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.

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!

“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!!

George Gordon, Lord Byron, died on 19 April 1824 at the age of 36. He had contracted a fever in Missolonghi fighting in the Greek War of Independence (Ελληνική Επανάσταση) against the Ottoman Empire.

Two of Verdi’s operas, Il corsaro and I due Foscari, are based on works by Byron. (By the way, Donizetti also wrote two Byronic operas.)

Today’s selection is an excerpt from Act II of I due Foscari, “Nel tuo paterno amplesso.” This 1980 or 1981 performance is untidy but features some splendid singing by Carlo Bergonzi as Jacopo Foscari and Renato Bruson as his father Francesco. Margarita Castro-Alberty portrays Lucrezia, and Eve Queler conducts.

P.S. Regular blog posts should resume now, though there are server problems and I sometimes cannot upload or save files. Also, I covered New York City Opera’s 2012–2013 season announcement for The Classical Review.

Dear hearts, I expect to be back from vacation around 17 April.

In the meantime, my latest article for Capital New York concerns a performance of the Manzoni Requiem by a wonderful New York group, the Choral Society.

Back at you soon!

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!

“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?

Happy birthday to Falstaff, which had its world premiere 119 years ago today!

Today’s musical selection features Tito Gobbi not in the title rôle (which he also sang superbly) but as Ford in the great jealousy scene from Act II, Scene 1: “È sogno o realtà?” Tullio Serafin conducts this performance from 1941. The clip also allows us to hear a bit of Mariano Stabile’s Falstaff, a legendary interpretation.

Though he had been grumbling about his supposed decrepitude since the 1880s, Verdi was saddened to bid farewell to the theatre after the Falstaff premiere. Gruff and laconic as he was, he opened his heart to Emma Zilli, the first Alice Ford, several months after the memorable night.

Do you remember the third Falstaff?!!! I took my leave of you all; and you were all somewhat moved, especially you and Pasqua. Imagine what my greeting implied, since it meant: “We will never meet again as artists!!” It is true that we saw each other after that, in Milan, in Genoa, in Rome; but memory carried us back always to that third evening, which meant: Everything is finished! Lucky you who still have such a long career ahead.

Verdi confessed to his publisher, Giulio Ricordi, that he could hardly bear to think back on the premiere and the period leading up to it:

Otherwise, I will fly to Milan in a balloon to beg my dear Merry Wives and Big Belly and the Men to start rehearsing again!! It was just exactly two months ago today, the third, that we had the first rehearsal!!! Everything ends!! Alas, alas! too sad!! This thought is too sad!! It is all Big Belly’s fault. What madmen!! Everyone… He, You, You, You, You. Everything on earth is a joke.

Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, in her magnificent biography of Verdi, describes the night of Falstaff’s premiere.

When [Verdi, Giuseppina, and librettist Arrigo Boito] got to the Grand Hôtel de Milan, they were greeted by the same pandemonium that had reigned after Otello. Dignitaries waited inside the lobby; the flower-decked salon of the composer’s suite was decorated with a bronze wreath, a gift of [the hôtel proprietor] Spatz, who had had many of its leaves engraved with the names of Verdi’s operas but had left some of them blank!

…An unidentified writer who was with [the party] reported that the composer was “happy and satisfied: his beautiful face was bright with a smile. Verdi gladly received the congratulations of his friends, and did not forget anyone who was there…” Nowhere is there a hint that the composer ever showed fatigue or exasperation during the taxing month before the Falstaff première. Indeed, several men of science published articles on his extraordinary physical strength, energy, and soundness of mind.

Still, despite Verdi’s vigor, despite his having created in Falstaff “a new art, music, and poetry” (as Peppina wrote), “an extremely new art form” (in Boito’s words), everything really was finished.

I hear time’s dreadful march in nearly every measure of this swiftest of operas: in the gossamer of Nanetta and Fenton’s love music; in the luxuriant (but oh-so-fleeting) sensuality of Falstaff’s “Ber del vino dolce e sbottonarsi al sole”; even in “Quand’ero paggio”—blithe and tripping, but evoking a slip of a boy whose “green April” and “glad May” will never return. Julian Budden writes that much of Falstaff is “instinct with… lacrimae rerum” and an “underlying melancholy.”

And the fugue! That triumphant joke at the expense of the conservatory professors and “quartettists” who had heaped scorn on Verdi’s abilities; that wrenching suspension, dreadful pause, and dizzying look into the abyss—Tutti gabbati! (“We are all deceived!”)—before the laughter returns and merry brass flourishes bring to an end the operatic career of this most humane and great-hearted artist.

Budden closes his three-volume study of Verdi’s operas thus:

By his eightieth year [Verdi] knew that nothing in this world can be taken for granted and that “Man is born to be made a fool of.” That he was no mere destructive cynic; that, if no orthodox Christian, he thought seriously on first and last things we know from the Requiem and the Quattro Pezzi Sacri that were his last compositions; but the final message of the secular Verdi is one of tolerance, comprehension and humour. If we cannot all agree we can at least laugh with each other and at ourselves. It is a message of hope.

Read earlier posts touching on Falstaff in the blog archives.