Happily last night, in marking its 10th season, the Berkshire Opera Festival mounted a La Traviata that fully satisfied in all the essential elements: soloists, chorus, orchestra, acting, and staging. It brought tears, or at least dampness, to the eyes at central moments.
In addition to being one of Verdi’s most popular operas, La Traviata is also his most personal, reflecting his own situation at the time he wrote it. Like any opera composer, Verdi was always one the lookout for a new libretto or a source that could be turned into one. In the early 1850s, he happened to attend a performance in Paris of a play by Alexandre Dumas fils based on his own novel La Dame aux Camélias, which, in turn, was based on his own year as the lover of a beautiful and brilliant woman who had entranced all of Paris but who died of tuberculosis at age 23. In Dumas’s work, the youth’s father objected strenuously to his son’s relationship with the courtesan because it would scandalize their family and prevent the marriage of their daughter.
At the time, Verdi was a widower who had tragically lost his two very young children, followed by the death of his wife in 1840, and had begun an intimate relationship with the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, the original Abigaille in Nabucco, the opera that first made him famous throughout the opera world. They lived together publicly in the great centers of Milan and Paris, but when he returned with her to his home town of Bussetto, Giuseppina was snubbed by the local women as a “fallen woman” (traviata in the compact Italian term), who had lived with men outside of marriage and had already given birth to a child without recognized parentage.
At the time, the Dumas play was a bold choice at the time. In order to get his play produced in Paris, Dumas fils needed to get his very famous father, Alexandre Dumas père to intercede with the censors. Verdi, too, was urged not to mount it—as he wished—in modern dress, but rather costumed as if it took place more than a century earlier. (In later productions, though, La Traviata became the first “modern dress” opera.) All of this background explains much of why the music has been so captivating from the beginning.
With Verdi, the singers must come first. Violetta, the courtesan who finds true love, is one of the most vocally challenging roles in opera, because her changing character in the course of the plot calls for different kinds of music to sing, which Verdi provides so well. In the first act, she is a brilliant favorite of the elegant set, singing coloratura brilliantly—though the moment of weakness when she faints bodes ill for the future. Vanessa Becerra took full control of the elaborate singing required there, and the suggestion that love is unlikely to find her. Yet by the end of the scene, having encountered the passionate, young Alfredo Germont, she begins to wonder if perhaps he might be the one—still, she considers it folly, with another round of coloratura. Yet her passion later in the opera comes forth, first, when Alfredo’s father tells her coldly that her past will always be a barrier, to which she gives a simple, powerful reply: “Più non esiste”–It no longer exists; now I love Alfredo and God will cancel it.” Later, even more powerfully, Violetta breaks out in a glorious climax expressing her deep love for Alfredo (Amami, Alfredo, amami quant’io t’amo” (Love me, Alfredo, love me as much as I love you) even though the audience knows that she has promised Germont to leave Alfredo. Beccarra sang this with passion and truth that brouht tears to the eyes.
Tenor Joshua Blue matched force in the love scenes, expressing both the warmth of his affection the first time he gets to speak to Violetta to his despair the moment of her death. His brindisi had all the youthful joy one might desire, followed soon by his description of falling in love with her at sight: “Di quell’ amor, quell’amor ch’è palpito” (That love that is a trembling of the whole universe).
The third principal, baritone Weston Hurt, played the difficult role of Alfredo’s father Giorgio Germont—difficult because he appears as a man entirely inimical to the woman who has gotten herself embroiled with his son, and he is determined to break up the liaison, but he comes to recognize the generosity of Violetta’s spirit and regrets what he came to do. At the same time, he urges Alfredo to return to “the sea and the sunshine of Provence” in one of the most lyrical baritone numbers in all of Verdi, something of a throwback to Donizetti. Hurt encompasses the full range of the role with grace, dignity, and a rich voice.
The remaining soloists, with much smaller parts, carried them off very well: Flora Bervoix, Violetta’s friend (Erin Rappenhagen), Marquis of Obigny (Adam Partridge), Baron Douphal (Yazed Grey), Doctor Grenvil (John Cheek), Gaston, Viscount of Letorières (Maximilian Jansen), Annina (Kalia Kellogg), and Giuseppe (Nikolas Brannen). Solo dancers were Glenda Sol Koeraus and Katie Harding.
Brian Garman conducted the fine BOF Orchestra. Jonathan Loy served as stage director. The production company included scenic designer Hannah Postlethwaite, costume designer Brooke Stanton, Lighting design Alex Jainchill and Alejandro Fajordo, Hair and Makeup design Beckie Kravetz, Choreographer Sara Erde, and Chorus master and Assistant conductor Luca Antonucci. Supertitles were by Cori Ellison.
Steven Ledbetter is a freelance writer and lecturer on music. He got his BA from Pomona College and PhD from NYU in Musicology. He taught at Dartmouth College in the 1970s, then became program annotator at the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1997.
Performances of La Traviata continue at the Mahaiwe Performance Center in Great Barrington on August 26th and 29th. The company has already announced next year’s principal opera: Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor for the same period next August.