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.

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.

Giovacchino Antonio Rossini was born on 29 February 1792. If I calculated correctly, this means that tomorrow is his fifty-fourth birthday.

In 2010, I wrote a post about Verdi and Rossini that offers audio clips, including a French-language performance of the Guillaume Tell finale.

Over at Re-visioning Callas and in the blog archives, you can hear Maria Callas giving many unsurpassed performances of Rossini’s music.

Buon compleanno, Maestrissimo !

“The voluntary servitude I consecrated to that just, most noble, and truly great man is the act of my life that gives me most satisfaction.”

So wrote Arrigo Boito of his work with Verdi. Boito was born on 24 February 1842, and he died in 1918.

Boito’s marvelous writings about Verdi are quoted in many of this blog’s posts. While most scholars agree that we “owe” to the immensely tactful and patient Boito Verdi’s last operatic masterpieces, Otello and Falstaff (plus the Boccanegra revision), Boito’s reputation as a librettist has been on a downswing for several decades.

Gabriele Baldini compared Boito with the once-maligned Francesco Maria Piave:

The meeting with Piave was far more important to Verdi’s artistic formation than the one with Boito… and the reason for this is quite simple: working with Piave was Verdi’s first opportunity to work with himself… [Piave’s] libretti are in fact those best suited to Verdi’s music—even from a literary point of view they are much finer, in the sense of being better finished, than Boito’s—simply because, in detail as well as in general shape, Verdi himself composed them. Furthermore, Piave was undoubtedly much more intelligent than Boito in artistic matters. Boito was an artist and a man of letters, but he never fully understood Verdi and so continually tried to bend him towards his own ideas. Piave, with profound critical insight, immediately appreciated the situation, and simply let libretti fall into Verdi’s lap…

The great William Weaver published an invaluable volume for all Verdians: The Verdi–Boito Correspondence. Among very recent books about Verdi, Verdi’s Shakespeare: Men of the Theater by Garry Wills considers the Verdi and Boito relationship in depth.

In honor of Boito’s birthday, here are words and music by him: “Ave, Signor!” from Mefistofele (1868, rev. 1881 and several other times). Ildebrando d’Arcangelo is the Dark Lord, and Riccardo Muti conducts this 2005 performance from Ravenna.

Incidentally, if you click through and watch the video on YouTube, you can have fun wading through the heart-rending laments by the passatisti. I mean, for Pete’s sake, I saw and heard Samuel Ramey in this rôle at New York City Opera, San Francisco, and the Met; and he was wonderful; and why on earth should this keep anyone from enjoying the admirable D’Arcangelo?

The presenter is nauseating, but the song “Verdi cries” by Natalie Merchant is interesting.

The man in 119 takes his tea alone.
Mornings we all rise to wireless Verdi cries.
I’m hearing opera through the door.
The souls of men and women, impassioned all.
Their voices climb and fall; battle trumpets call.
I fill the bath and climb inside, singing…

The rest of the lyric is here.

Verdi died in Milano on 27 January 1901. He had suffered a stroke on 21 January in his apartments at the Grand Hôtel.

Arrigo Boito described Verdi’s death to Camille Bellaigue in a beautiful letter:

Verdi is dead; he has carried away with him an enormous measure of light and warmth. We had all basked in the sunshine of that Olympian old age.

He died magnificently, like a fighter, formidable and mute. The silence of death had fallen over him a week before he died.

Do you know the admirable bust by Gemito? That bust, made forty years ago, is the exact image of the Maestro as he was on the fourth day before the end. With head bowed on his breast and knitted brows he looked downwards and seemed to weigh with his glance an unknown and formidable adversary…

His resistance was heroic. The breathing of his great chest sustained him for four days and three nights. On the fourth night the sound of his breathing still filled the room, but the fatigue… Poor Maestro, how brave and handsome he was, up to the last moment! No matter; the old reaper went off with his scythe well battered.

My dear friend, in the course of my life I have lost those I have idolized, and grief has outlasted resignation. But never have I experienced such a feeling of hatred against death, of contempt for that mysterious, blind, stupid, triumphant, and craven power. It needed the death of this octogenarian to arouse those feelings in me.

He, too, hated it, for he was the most powerful expression of life that it is possible to imagine.

Verdi’s first funeral on 30 January was simple, in accordance with his wishes: “two priests, two candles, one cross.” He wanted no flowers, so his adopted daughter Maria Carrara Verdi and her daughter Peppina placed palm fronds in his coffin. Mary Jane Phillips-Matz tells us that a second-class hearse transported his remains. Verdi may have gone to eternal rest with the score of the Te Deum beneath the pillow in his coffin; this was family tradition.

Some of the earliest surviving Italian film footage documents his state funeral on 27 February 1901, when his remains and those of Giuseppina were moved to the crypt of the Casa di riposo, where we can pay our respects to them today. (The crypt is always my very first stop whenever I visit Milano.)

There is a YouTube clip of an elderly Milanese lady who saw Verdi’s funeral as a little girl.

It is said that a country priest sent a telegram to the Grand Hôtel upon learning of Verdi’s death. It read: La Vergine degli Angeli vi copra nel suo manto. This selection from La forza del destino was sung the day of Verdi’s state funeral; here it is in one of the greatest recordings ever made of Verdi’s music (or anyone else’s), sung by Rosa Ponselle and Ezio Pinza in 1928.

Of course, “Va, pensiero” from Nabucco was sung at the state funeral, too. Here is an historic performance from several months ago led by the great, the immense, Riccardo Muti. Background here. I dare you to try to watch this with a dry eye.

The final words of Mary Jane Phillips-Matz’s magnificent Verdi biography:

To the world, as to the nation he helped to found, Verdi left an enduring legacy of music, charity, patriotism, honour, grace, and reason. He was and remains a mighty force for continuing good.

From Omnibus (1956), the inimitable Leonard Bernstein contrasts how Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner might have told of the rising price of chicken.

Gustav III of Sweden was born on 24 January 1746.

Okay, Gustav III of Sweden was not a real Verdian: he died (from an infection that followed an assassination attempt) some two decades before Verdi was born. But he was a great patron of the arts, a lover of opera, and a librettist himself. And, of course, he was to have been the hero of the opera that we now know as Un ballo in maschera.

The Gustavo III-to-Ballo yarn makes my head spin. There is a wonderful article by Philip Gossett that used to be available online but now seems to be behind paywalls: “Returning Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera to Sweden” (Scandinavian Review, 2004).

In any event, in addition to Dr. Gossett’s work, I urge you to read Gabriele Baldini on Ballo. (The YouTube clip I embedded in that post has since been removed, but the text is, I hope, still informative.) You can read some of the Ballo chapter online.

Today’s clip shows Plácido Domingo singing Gustavo’s second set of couplets, “Di’ tu se fedele.” Claudio Abbado conducts this Covent Garden performance from long-ago 1975. (This production may have set the opera in Boston; I chose the performance because Domingo’s ebullience and grace are fit for a king.)

Plácido Domingo turns 71 on 21 January. He was the greatest Otello of my time and, I suspect, the greatest that I will ever see and hear.

This is the final scene from the 2001 La Scala Otello led by Riccardo Muti. Barbara Frittoli is Desdemona and Leo Nucci is Iago. If this run did not mark Domingo’s last assumption of Otello, it certainly was among his last outings in the rôle.