Postcard from Palace Opera and Ballet 2019/20 Season

La Traviata/Simon Stone/Pretty Yende/Paris Opera/Palais Garnier 

The title of La Traviata literally means ‘the courtesan’ – or more figuratively ‘the fallen woman’ or ‘the woman led astray’. Verdi originally intended to give what is now his most popular opera (and the most frequently performed in the world) the somewhat grandiose title of Love and Death, but the work he eventually completed in collaboration with his regular librettist Piave deals with more down-to-earth issues of sex, money and class. 

To be sure the term ‘courtesan’ is more ambiguous and refined than ‘prostitute’, but despite the more multi-faceted and elevated status of the former as the paid mistresses or ‘kept women’ of upper-class men – and even if some courtesans enjoyed a certain autonomy and even had their own literary and artistic salons – ultimately they too depended on the exchange of sex for money as professional fringe-dwellers in the demi-monde of nineteenth century Paris. Indeed it’s not for nothing that the most successful demimondaines were known as les grandes horizantales.

The opera is based on La Dame aux camélias, a roman à clef and play by Alexandre Dumas fils based on the life of Marie Duplessis, who died of tuberculosis at the age of 23, and whose lover-patrons included Dumas and Liszt; the title refers to the white or red camellias she wore to indicate whether or not she was sexually available depending the time of the month. Verdi was inspired by seeing the play in the company of his own lover and artistic muse the soprano Guiseppina Strepponi, whom he later married but was herself at the time regarded as something of a ‘fallen woman’ – like many female singers, actors and dancers of the day who had lovers (and in Strepponi’s case children) but remained unmarried in order to have professional careers, which of course was considered unsuitable for married women.

Verdi’s choice of subject was thus a very personal one, as well as being socially and artistically controversial. La Traviata is the first opera that deals so openly with sex, money and class, as well as being the first to be set in the present-day world rather than far-off times and places; it thus anticipates the later verismo of Mascagni, Leoncavallo and Puccini, though its realism is arguably far more provocative than any of these. As with his previous opera Rigoletto, once again Verdi fell foul of the censors, who wanted to alter both the setting and content of his new opera, in particular with reference to Violetta’s profession (to which the composer famously retorted, ‘A whore must always be a whore!’). It also caused a scandal at its first performance in London in 1856: the church tried to have it shut down, Queen Victoria refused to attend, and critics decried what they called ‘the poetry of the brothel’ and ‘an exhibition of harlotry upon the public stage’.

All of this is easy to forget today, when the work has become such a staple of the repertoire – partly because the music is so ravishing, partly because we like to think we live in more enlightened post-Victorian times, but mostly because opera itself has become a cultural commodity and signifier of status that no longer communicates as directly to the public as it did in Verdi’s day. As such it invites radical renewal by a stage director who is attuned to the work’s original meaning as well as to its contemporary reception. 

Simon Stone’s new production at the Paris Opera succeeds on the second front perhaps more than the first. By transposing the setting to modern-day Paris, Stone is true both to his audience and to the composer’s intentions (as with the auteur-director’s recent contemporary adaptations of Chekhov and Ibsen). More specifically this Traviata takes place in a world (and on a stage) flooded by digital content. The spectacular set by Bob Cousins features two towering, conjoined and reflex-angled video screens on a vast revolving stage; at full revolve the now reversed and obtusely-angled sceens become blank white and merge with a similarly white floor to create an endlessly receding and featureless horizon. When facing the house, the video screens display ever-changing footage (video design by Zak Hein), from an opening close-up of Violetta’s (South African soprano Pretty Yende’s) closed and heavily made-up eyes – which slowly blink open as the haunting overture to Act 1 begins (echoing one of the obsessive motifs of French surrealism, from Bunuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou to Bataille’s Histoire de l’oeil, as well as suggesting the role of surveillance, ‘the gaze’, visibility and visuality generally in postmodern culture) – to a recurrent marketing image of Violetta/Yende (role and singer being effectively indistinguishable here) promoting a perfume called ‘Villaine’ on a giant advertising billboard which overlooks much of the rest of the Act. They are also continually traversed by scrolling emails, texts, emojis, newsfeeds, social media posts, bank statements and medical records. 

