Becoming Traviata (Traviata et nous), the 2012 documentary by Philippe Béziat that plays at New York’s Film Forum May 15 – 28, is a gripping and intelligent look at Verdi’s 1854 melodramma and at the process by which director Jean-François Sivadier, conductor Louis Langrée, and their beautiful cast brought it to life at the 2011 Aix-en-Provence Festival. (The Aix production in its entirety is available on a Virgin Classics DVD that I recommend warmly.)

In all honesty, I went to Becoming Traviata with considerable wariness in light of the Metropolitan Opera’s bleakly cynical infomercial plugging Robert Lepage’s production of Wagner’s Ring cycle. But Béziat’s film bowled me over. As we know from the Met’s “Live in HD” transmissions, the up-close-and-personal and larger-than-life scale of opera at the cinema offers unique thrills. And there is so much to relish in Becoming Traviata: the look in Natalie Dessay’s huge, glazed, seawater-green eyes when Alfredo’s voice breaks into “Sempre libera”; the way that the Germont of Ludovic Tézier (hubba-hubba) caresses Violetta’s face, lingering just one slimy second too long; how Charles Castronovo’s Alfredo, frantic with desire, clutches Violetta and buries his face in her skirts after throwing bills into her face and stuffing them down her bodice.

(Incidentally, as Don Ottavio in the Met’s Don Giovanni, Castronovo turned in possibly the most patrician and deeply musical singing I heard all this past season. In Becoming Traviata he is a hunky, irresistible puppy of an Alfredo, memorably presenting a shaggy clump of wildflowers to Dessay’s streetwise Violetta. If Castronovo continues to choose his roles wisely and to sing within his means, he will be a major artist—and I do mean “artist” and not just “tenor.”)

Becoming Traviata shows Sivadier, Langrée, and their cast really digging into the smallest details of Verdi and librettist Francesco Maria Piave’s masterwork. In Act I, when the guests burst into Violetta’s party, Langrée reminds his choristers that Flora is named after the goddess of flowers, so he asks them to sing her name “with perfume.” Sivadier and Dessay together explore the void that Verdi placed between the hectic, noisy exit of the revellers later in Act I and Violetta’s murmured È strano: It is “a desert,” the director observes, and Violetta in that moment stands “on the edge of nothingness.”

Langrée’s conducting is electrifying throughout, and what fire and agitation he brings out in Verdi’s orchestral writing where the dull and benighted hear only rum-te-tum. “Be nasty,” he exhorts the cellos as they rehearse the buildup to Violetta and Alfredo’s confrontation at Flora’s soirée. When Violetta sings Addio, del passato (performed correctly with both verses—Violetta is a Parisian, so Verdi logically wrote couplets for her), wisps and scraps of gold leaf flutter across the stage. They are a reminder of the superficial glitter of Violetta’s life as a prostitute; and like the discarded blossoms and billets-doux that are trampled at the end of the ballroom sequence in Luchino Visconti’s Il gattopardo, they also tell of mortality and evanescence. (Visconti’s film famously includes a waltz by Verdi and music from La traviata, and Burt Lancaster’s Don Fabrizio was modelled on a portrait of Verdi.)

For all the film’s wonderful qualities, Béziat’s remarks on La traviata (given in a press handout) reflect a certain naïveté about some of opera’s uncomfortable realities. “…[Verdi] seemed to have but one goal: to bring onto the theater stage the spark of life, the magic of words. When you delve into one of his scores, you see the way the notes stick to the words, the way speech brings about music.”

All well and good, but critics have long noted the tendency of words and music in opera to follow their own wayward trajectories, the classic case being Orphée’s “J’ai perdu mon Eurydice.” Gluck’s melody is equally suited to a very different sentiment: J’ai trouvé mon Eurydice. Rien n’égale mon bonheur ! What’s more, at least in France, Verdi expected that his works would be performed in the vernacular, which entailed all manner of retrofitting: Prosody and meter differ radically in Italian and in French. And in general, the question of who’s in charge in opera, la musica or la parola, is the form’s deepest and most abiding anxiety.

