All this is in our brilliant, high-lying first act, telling us that even here, a strong low-range grounding is essential for this role. In the central Act 2 scene with Germont, these passaggio-downward excursions, while not frequent, assume high emotional urgency. The first comes on the final word of “Donna son io, signore, ed in mia casa” (“I am a lady, sir, and in [this is] my home”), whereon the descent must pick up the chest timbre at least by the last syllable, on E, if not the penultimate, on F-sharp, if it is to convey the obviously intended tone of dignified reproof and, not incidentally, support the tension of the situation. Next come the E-flats of “Di due figli?” Here, the composer’s pitch choice, while also harmonically congruent, evokes Violetta’s startlement at the discovery of an Alfredo sibling—not through a melodramatic reaction that would break the musical mood, but through the natural timbral emphasis of the registral shift. Then there’s an arguable, singer’s-choice example at the end of Violetta’s desperate plea (“Non sapete quale affetto,” etc.), at “che in lui troverò?“. This page, usually sung at a tense pianissimo alternating with brief outbursts, is marked Vivacissimo and agitato—but then, at “e che Alfredo m’ha giurato,” there’s an a piacere (and such an easement applies, let’s remember, not only to tempo, but to dynamic and specific affective color), and then a diminuendo down to our finishing “troverò?“, descending from G to F to E-flat, which lands on a downbeat, finished off with a vicious little group of accented chords from the strings. So a case can be made for continuing the diminuendo and searching for a sharp enough inflection to make the point without resorting to chest. But the case for emerging from the diminuendo and taking the plunge at full voice, with those string chords concluding her statement, has greater emotional logic. The most definitive chest-voice moment in the rest of the opera is in the final scene, at “salvarmi è dato,” which prepares the outcry of “Ah! gran Dio! morir si giovine!” This stays on the D, indicated as pp, until the penultimate syllable on E-flat (open vowel, downbeat—in effect, what I’d call an acciaccatura di forza ), where the orchestra jumps in at ff. There’s no way for the voice to clear that without summoning a vibrant voce di petto.

These crossings into and out of chest must, of course, be deftly handled and musically controlled. They must be interpretive choice, not technical field expedients. That, in turn, implies the equalization of the registers, with no manipulation of the vocal position (usually detectable by a change in vowel coloring) or interruption of the vibrato, and with the sense that the qualities of the two registers have been bonded, each partaking of the other, so that the voice is clear and firm throughout its compass—in Violetta’s music, crucially in the midrange, G to G. This has been lost sight of in contemporary vocalism, and nowhere more egregiously than in soprano voices of the higher sorts, mostly through a failure to acknowledge that the registers cannot be bonded if one of them (the lower one) is absent, present only in raw form and therefore avoided, or so weakly engaged that it cannot stand the stress. Verdi”s writing shows that he relied on that bonding, and saw no contradiction between a sturdy lower octave and a limber, quick (and still sturdy) upper one. That was his standard. ^(I)