by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The show I picked out was a recent Metropolitan Opera
broadcast of Verdi’s La Traviata,
originally presented live in movie theatres on the date of the performance —
April 14, 2012 — and shown locally on KPBS on September 2. It was an annoying
production because of the staging by Willy Decker and the idiotic set and
costume designs by Wolfgang Gussmann. Ironically, Fanfare magazine’s current (November-December 2012) issue
has a review of a Traviata DVD
with the same singer as Violetta, Natalie Dessay, from Aix-en-Provence in 2011,
and judging from Barnaby Rayfield’s comments, its production was just as stupid
as this one: “Are there lots of chairs symbolically arranged, instead of a set?
Yup. Is the black back wall papered over with lots of limp video projection?
You betcha. Does the chorus make the same three dance moves and vaguely
gypsyesque hand movements as in every other single opera production of all
time, regardless of which time it’s set in? Why, indeed, yes. Does the baddie …
have a minimalist, postmodern, painted-on eye mask, instead of a real one? Yes,
contractual obligation, you know. Also, how the hell do you make Natalie Dessay
look dumpy? It takes a rare genius to do that.” Well, Willy Decker’s staging
isn’t quite as bad as the one by
Don Kent described by Rayfield, but it’s certainly giving it a run for the
money: instead of a bunch of chairs, we have four couches; and instead of a
blank black wall behind the participants, there’s a set of a blank grey wall, looking like the outside of an industrial
building made of concrete rebar. Dessay’s Violetta wears a red dress and,
apparently, nothing else — except in the first scene of Act II (the first of three scenes of Act II, since for some unfathomable reason
the Met decided to do Traviata in
two acts instead of three, and instead of breaking it between the two scenes of
what Verdi and librettist Francesco Maria Piave intended as Act II — which
would at least have made the two acts of roughly equal length — they put the
single intermission at the end of Act I and ended up with a 25-minute first act
and an 85-minute second), where she and Alfredo are lounging around in robes
that exactly match the furniture covers that have been thrown over the
otherwise white couches. “How do they find each other?” Charles asked — and the
production answered him when Dessay and tenor Matthew Polenzani opened their
robes and flashed their underwear. Preposterously, the announcer, Deborah Voigt
(who, like Renée Fleming, as an announcer is a very great opera singer), said
that Decker had defended this nonsensical production as a return to Verdi’s
original intentions, which were to set the opera in his own time (the premiere
was in 1853) and give audiences the sense that this story was happening now.
She also garbled the story, saying that the Italian censors (whom Verdi had to
contend with his entire career, making stupid demands similar to those made by
the officials who enforced the Motion Picture Production Code in Hollywood in the middle third of the 20th century) had demanded he change
the sets and costumes to the 18th century. Actually, Traviata was premiered in the modern-dress of the period,
it was a failure, so for the second production Verdi O.K.’d an 18th-century
setting — and Traviata was an
immediate hit and made it into the standard repertory.
I remembered that story
when I was listening to a Met radio broadcast of Traviata in the late 1980’s (with the radiant soprano Anna
Tomowa-Sintow as Violetta) and it hit me that the way to restore the shock
value Verdi and Piave intended Traviata to have would have been to set the piece in modern-day San Francisco,
change Violetta’s disease from tuberculosis to AIDS, and have her spend the
entire last act in a hospital bed in her home with her face made up to look
like she’d broken out with KS lesions and her cheeks had become sunken. And if
I were doing a modern-dress Traviata now, Violetta would be spending a lot of time at her computer because
virtually all transactions in the modern-day version of the “oldest profession”
— at least at Violetta’s level of it — start out on the Internet. For anyone
reading this who doesn’t know the origin or basic premise of the plot, which
began as Alexandre Dumas fils’
novel La Dame aux Camellias and
has been filmed several times as Camille (most notably the 1922 version with Alla Nazimova and Rudolph
Valentino, and George Cukor’s 1936 masterpiece with Greta Garbo and Robert
Taylor), Violetta Valéry is a high-class courtesan (in the 20th
century the au courant euphemism
would have been “call girl” and today it’s “escort”) with a string of rich
lovers, a lavish and pleasure-filled lifestyle funded by the gifts from her
sugar daddies — and a bad case of TB that’s going to kill her in a few months.
