Browse content similar to La traviata: Love, Death and Divas. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!
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Violetta Valery is a heroine like no other. | 0:00:07 | 0:00:10 | |
When she made her debut, | 0:00:10 | 0:00:12 | |
a dangerous female blazed into life on the operatic stage. | 0:00:12 | 0:00:16 | |
A courtesan, a fallen woman, La Traviata. | 0:00:16 | 0:00:20 | |
# Oh Dio | 0:00:20 | 0:00:22 | |
# Oh Dio | 0:00:22 | 0:00:23 | |
# Oh... # | 0:00:23 | 0:00:30 | |
Today La Traviata is the most performed | 0:00:35 | 0:00:38 | |
and arguably best-loved opera in the world. | 0:00:38 | 0:00:42 | |
But it was a very different story following its London | 0:00:42 | 0:00:45 | |
premiere in 1856. | 0:00:45 | 0:00:47 | |
Presenting a fallen woman as a tragic heroine caused a very | 0:00:49 | 0:00:53 | |
British scandal. | 0:00:53 | 0:00:55 | |
SHE SINGS | 0:00:55 | 0:00:59 | |
"An exhibition of harlotry - upon the public stage!" | 0:00:59 | 0:01:05 | |
"This demoniacal stimulus to jaded sensibilities." | 0:01:05 | 0:01:10 | |
"It is the poetry of the brothel." | 0:01:10 | 0:01:13 | |
The story of this unconventional heroine will take us | 0:01:15 | 0:01:18 | |
from the glitter of the Parisienne demimonde, | 0:01:18 | 0:01:21 | |
where courtesans reigned as queens of debauchery. | 0:01:21 | 0:01:25 | |
That is one hell of a bed. | 0:01:25 | 0:01:27 | |
To the modern Babylon of Victorian London, where respectable | 0:01:28 | 0:01:32 | |
and disreputable jostled in the teeming streets. | 0:01:32 | 0:01:35 | |
Here is our poor fallen woman, fallen so very low. | 0:01:37 | 0:01:42 | |
It will take us from a composer struggling to reinvent | 0:01:44 | 0:01:47 | |
opera for the modern day. | 0:01:47 | 0:01:49 | |
Verdi said he wanted poetry but with big balls. | 0:01:49 | 0:01:53 | |
To the canny calculations of a London impresario who courted | 0:01:54 | 0:01:58 | |
scandal, hoping to make a killing. | 0:01:58 | 0:02:01 | |
But would the British public pay good money to see a prostitute die | 0:02:01 | 0:02:05 | |
onstage? | 0:02:05 | 0:02:07 | |
Violetta's London debut was seismic. | 0:02:12 | 0:02:15 | |
The gilded walls of the Opera House were shaken by the sordid | 0:02:17 | 0:02:21 | |
realities of bourgeois society and modern love. | 0:02:21 | 0:02:25 | |
It was a night of high drama and high emotions, applause | 0:02:26 | 0:02:30 | |
and abuse, success and scandal. | 0:02:30 | 0:02:34 | |
And it produced one of those revelatory moments when life | 0:02:34 | 0:02:38 | |
and art collide. | 0:02:38 | 0:02:40 | |
A night at the opera that no-one would ever forget. | 0:02:40 | 0:02:43 | |
SHE SINGS | 0:02:47 | 0:02:51 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:02:56 | 0:02:59 | |
The London to which Violetta came was a society without | 0:03:19 | 0:03:22 | |
safety nets. | 0:03:22 | 0:03:23 | |
If you fell there was little to break your fall except cold | 0:03:23 | 0:03:28 | |
hard flagstones and the rank waters of the river. | 0:03:28 | 0:03:34 | |
It was the engine of the most economically advanced | 0:03:34 | 0:03:36 | |
country on the planet, but it was being built over a chasm | 0:03:36 | 0:03:40 | |
separating rich and poor, damned and saved. | 0:03:40 | 0:03:43 | |
Though she sprang from the most hidebound of places, | 0:03:46 | 0:03:50 | |
the Opera House, Violetta was a radical | 0:03:50 | 0:03:52 | |
and when she made her debut here in the spring of 1856, | 0:03:52 | 0:03:57 | |