Béziat further opines, “There is no need… for a great crinoline, twenty-five fireplaces, fourteen chandeliers, and flowing champagne.” Yet when Violetta attacks “Sempre libera,” Dessay and Sivadier fall back on the moldiest of all Traviata clichés: brandishing a bottle of booze. And a “timeless” treatment of Violetta’s drama can overlook what was once most startling about the opera. In the early 1850s, La traviata was “ripped from the headlines,” a story of raw immediacy. By one account, Violetta was the first operatic character to die of a real, identified disease (“La tisi non le accorda che poche ore”), one then raging in Paris and other urban centers.

To Verdi and Piave’s exasperation, censors insisted that the action be moved back to the time of Richelieu, but no one was fooled. In The Sounds of Paris in Verdi’s “La traviata,” a must read for all Verdians, Emilio Sala examines how the music of the Parisian boulevard theatres and the then-racy waltz saturate Verdi’s score, further amplifying the story’s bleeding-edge punch for the composer’s contemporaries. And one of Verdi’s colleagues described La traviata, even in bowdlerized form, as “a real musical and social revolution.”

But that was then. Nowadays waltzes are tame and kitschy, most everyone has seen Camille and La Dame aux Camélias (Bernhardt, Huppert), and La traviata is the most frequently performed opera in the world. It can probably never be as gritty for us as it was for Verdi’s peers.

In his critique of Wagner, Theodor Adorno decried the composer’s fondness for characters presented as “universal symbols” bound up with “the standing-still of time” and with escape into spurious realms outside of history and of politics. It is strange, even gruesome, to think of Violetta and Verdi in similar terms. But perhaps Sivadier chose to craft a contemporary-dress Traviata, with raves and graffiti and exposed-brick walls, in part to sidestep such dangers. Certainly his splendid cast, conductor Langrée, and film director Béziat offer a searing and riveting vision of Verdi’s “poor sinner,” her unqualified surrender to love, and the cruel and bitter end to which her society condemns her.

Becoming Traviata plays at Film Forum in New York May 15 – 28. For screening information on other cities in the United States, please visit the Distrib Films website.

Dear all, sorry to have been away from you for so long! This blog was long broken, and once my webmaster fixed it (knock wood, etc.), I was preoccupied with other things.

Anyway, for now, I shall simply link to my Verdi-related articles of the past few months. Hope to be back at you next week with fresh and toothsome content.

• For WQXR Operavore, an article on the Defiant Requiem film and concert
• For The Classical Review, I reviewed the following Metropolitan Opera productions: La traviata; Don Carlo; Rigoletto (ugh, I had almost managed to forget that one); Ballo.

This is cross-posted from my “blog portal.” Hope to be back with fresh content soon!

I reviewed the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of Verdi’s Otello for Capital New York.

Alas, the prima was not a great night for Verdi: Johan Botha was suffering from allergies, and the show as a whole seemed underrehearsed and sloppy. I suspect that it will improve as the run goes forward, because the raw materials, so to speak, are quite fine. But someone please tell Maestro Bychkov that Otello is not Mahler’s bleeding Ninth.

I especially enjoyed Falk Struckmann’s bracingly intelligent portrayal of Iago.

VIVA VERDI!

Hi all! Sorry that posts have been so thin of late. I am very busy, and very glad to be so.

I reviewed the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of Il trovatore for The Classical Review, and I include a “The Kiss” by Francesco Hayez in this post because he seems to me a much more germane visual reference for Trovatore than Goya. In 2011, there was an exhibit entitled “Hayez in Verdi and Manzoni’s Milan” that I am sad to have missed.

How about a little Trovatore playlist?

• Ildebrando d’Arcangelo as Ferrando in the opening scene, with Antonio Pappano conducting.
• Giuseppe de Luca (in 1907) sings “Il balen del suo sorriso.”
• Carlo Bergonzi sings “Ah sì, ben mio” (with trills, or an approximation thereof, grazie).
• Maria Callas in the prison scene, with Herbert von Karajan conducting.

Back soon, I hope! mwah!

