La Traviata | Teatro Comunale di Bologna

From Saturday, February 21 to Sunday, March 1, at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi takes the stage.

Living and dying to the rhythm of a waltz. This is what Violetta Valéry does, Verdi’s heroine whom censorship wanted dressed in the costumes of Richelieu’s time, yet who forcefully claims, note by note, word by word, her eternal contemporaneity. Perhaps precisely because she is a real person rather than a historical character: a woman who died very young, just six years before the premiere of La Traviata (1853). Alphonsine Plessis, under the stage name Marie Duplessis, became one of the most admired and refined Parisian courtesans, entering legend also thanks to Alexandre Dumas fils’ novel La dame aux camélias (which renames her Marguerite). The heroine is a prostitute, a woman of the world, a woman well known in the contemporary society pages. 
The scandal of the “fallen woman” who does not need redemption, because the only condemnation points to the “implacable man,” cannot be avoided by distancing it in time: beneath the patina of refined vocabulary and syntax, Francesco Maria Piave’s libretto is concrete and merciless, with its frequent insistence on a “vulgar” subject such as money. At the same time, Verdi’s recurring use of the waltz—and its close relative, the polka—represents a contemporary worldliness, with all the connotations of a dance considered sinful and sensual, of popular origin, yet ready to conceal emotions and display elegance through its elusive motion.