she dragged malignant hypocrisy into the limelight. | 0:03:57 | 0:04:00 | |
But she was heard first, not in London, | 0:04:07 | 0:04:10 | |
but in another city hundreds of miles and a world away. | 0:04:10 | 0:04:14 | |
We're off to the opera. | 0:04:16 | 0:04:17 | |
A performance of La Traviata, of course, | 0:04:17 | 0:04:20 | |
but this one is being given at La Felice in Venice. | 0:04:20 | 0:04:24 | |
The theatre where the opera received is very first | 0:04:24 | 0:04:27 | |
performance in the spring of 1853. | 0:04:27 | 0:04:31 | |
So, La Felice. | 0:04:33 | 0:04:36 | |
-It's unbelievably, exquisitely pretty, isn't it? -It is. | 0:04:38 | 0:04:42 | |
The glowing pinkness of it all, | 0:04:42 | 0:04:45 | |
it's sort of opera as imagined by Barbara Cartland, isn't it? | 0:04:45 | 0:04:48 | |
-It's so lovely. -TOM LAUGHS | 0:04:48 | 0:04:50 | |
Tom, I know the music, but I have never ever seen La Traviata. | 0:04:53 | 0:04:58 | |
What's it going to tell me that's new about love? | 0:04:58 | 0:05:01 | |
Really, it's summed up by the title Verdi first | 0:05:01 | 0:05:04 | |
thought of for La Traviata, which was Love And Death. | 0:05:04 | 0:05:08 | |
That's what the piece has at its absolute core. | 0:05:08 | 0:05:10 | |
Through a very intimate story that's told through three characters, | 0:05:10 | 0:05:13 | |
Violetta, the courtesan, Alfredo, her young lover, | 0:05:13 | 0:05:17 | |
and his father, Germont. | 0:05:17 | 0:05:19 | |
Alfredo believes in the power of love to transform the world | 0:05:21 | 0:05:25 | |
and fatefully, when he falls in love with a young courtesan, | 0:05:25 | 0:05:29 | |
he persuades her to believe it too. | 0:05:29 | 0:05:31 | |
She is Violetta Valery, La Traviata, a fallen woman. | 0:05:34 | 0:05:38 | |
She has never known what true love is. | 0:05:38 | 0:05:42 | |
Her motto is live for the moment, "sempre libera" - always free. | 0:05:42 | 0:05:47 | |
Enter Alfredo's father - Giorgio Germont, | 0:05:49 | 0:05:52 | |
determined to put an end to this foolish infatuation. | 0:05:52 | 0:05:57 | |
The battle lines between love | 0:05:57 | 0:05:59 | |
and conventional morality are starkly drawn. | 0:05:59 | 0:06:01 | |
But it's also a battle between love and death. | 0:06:05 | 0:06:08 | |
Because Violetta knows from the start of this opera she's | 0:06:08 | 0:06:11 | |
dying of consumption. | 0:06:11 | 0:06:12 | |
She's got a brief amount of time to try and find this other kind of | 0:06:12 | 0:06:15 | |
connection with a human being, which she's never had. | 0:06:15 | 0:06:18 | |
Have you brought me a hankie? | 0:06:18 | 0:06:20 | |
I have, but it won't be enough because if this piece does not rend | 0:06:20 | 0:06:23 | |
your heart in twain, then nothing will. | 0:06:23 | 0:06:26 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:06:35 | 0:06:38 | |
ORCHESTRA PLAYS OVERTURE | 0:06:46 | 0:06:49 | |
Seeing La Traviata for first time was a revelation. | 0:06:49 | 0:06:53 | |
I anticipated tragic love, camellias and crinolines, | 0:06:53 | 0:06:57 | |
but its frankness about the trade of the courtesan and its forensic | 0:06:57 | 0:07:01 | |
examination of the female predicament | 0:07:01 | 0:07:04 | |
came as a stunning surprise. | 0:07:04 | 0:07:05 | |
The power of this ground-breaking opera | 0:07:08 | 0:07:10 | |
draws its strength from the lives of real people. | 0:07:10 | 0:07:13 | |
To find out about them, Amanda and I went our separate ways, | 0:07:13 | 0:07:17 | |
the plan to rendezvous back in London for that scandalous first night. | 0:07:17 | 0:07:21 | |
