No traviata between private life and public life

There is a consensus among music historians in recognizing the Italian composer’s very long creative career Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), Three “Methods”. They were all, though each different in different ways, almost entirely an expression of the nineteenth-century romanticism experienced by the Parmesan musician.

After the “First Style” which relied on events of the past and in the most diverse geographies to instill the nationalism with which the Italian unification process was founded, in the “Second” Verdi – though always with the same theatrical and musical mastery – uses effective stories, although of other types.

At the heart of this “second form” of Verdian expression, a very popular expression occupies a prominent place, and not for nothing. Traviataa creation in four acts with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, premiered in 1853 and is the title with which Colon Theater He finished his official singing season.

And of course, in this case, the repetition of the narration Lady Camellia to Alexandre Dumas (h) Published a few years before the opera, it contains an implicit statement by Verdi regarding a work that undoubtedly constitutes a true historical picture. But the composer’s genius for musically recreating great texts and adding them to the lyric repertoire has not and will not cease to be constant. It had its most symbolic expression in the works of Shakespeare that he dealt with.

In La Traviata“Verdi brilliantly brings together that tension between public and private that is reflected in the romantic novel in general and in Dumas in particular.”

He is Macbeth, Othello Or even FalstaffHis will is built on The Merry Wives of Windsorpassed through the sieve of the lyrical genre and Verdi’s staff, became something else. It will also end up being a box office hit TraviataToday, it is infinitely more popular than the novel that inspired it, and is one of the most frequently performed operas around the world.

Be that as it may, once again Verdi’s genius in this title reveals more than the distinctive features of the era, and it is also interesting the way in which the presentation of the current version of Columbus reinterprets the original decisions of the Piave-Verdi duo.

Private life and public life in four works

If there is one thing that characterizes nineteenth-century Romanticism in the most diverse aspects of social life, it is the status acquired by interiority by its almost unlimited devotion to spirituality. Subjectivity.

In fact, far from monarchist resistance or attacks from socialism in its various forms, after the French Revolution, liberalism triumphed – at the hands of a government. Bourgeoisie Triumphant too – it began to shape a world where industrial capitalism could no longer turn back.

Strong defense of Individuality Free initiative, indispensable for capitalist accumulation, gradually formed an increasingly solid space “at home” that had its most diverse expressions in the world of creation, to the point that the march towards the consecration of intellectual property rights became irreversible.

In the field of music, besides the promotion of concerts with audiences, there was a significant rise in chamber music, as well as more intimate expressions, such as song cycles for voice and piano (liar) which were represented in that field par excellence of the bourgeoisie: the living room.

But alongside this process of “privatisation”, almost as two sides of the same coin, we witnessed the assertion of the public sphere which, alongside the strengthening of national states, had its indispensable fuel as well as its most visible visibility in the press.

In short, we are facing a process in which “private” It is unified at the same time, and although it may seem paradoxical, in Jürgen Habermas’s terms, “Public domain.”

Throughout the four works that contain a conspiracy TraviataVerdi reads, highlights and coexists in a wonderful way the tension between the private and the public that is reflected in the romantic novel in general and in Dumas’s novel in particular.

Parties (Acts I and III) show strong sociability in the interior (the love between Violetta and Alfredo; the affection between the former and Flora), again with Habermas: “The bourgeois temperament differs from the gentle temperament in that in the bourgeois house, the ceremonial space is also habitable, while in the palace, even the habitable space is ceremonial” (History and Criticism of Public Opinion). This reality finds its contradiction in that “populous desert which they call Paris,” to which the protagonist refers in the famous tone with which the curtain falls in the first chapter.

This is the same French capital Which slowly begins a stunning architectural transformation in keeping with the strong demographic expansion – from which the bride and groom move away to the monastery in the interior of the country where the entire second act takes place. And also, the same city that will strive to intrude into the dying Violetta’s bedroom when she decides to open the windows to get infected “inside” and into some of the revelry of Carnival Street festivities.

My message time. Epistolary opera

“Letter writing strengthens the individual in his subjectivity” (J. Habermas).

The transitional period between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that is, the period of the emergence of Romanticism, was undoubtedly the time of the novel. But it was also a strengthening and diversification of journalism – as the most symbolic expression of the aforementioned expansion of the public sphere – and Epistle type As one of the most prominent expressions of intimacy in the private sphere.

In fact, before communications began to be affected by new technological mechanisms – such as the telegraph -, letters could be considered the distinctive means of expression at that time. Once again as an exemplary expression of an era, Verdi’s musical theater echoed these expressions and found the epistolary practices in his operas a resource from which the composer could draw on a recurring basis.

But in “La Traviata” the correspondence can be said to be the basis of the plot: the entire second act – crucial to the heart of the story – is essentially epistolary, as is the reading of a letter before the famous and moving aria “Addio del passato…”, the vehicle chosen to project the tragic conclusion of the drama minutes later as inevitable.

Whatever the case, it was the mastery of the Piave-Verdi duo – with Dumas’s novel as a backdrop – that once again succeeded in turning this story into an opera, and this opera into an exemplary expression of its time: the revolution of the “bourgeoisie”, in the words of the great English historian Eric Hobsbawn.

La Traviata in Cologne

Verdi’s version of the drama is transported to the 1960s in the final performance at the Teatro Colon – by Emilio Saggi, Daniele Bianco, Renata Shoshim And Eduardo Bravo – very coherent and innovative, if the interpretive reading suggested by these lines is accepted as much as possible.

And if there is one thing that this decade has brought about like few others—and perhaps since—it is the gradual process of mixing private life with public life. Or at least, the first’s indisputable intrusion into the second. In a new, albeit different, development, the press – reinforced by television – became the privileged channel, and in contrast to the separation promoted by newspapers in Verdi’s time, this separation began to lose its force.

Besides lightening the costumes and stripping away the spaces in which the action takes place, those responsible for this version – as was very common in the 1960s – made some scenes filmable, either due to the inclusion of dedicated “photographers” to accomplish this task or because of the availability of characters that could be deliberately shot for this recording. It is a resource that only reminds us of the way in which private scandals became increasingly public through the media in those years – at similar ‘pompous parties’.

In short, for those who were fortunate enough to be able to attend these very successful performances of La Traviata, they were able to encounter an interesting transitional exercise that makes the merging of two inextricably linked processes more comprehensible: the social process, represented by the rise of the bourgeoisie, and the cultural process, represented by the irresistible consecration of lyric theatre.