Since I didn’t read all this program material till later, my eye-aggravation didn’t start till the Prelude, with its now-customary assertion that the ear will never be allowed a moment’s dominance over the eye, and that nothing awaits revelation by the rise of a curtain. I should be used to it by now, but I’m not. Here, with the orchestral burst of allegro brillantissimo e molto vivace that would have marked that moment of unconcealment, a flying wedge of leering, crouching folks in black suits charges onto the scene. When I say “scene,” I refer to the white cycloramic structure that is the set. It resembles a clamshell, pried open at the front so we can see in, and open high in the back for projected background and assorted directorial doings. The black suits stick close together—we can’t tell who’s who, who’s singing, or which gender is involved—because they represent en masse the monolithic “bourgeois” . . .  “society of greedy men” (per W.D.) whose sole function is to hound Violetta (and all women) literally to death. The color scheme (black-and-white, broken only by Violetta’s red dress and, from time to time, flowers up in back); the attitudinal affect imposed on the chorus and comprimarios; and The Clock (a bit of downrent Dalì, also recalling the countless old movies in which clocks spin, pages flip., etc.), together with the circling, stalking presence of Death/Grenvil, lend more than a tinge of interwar German Expressionism and Surrealism to the “colori occulti”  Violetta has been inwardly nursing. The cycloramic shape, steeply raked toward the rear, facilitates much walking in circles, because (W.D. again) “Time . . . runs in circles.”

Does it? A great many operas bring back music from a prelude or overture toward the end, and drop heavy hints of doomed love along the way. Should they all be staged in circles? And do you believe that “the gesture underlying [the opera’s] rhythm—the notorious oom-pah-pah—” pulls us “ . . . into a vertigo-inducing circular motion”? Or do you perhaps think that Traviata is actually rather linear, laying out a series of episodes—acts, scenes, numbers—that take us on an ever-tightening line through a determinative stretch of life, like most narratives in any artform?

Expressionism, Surrealism, and cyclical motion are superbly à propos in works written in accordance with those aesthetic principles. La Traviata is not such a work. It is pretty much the opposite. In his entry for this opera in The Metropolitan Opera Guide to Opera on Video, Albert Innaurato makes two interesting claims for it—first, that it “seems to be the first opera in which someone dies of a particular disease,” and second, that “It is probably the first opera to actually demand a verisimilitudinous representation.”  I can’t vouch for the firsts (though in terms of surviving canonical works, these guesses sound right to me), but both statements speak accurately to the character of the piece. Innaurato observes that in the mid-Ottocento tuberculosis was a highly romanticized and mysterious illness identified with sexual allure and the moral censure that accompanied it. Its development moved in progressive, predictable stages through time, and that’s how the opera tracks it. As for “verisimilitude,” I think he’s on point again. Theatrical style was just beginning its shift toward what we now think of as realism, expressed first in setting and costume and then, gradually, in a new kind of “lifelikeness” in acting and in choice of subject. Traviata is the first great examplar of that movement in operatic tragedy (comedies had often trafficked in the here-and-now, and in lives other than those of kings and gods). Its validity in performance depends on specificities of time, place, and social milieu, and on highly defined, up-close-and-personal characterization. As soon as we’ve moved from a story about a captivating young femme galante with tuberculosis and her passionately sincere, rather naïve lover from Provence amid the glitzy haute-bourgeoisie of Paris, circa 1850, to black suits and the Circle of Time and Death, we’ve come a fair distance from the emotional place Verdi was trying to take us.