APPLAUSE CONTINUES | 0:07:21 | 0:07:25 | |
MUSIC: The Drinking Song from La Traviata | 0:07:27 | 0:07:30 | |
Every pearl has a small piece of grit as its seed. | 0:07:32 | 0:07:36 | |
For La Traviata the grit was supplied by the short life | 0:07:36 | 0:07:40 | |
and tragic death of Rose Alphonsine Plessis. | 0:07:40 | 0:07:44 | |
Her childhood in Normandy was abysmal, deserted by her mother, | 0:07:44 | 0:07:48 | |
raped by her own father and then pimped out by him to an old roue. | 0:07:48 | 0:07:53 | |
In 1838, aged 15, she was sent to Paris to fend for herself. | 0:07:53 | 0:07:59 | |
And yet within a few years, this abused, abandoned child had | 0:07:59 | 0:08:02 | |
reinvented herself as Marie Duplessis, La Dame Aux Camelias. | 0:08:02 | 0:08:07 | |
A dazzling star of the Parisienne demimonde, a courtesan who traded | 0:08:07 | 0:08:12 | |
her pale body for independence, possessions and status. | 0:08:12 | 0:08:17 | |
This charming watercolour purports | 0:08:20 | 0:08:24 | |
to be of the courtesan Marie Duplessis at the theatre. | 0:08:24 | 0:08:29 | |
She's got a lovely oval face, | 0:08:29 | 0:08:32 | |
and big, doe-like brown eyes, | 0:08:32 | 0:08:35 | |
and marked black eyebrows, and her hair is parted very demurely, | 0:08:35 | 0:08:40 | |
quite unlike the two fashionable ladies above her who have | 0:08:40 | 0:08:45 | |
elaborate ringlets and ribbons of the period. | 0:08:45 | 0:08:50 | |
If she's selling her wares, then I think the niche she's | 0:08:50 | 0:08:53 | |
going for is that of the innocent country maid. | 0:08:53 | 0:08:58 | |
So, it is a very knowing portrait of a woman's allure... | 0:08:59 | 0:09:07 | |
and market value. | 0:09:07 | 0:09:08 | |
Courtesans were dubbed the "lionesses of the demimonde". | 0:09:12 | 0:09:17 | |
Supported by rich and powerful clients, | 0:09:17 | 0:09:19 | |
in a manner to which they very soon became accustomed. | 0:09:19 | 0:09:23 | |
They lived in palaces, literally bathed in champagne and when it | 0:09:23 | 0:09:27 | |
came to the sleeping arrangements, well, just see for yourself... | 0:09:27 | 0:09:31 | |
That is one hell of a bed. | 0:09:34 | 0:09:37 | |
This spectacular sage green number belonged to a courtesan, | 0:09:39 | 0:09:44 | |
who styled herself "Voltesse" - meaning Her Majesty. | 0:09:44 | 0:09:49 | |
She's even had a V embroidered on her pillow cases | 0:09:49 | 0:09:54 | |
and she proudly bequeathed it to the nation. | 0:09:54 | 0:09:58 | |
MUSIC: La Marseillaise | 0:09:58 | 0:10:01 | |
The other thing that's interesting about these beds is, | 0:10:06 | 0:10:09 | |
often in prostitutes' apartments, it's not where they did the deed. | 0:10:09 | 0:10:15 | |
The bed was for show to make a statement about their status | 0:10:15 | 0:10:20 | |
and what a classy piece she might be. | 0:10:20 | 0:10:22 | |
They often got down to business on a couch. | 0:10:22 | 0:10:27 | |
And business it was. | 0:10:29 | 0:10:31 | |
Though their male clientele connected them to good society, | 0:10:31 | 0:10:36 | |
courtesans remained in the half shadow between the salon | 0:10:36 | 0:10:39 | |
and the street, and just like the saddest streetwalker, | 0:10:39 | 0:10:43 | |
Marie Duplessis and her fellow lionesses had to put out to get on. | 0:10:43 | 0:10:49 | |
The raw commerce of it all is brought home by the fact that | 0:10:50 | 0:10:54 | |
seven members of the Paris Jockey Club combined in a syndicate | 0:10:54 | 0:10:59 | |