Friends, it has been a rollicking few months! Over at my Callas blog, I posted about some recent articles.

Back at you soon, and VIVA VERDI!

I was lucky enough to review the splendid new recording by Boston Baroque of Haydn’s Creation for The Forward. And it reminded me that there is a story involving Verdi and The Creation.

Late in life, Verdi gave an account of the episode to a biographer. What follows took place when he was twenty or twenty-one years old and studying under Vincenzo Lavigna in Milan.

About 1833 or 34 there existed in Milan a Philharmonic Society composed of very good musical elements. It was directed by a master called Masini who, while he did not shine, through his eminent musical knowledge at least had patience and tenacity; that is to say the necessary qualities requisite for the conductor of an amateur musical body. At that time they were organising at the Theatre Philodramatic a performance of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation, and my master Lavigna asked me for my own benefit if I would not like to go to the rehearsals. I need not say I accepted with pleasure. I went, but no one paid the slightest attention to the little youngster who seated himself modestly in an obscure corner. Three masters, Perelli, Bonoldi, and Almasio conducted these rehearsals, but one fine morning by a singular coincidence none of the three was present. The public was getting impatient when the leader Masini, not feeling himself capable to sit down to the piano and accompany the full score, turned towards me and begged me to be accompanist. He was so little confident in the ability of the young musician that he said to me, “It will be sufficient to accompany with the bass only.”

At that time I was fresh from my studies, and certainly I would not have felt very perturbed before any orchestral score living. I accepted Masini’s offer and sat down to the piano to commence the first measures. I well recall several ironical smiles on the faces of certain amateurs, for it seems that my juvenile physiognomy, my lank body, and my shabby dress were not of a nature to inspire great confidence. However that may be, we began the opening number. Little by little warming up to it and beginning to feel the excitement myself, I was not alone satisfied with accompanying the bass, but I commenced to direct the orchestra with my right hand at the same time playing the score with the left. When the rehearsal was finished from every side I received felicitations and compliments but particularly from the Conte Pompeo Belgiojoso and Conte Renato Borromeo. To close this incident, whether the three masters of whom I have already spoken were too occupied to continue the task of conducting for the Philharmonic Society or whether from other reasons I know not, but the Society finished by confiding the direction of the concert entirely to me. The public performance was such a success that we gave a second performance in the great room of the Casino dei Nobili in the presence of the Archduke and Archduchess Ranieri and the grand society then residing in Milan. The success was so great that the Viceroy himself expressed a wish to hear The Creation and a third concert took place in the palace again under my direction.

As for me, I hope to resume posting regularly soon: Over at my Callas blog, I wrote up what my holiday weekend looks like.

To everyone in the States, have a happy and relaxing holiday, and I’ll be back next week!

Darling readers, so sorry to have been away from you and the blog for so long! Over at my Callas blog, I published a list of some of the things I’ve been working on.

I did screen and review something Verdi-related: the film Defiant Requiem, which tells the story of performances of Verdi’s Requiem by prisoners at the Terezín concentration camp.

The film is showing in Los Angeles through 23 August, and it is scheduled to be shown on PBS here in the States in April 2013.

Please visit the Defiant Requiem Foundation website to learn more about efforts to honor the memory of the heroic Terezín musicians.

“I am an arrogant and impatient listener,” Benjamin Britten wrote, “but in the case of a few composers, a very few, when I hear a work I do not like I am convinced it is my own fault. Verdi is one of these composers.”

I wrote a little (very little) about Britten and Verdi when I reviewed the Metropolitan Opera’s superb production of Billy Budd for The Classical Review.

And if you pop over to Re-visioning Callas, you can read about my mad escapades.

It’s good to be posting again. VIVA VERDI!!

Darlings, I am on vacation, and I wish you all Chag Pesach Sameach, Happy Easter, or just “Have a nice day” if you celebrate neither of the above.

I did, however, head uptown to review the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of La traviata for The Classical Review.

Hei-Kyung Hong was a marvelous Violetta, and Dmitri Hvorostovsky was in sensational form.

Back at you soon!