Verdi's camellia courtesan survived a disastrous Venice night
Verdi's La traviata, adapted by librettist Francesco Maria Piave from The Lady of the Camellias by Dumas fils, flopped at Venice's La Fenice on 6 March 1853, when parts of the house jeered the leading lady. Fourteen months later a revised staging turned it into a triumph and one of opera's most performed works.
Verdi's years from 1851 to 1853 were crowded. Rigoletto opened in Venice in March 1851 and Il trovatore was waiting when Brenna, secretary of La Fenice, offered one more commission. In February 1852, while in Paris with Giuseppina Strepponi, Verdi saw Dumas's play, itself drawn from the author's 1848 novel; biographer Mary Jane Phillips-Matz says he began writing music at once, while Julian Budden thinks he already knew the book. Piave struggled to find a subject daring enough, and Verdi, bruised by his fights over Rigoletto, dreaded the Venetian censors. A synopsis first went to Venice as Love and Death.
Verdi wanted the contemporary setting Dumas had used, but the theatre insisted on the past, around 1700 in the era of Richelieu, and realistic modern stagings came only in the 1880s. He also distrusted his Violetta, the 38-year-old Fanny Salvini-Donatelli, and pushed in vain for a younger soprano. At the premiere the first act won cheers, but the mood turned in the second, and some scorn fell on a singer the audience thought too old and too heavy to be a girl dying of consumption. Next day Verdi told his friend Emanuele Muzio the evening had failed and time would tell whose fault it was.
He turned down requests from other cities until he could trust the singers. After revisions mostly to acts two and three, Venice's Teatro San Benedetto revived it on 6 May 1854 with Maria Spezia-Aldighieri as Violetta, and Piave reported that the fiasco had become a furore. Madrid, Vienna and Barcelona followed in 1855. London first heard it on 24 May 1856, when church leaders tried to stop it and Queen Victoria stayed away; New York and Paris both staged it that December.
The plot opens at a Paris party, where Alfredo leads the drinking song Libiamo ne' lieti calici and declares his love, and Violetta, torn, answers with Sempre libera, vowing to stay free. Three months later the couple live quietly outside Paris, until Alfredo's father, Giorgio Germont, demands that she give up his son because her reputation threatens his daughter's engagement, and she reluctantly agrees. Britannica counts it among the most performed operas of Verdi's lifetime.
Source: La traviata