so they could all afford part shares in her body. | 0:10:59 | 0:11:03 | |
To mark the occasion, | 0:11:03 | 0:11:05 | |
they even bought her a dressing table with seven drawers in it, | 0:11:05 | 0:11:09 | |
presumably so that each of them could keep their shaving tackle | 0:11:09 | 0:11:13 | |
and a spare shirt on site. | 0:11:13 | 0:11:16 | |
The man drawer marked their territory | 0:11:16 | 0:11:19 | |
and symbolised their possession. | 0:11:19 | 0:11:22 | |
And so the courtesan found her niche in Parisian society, admired, | 0:11:25 | 0:11:30 | |
desired, owned. | 0:11:30 | 0:11:32 | |
Sometimes a customer might even fall in love with her, | 0:11:34 | 0:11:38 | |
but as Violetta explains to Alfredo in Act One, | 0:11:38 | 0:11:42 | |
love is the one luxury the courtesan cannot afford. | 0:11:42 | 0:11:47 | |
THEY SING IN ITALIAN | 0:11:47 | 0:11:50 | |
To undercover Violetta's musical roots, | 0:14:38 | 0:14:41 | |
I've come to the hamlet of Roncole, just outside Busseto, | 0:14:41 | 0:14:44 | |
a small town in northern Italy where Giuseppe Verdi was born in 1813. | 0:14:44 | 0:14:50 | |
The offspring of innkeepers and farmers, Verdi's first | 0:14:52 | 0:14:55 | |
exposure to music would have been in the local parish churches. | 0:14:55 | 0:14:59 | |
By the age of eight, he was playing the organ himself | 0:14:59 | 0:15:02 | |
and before long Busseto realised it had a musical prodigy on its hands. | 0:15:02 | 0:15:08 | |
That was a big deal because everybody in Busseto was and is music mad. | 0:15:08 | 0:15:15 | |
MUSIC: The Drinking Song from La Traviata | 0:15:15 | 0:15:18 | |
There was a local amateur orchestra in Busseto, | 0:15:37 | 0:15:39 | |
many of whose members were freethinkers. | 0:15:39 | 0:15:42 | |
For them, the young and brilliant Giuseppe Verdi became a symbol | 0:15:42 | 0:15:47 | |
and a cause. | 0:15:47 | 0:15:48 | |
They stepped in financially to save him | 0:15:48 | 0:15:50 | |
from the clutches of the priests and also steered him | 0:15:50 | 0:15:53 | |
away from sacred music and towards secular music. | 0:15:53 | 0:15:57 | |
Secular music in Italy in the 19th century meant one | 0:15:57 | 0:16:01 | |
thing above all others, Opera! | 0:16:01 | 0:16:04 | |
Aged 18, Giuseppe Verdi came to Milan hoping to win | 0:16:09 | 0:16:13 | |
a place at the prestigious Conservatorio di Musica, | 0:16:13 | 0:16:17 | |
but they turned him down because his piano playing was not up to it. | 0:16:17 | 0:16:21 | |
The Conservatorio today bears his name. | 0:16:23 | 0:16:26 | |
But this initial failure is a reminder that success and | 0:16:26 | 0:16:30 | |
failure were by no means a foregone conclusions for Verdi. | 0:16:30 | 0:16:34 | |
To establish himself in the cut-throat world of Italian | 0:16:34 | 0:16:37 | |
opera took armour-plated ambition and nerves of steel. | 0:16:37 | 0:16:42 | |
Nabucco was Verdi's breakthrough opera. | 0:16:43 | 0:16:46 | |
Nabucco marked the start of what Verdi would call | 0:16:46 | 0:16:49 | |
his galley slave years, when he was really churning operas out. | 0:16:49 | 0:16:53 | |
Between 1842 and 1849 he wrote 12 new operas. | 0:16:53 | 0:16:58 | |
You're never bored in an early Verdi opera, | 0:16:58 | 0:17:00 | |
the music is always pushing forward relentlessly. | 0:17:00 | 0:17:03 | |
The way the scene changes are done and is more like the jump cuts of | 0:17:03 | 0:17:07 | |
cinema than the conventions of early 19th-century opera. | 0:17:07 | 0:17:10 | |
Verdi put all this distillation | 0:17:10 | 0:17:12 | |