The effect is that real and virtual, private and public realms dissolve into each other in a société du spectacle that becomes indistinguishable from its representation on the stage/screen. This sense of a simulacrum without borders extends backstage as well as into the auditorium and foyer of the opera house at the Palais Garnier, as captured live on video before the show and between the acts, skilfully edited and included in the digital broadcast shown in cinemas. The result is that we ourselves feel as if we are not merely spectators but voyeurs participating in Violetta’s downfall.

Against this continuously morphing and shifting backdrop the revolve transports the characters on a restless journey from one narrative location to another. This occurs most effectively in Act 1, which becomes an all-night party, beginning with Violetta jumping a queue outside a club, then heading inside for her set-piece brindisi (‘Libiamo’) with Alfredo (French tenor Benjamin Bernheim), before leaving through the kitchen to a back lane (‘Oh, quai pallor/Un di felice eteara’), and then wandering the streets of Paris (‘E strano/Ah, fors'è lui che l'anima’) to a kebab-stand beside the Joan of Arc statue in the Place des Pyramides, where her closing love duet with Alfredo (‘Sempre libera’) takes place via SMS while he sits at his laptop in an internet café. 

Act 2 Scene 1 ran aground for me both scenically and dramatically as the action shifted to the country retreat where the lovers have fled from Paris, and where Alfredo’s bourgeois father Germont (Québécois baritone Jean-Francois Lapointe) tracks them down, confronts Violetta and persuades her to leave his son. Scene 2 then became unmoored and drifted into the doldrums of recycled trash-camp at Flora’s party back in Paris, where an impressive array of fancy-dress costumes (designed by Alice Babbage and decorated with randomly protruding dildos) failed to enliven an orgy even more inert than the one in Eyes Wide Shut. In this context the function of the ‘gypsy’ and ‘matador’ choruses (surely intended by Verdi to be hired entertainers doing double-duty as sex-workers) seemed dramaturgically unclear, while Alfredo’s drunken e-gambling on an iPad (with his winnings displayed on the overhead screens) looked more like stage-technological gimmickry than convincingly motivated scenography. As for the putative climax of the scene, Alfredo’s challenge to Violetta’s former lover the Baron Douphol (French baritone Christian Helmer) to fight a duel to the death, his verbal and physical abuse of Violetta, and his father’s unexpected entrance and reprimand, all seemed curiously enervated and lacking in dramatic intensity. 

Things became more intriguing again in Act 3, which began with Violetta languishing in a hospital ward in the terminal stages of consumption. The revolve then took her on a hallucinatory journey back through the street-scenes of Act One (recalling the closing shots of Antonioni’s L’eclisse, where the camera revisits the locations where the lovers have met throughout the film) for her nostalgic farewell aria (‘Addio, del passato bei sogni ridenti’), before arriving back at the hospital for her final trio with Alfredo and Germont (‘Prendi, quest'è l'immagine’) and then departing through a slowly widening chasm between the dark and empty video screens, as if disappearing through a fissure in social reality into a kind of ontological void.

The key performance was of course Yende as Violetta, who looked and sounded luminous (especially in her shimmering gold sequin dress in Act 1), but who struggled with the demands and complexity of the role both musically and dramatically. In this she was not helped by the generally glacial tempi adopted by conductor Michele Mariotti, and too often sounded plaintive rather than energized, not only when overcome by illness in Act 3 but also in the more spirited passages of Acts 1 and 2, when the role required her to embody the wilful courtesan or passionate lover. Bernheim as Alfredo was more successful, with a gloriously relaxed lyric tenor voice and easy stage presence; but again – partly because of the tempi but also Stone’s direction – he seemed fatally passive almost to the point of defeat from the very beginning of the opera, often appearing more interested in the contents of his smart phone than in what was happening around him onstage. In the third crucial role, Lapointe’s Germont was both over-acted and under-sung, laying on the sentimental pity for Violetta but failing to underline his character’s fundamental role as the irresistible voice of bourgeois reason and patriarchal authority. 