She’s also got an ardent suitor, a young man from Provence named Alfredo
Germont, and in the first act he attends a party Violetta is hosting and tells
her he’s genuinely in love with her and wants to take her away from The Life.
At the end of the first act, in one of the greatest operatic scenes Verdi (or
anyone else) ever wrote, Violetta mulls over his offer and even hears him
calling to her from outside her building, then thinks better of it and declares
that she has no use for serious relationships or emotional commitments, and she
will continue to have a good time as long as her life and her charms hold out.
Nonetheless, in act two she and Alfredo have settled down in a house outside
the city and are rapturously happy until two things happen: Alfredo learns that
Violetta has been financing their lifestyle by selling her sugar daddies’
presents, and Alfredo’s father Giorgio turns up. Germont père demands that Violetta give up Alfredo because their
affair is standing in the way of Alfredo’s sister’s engagement to a young man
from a rich but thoroughly conventional family who would break it off at once
if they found out their brother-in-law to be is having an affair with That Kind
of Woman. Violetta is reluctant at first but then gives in, though she says she
can only dump Alfredo if she can make him believe she’s given up on love
altogether and is whoring herself out to rich men again. In Act Two, scene 2,
Violetta, her new sugar-daddy Baron Douphol, and her friends are gambling at a
casino when Alfredo turns up — as does his father — and an angry Alfredo, after
a run of good luck at the card tables, takes his winnings and throws them in
Violetta’s face, stating that everyone else there can witness that he has
finally paid off the whore. (Even Daddy Germont is miffed at this one, telling his son that a gentleman never insults a woman in public no matter what she’s done.) Offstage, Douphol challenges Alfredo to
a duel, and the curtain falls — only in this production it not only doesn’t
fall but Violetta is left onstage while the orchestra plays the hauntingly
beautiful music Verdi intended as the orchestral prelude to the last act.
Violetta laments the loss of Alfredo and the progression of her disease, which
is about to kill her at any moment, and eventually Alfredo turns up, once again
offers to Take Her Away from All That, and she’s ready to go with him when
Alfredo’s father also shows up, she sickens and weakens again, then has a final
burst of energy; in her last moments she gives Alfredo a picture of herself and
tells him to cherish it later on, after he’s met another, more respectable
woman and married her. Then, just as she’s feeling better, she keels over,
dead.
La Traviata is one of the
most remarkable operas ever written (to my mind, rivaled in the Verdi canon
only by his last works, Otello
and Falstaff), and one of the
most amazing things about it is there isn’t really a villain: even the father
is acting from what he considers to be noble motives, and in all three of the
leads there is emotional and moral complexity far beyond what we expect from
the usual stick-figures of 19th-century opera. It’s true that the
tenor role gets lost in the shuffle — Luciano Pavarotti recorded Traviata with Joan Sutherland but didn’t like singing it on
stage because it was a feature first for the soprano, then for the baritone
playing Germont’s father and only third for the tenor — but it’s a refreshingly
unmelodramatic story, Verdi and Piave tell it relatively unsentimentally and
tone down the obvious
tear-jerking elements, and in the hands of the right soprano Violetta comes
alive as one of the most complicated and multi-dimensional characters in all
opera. The big problem with Traviata
is casting the lead: Rayfield commented it requires “a coloratura in Act I, a
dramatic soprano in Act II, then a fragile lyric in the final act,” and said he
doesn’t like it when the opera is cast with the sort of singer who does well in
Verdi’s later and bigger-voiced operas. “My preferred Violettas tend to be
Mozart specialists, like Ileana Cotrubas, Nuccia Focile, or more recently Patrizia
Ciofi, where their vocal flexibility and, more pertinently, lighter color give
the dying courtesan some naturalistic credibility,” Rayfield wrote. Not mine: my idea of a great Violetta is one of those rare birds