and compression better than anybody else. | 0:17:12 | 0:17:15 | |
He said he wanted "poesia coi testicoli grossi, grossi, grossi" - | 0:17:15 | 0:17:22 | |
poetry with big, big, big balls. | 0:17:22 | 0:17:26 | |
The soprano who took the lead role in Nabucco was Giuseppina Strepponi, | 0:17:32 | 0:17:37 | |
a star of La Scala, a primadonna with an international reputation. | 0:17:37 | 0:17:42 | |
If Marie Duplessis the grit that produced La Traviata's pearl, | 0:17:42 | 0:17:47 | |
Strepponi is the ghost that haunts its score. | 0:17:47 | 0:17:50 | |
Verdi and Strepponi first met in Milan. | 0:17:54 | 0:17:58 | |
At that time, Verdi was struggling to come to terms | 0:17:58 | 0:18:01 | |
with the tragic loss of his young wife Margherita and their two | 0:18:01 | 0:18:05 | |
young children, all dead from disease within the space of just a few years. | 0:18:05 | 0:18:11 | |
Giuseppina Strepponi helped him through this dark period, first | 0:18:13 | 0:18:16 | |
by falling in love with the work and then by falling in love with a man. | 0:18:16 | 0:18:21 | |
Success on the operatic stage had given Strepponi financial | 0:18:24 | 0:18:27 | |
independence that was rare for a woman in those days. | 0:18:27 | 0:18:30 | |
But as Verdi biographer Susan Rutherford explains success | 0:18:30 | 0:18:34 | |
brought with it heavy responsibilities. | 0:18:34 | 0:18:37 | |
She's the person who's keeping her mother and her siblings... | 0:18:37 | 0:18:44 | |
..in food. | 0:18:45 | 0:18:47 | |
She's supporting the whole family. | 0:18:47 | 0:18:51 | |
So the only way to earn enough money, because singers often | 0:18:51 | 0:18:55 | |
had quite short careers, | 0:18:55 | 0:18:57 | |
was to do quite crazy work schedule. | 0:18:57 | 0:19:01 | |
So you sang much, much more in that period than modern singers do. | 0:19:01 | 0:19:08 | |
And much earlier as well, | 0:19:08 | 0:19:10 | |
she'd have been younger taking on roles that now people say, | 0:19:10 | 0:19:13 | |
"You mustn't do that because it will ruin your voice." | 0:19:13 | 0:19:15 | |
So she was effectually throwing everything she could, | 0:19:15 | 0:19:18 | |
-wringing all she could out of her instrument... -Yes. Exactly. | 0:19:18 | 0:19:21 | |
..in order to support her family and | 0:19:21 | 0:19:23 | |
-be the person she needed to be in public. -Exactly. | 0:19:23 | 0:19:25 | |
Whatever her public persona, her private life was a mess. | 0:19:25 | 0:19:30 | |
With three, possibly four illegitimate children | 0:19:30 | 0:19:34 | |
from various lovers. | 0:19:34 | 0:19:35 | |
If not fallen, Giuseppina was certainly falling, | 0:19:36 | 0:19:39 | |
when Verdi came into her life. | 0:19:39 | 0:19:42 | |
But he stayed loyal to her despite the vindictive whispers of local | 0:19:42 | 0:19:46 | |
gossips and cold shouldering in his hometown of Busseto. | 0:19:46 | 0:19:50 | |
She describes him in letters in the early 1850s. | 0:19:52 | 0:19:56 | |
She calls him her redeemer. | 0:19:57 | 0:19:59 | |
She obviously feels that | 0:19:59 | 0:20:02 | |
their relationship has given her a life that, perhaps, | 0:20:02 | 0:20:06 | |
would have been very difficult | 0:20:06 | 0:20:08 | |
without Verdi taking that chance on the relationship. | 0:20:08 | 0:20:12 | |
Marie Duplessis' reign as queen of the demimonde | 0:22:51 | 0:22:54 | |
was as fleeting as spring blossom. | 0:22:54 | 0:22:57 | |
In February 1847, | 0:22:57 | 0:22:59 | |
less than nine years after her arrival in Paris, | 0:22:59 | 0:23:02 | |
she was dead from consumption, tuberculosis, | 0:23:02 | 0:23:06 | |