More questionable for me was Stone's decision to make Violetta a celebrity 'influencer' and fashion icon. This glosses over the economic precarity of her position as a courtesan, along with the sexual and class dynamics that underpin her fragile status. To be sure, the toxic nexus of social media, advertising, narcissism and commercial interests might be seen as a form of prostitution, which is potentially just as exploitative, degrading and even destructive. To turn Violetta into Kim Kardashian is however to give her significantly more social agency than she possesses in the original. Conversely it reduces the physical, tangible, corporeal dimension of her way of life and means of survival, which is essential not only to her tragedy, but to the musical and libidinal energy of the opera itself. Perhaps this explains why Stone's direction, Mariotti's conducting and the performances of the singers all seemed strangely lacking in vitality. 

In a pre-show foyer interview Stone cites Meghan Markle as a current-day analogy with Violetta in terms of being ostracized because of race and class; but the former (as well as being somewhat more secure in her social status than a courtesan) is as outspoken about her feminism and progressive politics as she is about the challenges of being mixed race, and is targeted so viciously in the media and online precisely because of conservative (and implicitly sexist as well as racist) expectations regarding the wife of a British royal. In contrast, Stone makes Violetta the acquiescent celebrity girlfriend of a contemporary bourgeois, while the latter is reconceived as (in Stone’s words) ‘a writer, artist or architect’ – in other words, a member of the knowledge/culture class, making it even more unlikely that his association with a media superstar (regardless of race) would be in any way scandalous.

In short: gender, race and class are not interchangeable either as cultural signifiers or social realities. They interact with each other in complex ways, and their meaning and significance depends on this, as well as on historical context. The definition of class in particular is determined by how it divides and organises a society. In nineteenth century Paris, the hypocritical morality of bourgeois patriarchy (Germont) colluded with the reactionary trappings of a residual aristocracy (the Baron Douphol) and the permissive ethos of the demi-monde to engineer a situation in which marriage, sex and romantic love were entirely separate transactions. It is the tragedy of Violetta and Alfredo that they seek to transcend this contradiction. In the contemporary world of consumer capitalism, however, desire and money are all that matters; all other considerations of status, value or meaning fall by the wayside; the body and even the emotions are reduced to being little more than appearances or simulations. In the era of the hyper-real, death is the only reality that resists technology (despite the best efforts of billionaires to achieve immortality through cryogenics); thus in Stone’s production Violetta’s illness (here implicitly cancer rather than tuberculosis, which in the 19^thCentury was associated with syphilis, another shameful disease of contagion) is the only tragedy, rather than the contradictions of class. The latter are smoothed over, so that the streets of Paris at night appear to be populated solely by people of wealth and privilege. Indeed in terms of dramatic economy the production would arguably be more consistent if Act Two were cut entirely.

As for the issue of race – alluded to by Stone in the comparison he makes with Meghan Markle, and possibly reflected in the casting of Yende as Violetta (though curiously the role is alternated in Paris with Czech soprano Zuzana Marková, who is white) – this too is a matter of context. Like class or gender, race is a social category rather than a biological one; in other words, it’s a question of how skin-colour or heritage are valued. This is very different in the case of a global supermodel or social media starlet, a British royal’s wife, a 19^thcentury French courtesan, or a contemporary South African soprano; indeed opera singers are now increasingly cast with as little regard to race as age or body-shape. If anything, the colour of Yende’s skin only enhances her status as a stage beauty when she enters as Violetta in a gold dress with an expensive clutch under her arm and saunters past the other fashionistas outside the club; and her race effectively disappears as soon as she begins to sing – which is surely as it should be. 

In fact the most telling – and moving – moment for me was when Yende reappeared for a solo curtain-call in the blue hospital gown that was Violetta’s final Act 3 costume, and curtsied so deeply that she almost touched the floor. In this simple gesture – and the tears that stained her face – I suddenly saw her journey from a small South African town to the gilded proscenium of the Opéra Garnier. In that moment, for the first and only time, I saw her as Violetta.

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La Traviata directed by Simon Stone for the Paris Opera opened at the Palais Garnier on 12 September. It was digitally broadcast and shown in cinemas as part of the Palace Opera and Ballet screenings from 15 November.