known as a soprano drammatica d’agilitá, meaning one capable of both coloratura fireworks and dramatic
inflection and credibility, and while some sopranos have come close to the
role’s demands only two have, in my mind, really conquered it: Rosa Ponselle
(whose 1935 live performance from the Met was fortunately preserved and
released on CD by Pearl) and Maria Callas. Natalie Dessay is a light-voiced
coloratura who’s closer to Rayfield’s ideal of Violetta than mine; she sings
absolutely gorgeously (except for a few wobbly high notes — but then
post-Callas it’s been a lot easier to get away with wobbly high notes than it
was before) and she acts the part convincingly, but her acting is almost
exclusively with her on-stage movements and gestures; she either won’t or can’t
change the timbre of her voice
enough to color the words and communicate Violetta’s emotions the way Callas
did. If there’s one thing Dessay
did in terms of giving me insights into Traviata I hadn’t had before, it’s that she negotiates the
rapid-fire shifts in tone, tempo and emotional mood so well she convinced me
that Verdi and Piave deliberately meant Violetta to be mentally ill, suffering
from what would now be called bipolar disorder.
The production also suffers from Dmitri Hvorotovsky’s casting as Germont père: he’s an excellent singer and sexy as all get-out —
the problem is that he’s too sexy
and he looks considerably hotter (and younger!) than the tenor playing his son.
For that matter, the singer playing Baron Douphol also looks hotter than
Polenzani.
But the worst part of this production is Decker’s staging: in the
opening act the people who are supposed to be playing Violetta’s party guests,
instead of mingling with her and each other like people at a real party, form a
phalanx and charge towards her, making me wonder if Willy Decker was taking his
directorial cues from Busby Berkeley’s “Lullaby of Broadway” number in Gold
Diggers of 1935 (and indeed the cameraman
on this production actually had a camera stationed in the flies and shot down towards the stage for a Berkeleyan tableau of the
party guests — an annoying habit in these “live” Met broadcasts to give us
vistas none of the paying audience could actually see), and at the end of the
act, instead of having Alfredo sing the few lines with which he interrupts
Violetta’s scena offstage come
scritto, Decker has him re-enter and turns
her big solo into a duet — thereby blowing one of Verdi’s most beautiful and
carefully calculated dramatic effects. The production is also dominated by a
giant clock — it hangs on Violetta’s wall in Act I and in Act II, scene 2, gets
taken down off the wall to become first a giant roulette wheel in the casino
(never mind that Piave’s text makes it clear that Alfredo is playing a card
game!) and then a giant holder on which a woman who’s supposed to be a
replacement for Violetta (wearing the same red dress Dessay did in Act I) is
sprawled out and carried off, as if to say the world of empty gaiety Violetta
tried to escape will just continue going on without her and she won’t be
missed. There’s also a drag queen who puts on the red dress and wears a mask
(at least in this production the masks are real, though they mostly look the
same) that has a camellia painted on the face, indicating that he’s a Violetta
impersonator, and aside from him Decker and Gussmann dress all the chorus members in suits and ties — and it’s a shock
when we hear a woman’s voice coming from one of these androgynous bodies. And as if that weren’t
weird enough, throughout the whole production there’s an aging figure lurking
around and watching the action, who may or may not be the same person who turns
up as Violetta’s doctor in the last act but apparently symbolically represents
the Spirit of Death about to take her.
I’ve
read about (and sometimes seen) considerably worse opera productions than this Traviata, and certainly Dessay tries her best to bring the
role to life with her gestures and movements (and though she doesn’t color her
voice for drama she does sing
absolutely gorgeously!), but through most of this we get the impression that
she’s fighting the production to
make Violetta live as a character instead of being able to use it, and we ache to see and hear her in a Traviata production set in the 19th century, or the 18th, or quite frankly any recognizable period of human life and
culture at all.