aged 23. | 0:23:06 | 0:23:08 | |
She was buried here in the cemetery of Montmartre. | 0:23:08 | 0:23:11 | |
And this is where the story of Marie Duplessis might have ended, | 0:23:16 | 0:23:20 | |
if it wasn't for a man who would also eventually find his way | 0:23:20 | 0:23:24 | |
into Montmartre's cemetery. | 0:23:24 | 0:23:27 | |
This is the tomb of author Alexander Dumas Junior. | 0:23:27 | 0:23:31 | |
Within 18 months of Marie's death, | 0:23:32 | 0:23:35 | |
he published a frank and thinly fictionalised account | 0:23:35 | 0:23:38 | |
of a brief liaison he had with her. | 0:23:38 | 0:23:41 | |
La Dame Aux Camelias was a publishing sensation, | 0:23:41 | 0:23:45 | |
which Dumas quickly adapted into a scandalous, seductive melodrama. | 0:23:45 | 0:23:49 | |
Two Italian tourists in Paris at the time were especially moved. | 0:23:51 | 0:23:55 | |
Giuseppe Verdi and Guiseppina Strepponi. | 0:23:57 | 0:24:00 | |
Within days of the premiere, Verdi sent off for a copy of the novel | 0:24:01 | 0:24:06 | |
and began work on a new opera, La Traviata. | 0:24:06 | 0:24:09 | |
When Verdi took on the life of Marie Duplessis, | 0:24:14 | 0:24:18 | |
he knew he was flying in the face of social convention | 0:24:18 | 0:24:21 | |
and operatic convention. | 0:24:21 | 0:24:23 | |
While his exact contemporary Richard Wagner | 0:24:27 | 0:24:30 | |
recruited gods and heroes to reinvent the opera, | 0:24:30 | 0:24:33 | |
Verdi sought out antiheroes and outcasts, | 0:24:33 | 0:24:37 | |
characters whose psychological reality | 0:24:37 | 0:24:39 | |
would give him what he wanted - | 0:24:39 | 0:24:41 | |
poetry with balls. | 0:24:41 | 0:24:43 | |
In Rigoletto, the leading role had been written for a hunchback jester. | 0:24:47 | 0:24:51 | |
But now Verdi would go further, | 0:24:51 | 0:24:54 | |
putting the ultimate outsider - | 0:24:54 | 0:24:56 | |
the fallen woman - centre stage, | 0:24:56 | 0:24:59 | |
from where she could reflect back on the audience | 0:24:59 | 0:25:01 | |
some uncomfortable home truths. | 0:25:01 | 0:25:03 | |
Verdi was particularly irritated by hypocrisy. | 0:25:05 | 0:25:09 | |
And the 19th century was, if nothing else, | 0:25:11 | 0:25:15 | |
the age of hypocrisy. | 0:25:15 | 0:25:18 | |
And sometimes, I think, | 0:25:18 | 0:25:20 | |
we get a little caught up in this particular narrative | 0:25:20 | 0:25:23 | |
as if Traviata is all about sex, | 0:25:23 | 0:25:26 | |
as if it is about the role of a courtesan. | 0:25:26 | 0:25:29 | |
In many respects, it is about love... | 0:25:29 | 0:25:32 | |
..which was at least as contentious an idea | 0:25:33 | 0:25:39 | |
in the 19th-century, | 0:25:39 | 0:25:41 | |
because it is about the right for women and men | 0:25:41 | 0:25:45 | |
to choose their own partners. | 0:25:45 | 0:25:48 | |
So it is a profoundly important topic at the time. | 0:25:48 | 0:25:53 | |
Violetta may have been born in Venice, | 0:26:01 | 0:26:04 | |
but she would come of age in London. | 0:26:04 | 0:26:07 | |
The world premiere of La Traviata at La Fenice | 0:26:07 | 0:26:10 | |
had been a purely musical affair. | 0:26:10 | 0:26:12 | |
But three years later in London, | 0:26:12 | 0:26:14 | |
the opera fell like a spark in a tinder-dry forest. | 0:26:14 | 0:26:18 | |
Britain's artists had prepared the ground. | 0:26:19 | 0:26:22 | |
They were fixated on our very own home-grown traviatas, | 0:26:22 | 0:26:26 | |
from adulterous wives and kept women, | 0:26:26 | 0:26:29 | |
to common prostitutes who sold themselves | 0:26:29 | 0:26:32 | |
