchestrated, although the giant mirror that dominated Paul Shortt's set struck me as a distraction from all the real-life figures below it. The Spanish dancers in the third act offered more for the eye than the pedestrian choreography I've come to expect in the past from the Opera Company.

Nor can you blame director Driver (who is also the company's artistic director) for trying a new approach, if only for the sake of variety, since the Opera Company seems to stage Traviata every second year or so. And indeed, the Roaring "'20s motif works just fine in the opening party scene (although I was disconcerted to see chorus members dancing the Charleston to Verdi).

What would Hemingway say?

But contextual problems begin to creep in during Act II, when the stuffy Germont reproves Violetta because "Your union was never blessed by Heaven," and she, in her flapper outfit, self-righteously replies, "I am a lady, sir, and this is my house," and "God has accepted my penance."

Heaven? God? A lady? Penance? In the Lost Generation Paris of Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and Cole Porter?

The problem is compounded in Act III, when Alfredo's father reminds him that "To offend a woman, even in anger," is a no-no, and the evil Baron defends Violetta's honor by challenging Alfredo to a duel— a method of settling scores that was discontinued at least 50 years earlier.

Louis Pasteur to the rescue

As for Act IV, when Violetta inevitably dies of consumption: Let us skip over such medical tidbits as Louis Pasteur's development of the pasteurization process in the 1860s, or Robert Koch's discovery of the tuberculosis bacillus in 1882, or Wilhelm Röntgen's discovery of X-Rays, which won him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1901. By the '20s hardly anyone died of consumption.

The more important point is: In the Roaring "'20s, Violetta wouldn't have needed to beg the heartless establishment for a second chance at true love. She would simply have grabbed it, as everybody else seemed to be doing. The message of Verdi's opera may indeed be timeless; but it's timelier in some periods than in others.♦


To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
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