day and night on the city's streets. | 0:26:32 | 0:26:35 | |
But first the ideal. | 0:26:39 | 0:26:41 | |
This, according to George Elgar Hicks, | 0:26:41 | 0:26:44 | |
is how a woman was expected to behave. | 0:26:44 | 0:26:47 | |
Loyal companion to man, | 0:26:47 | 0:26:49 | |
a domestic rock in good times and bad. | 0:26:49 | 0:26:53 | |
It couldn't be a more legible statement of Victorian values | 0:26:54 | 0:26:58 | |
if it tried. | 0:26:58 | 0:27:00 | |
A pure woman is the foundation of a strong family. | 0:27:00 | 0:27:04 | |
But what happens when the domestic foundation gives way? | 0:27:07 | 0:27:11 | |
This group of three pictures by Augustus Leopold Egg | 0:27:11 | 0:27:15 | |
is known as Past and Present | 0:27:15 | 0:27:17 | |
and it shows in three graphic scenes the catastrophe that ensues. | 0:27:17 | 0:27:21 | |
Scene one, we come in at a climactic moment. | 0:27:26 | 0:27:32 | |
The very second when the edifice of the Victorian family | 0:27:32 | 0:27:37 | |
is about to crumble. | 0:27:37 | 0:27:40 | |
The husband has received a letter | 0:27:40 | 0:27:43 | |
betraying his wife's infidelity. | 0:27:43 | 0:27:46 | |
In despair at exposure... | 0:27:47 | 0:27:50 | |
..the woman has collapsed on the floor. | 0:27:51 | 0:27:53 | |
She is literally a fallen woman. | 0:27:53 | 0:27:55 | |
The little girl's watching... | 0:27:56 | 0:27:58 | |
..playing with a house of cards, which is now collapsing. | 0:27:59 | 0:28:03 | |
The consequences for this little family play out | 0:28:05 | 0:28:09 | |
in the next two scenes. | 0:28:09 | 0:28:11 | |
It's a few years later... | 0:28:14 | 0:28:16 | |
On a moonlight night somewhere in London, | 0:28:16 | 0:28:19 | |
the two little girls, grown-up now, | 0:28:19 | 0:28:21 | |
are lost to despair. | 0:28:21 | 0:28:24 | |
Their father, we deduce, is dead. | 0:28:24 | 0:28:26 | |
His picture hangs on the wall of their lonely room, | 0:28:26 | 0:28:29 | |
but their mother's fate is even worse. | 0:28:29 | 0:28:32 | |
Here is our poor fallen woman, | 0:28:34 | 0:28:37 | |
fallen so very low. | 0:28:37 | 0:28:39 | |
She's under the arches of the Adelphi, | 0:28:41 | 0:28:44 | |
which is a known haunt of prostitutes. | 0:28:44 | 0:28:48 | |
But here, look, there's two little baby's feet sticking out. | 0:28:48 | 0:28:53 | |
The consequences of sin. | 0:28:55 | 0:28:58 | |
And in case you'd missed the point, | 0:28:58 | 0:29:02 | |
up here there are posters on the wall. | 0:29:02 | 0:29:05 | |
"Pleasure excursions to Paris." | 0:29:05 | 0:29:08 | |
Given the prevailing winds of Britain's moral climate, | 0:29:15 | 0:29:19 | |
how could Violetta, | 0:29:19 | 0:29:20 | |
with her roots deep in the mire of sinful Paris, | 0:29:20 | 0:29:24 | |
get a fair hearing in London? | 0:29:24 | 0:29:26 | |
Professor Francesco Izzo, | 0:29:29 | 0:29:31 | |
general editor of The Complete Works Of Verdi, | 0:29:31 | 0:29:34 | |
is the man to ask. | 0:29:34 | 0:29:35 | |
I think Verdi really wanted Violetta to be a human being | 0:29:39 | 0:29:42 | |
and one with whom we can not only sympathise, but actually empathise. | 0:29:42 | 0:29:46 | |
And so the character gets pulled away gradually, | 0:29:47 | 0:29:49 | |
but inexorably, from real life | 0:29:49 | 0:29:52 | |
and, you know, becomes idealised | 0:29:52 | 0:29:55 | |
and, ultimately, almost sanctified. | 0:29:55 | 0:29:57 | |
This transformation takes place before our eyes and ears | 0:29:59 | 0:30:02 | |
at the climax of Act One. | 0:30:02 | 0:30:05 | |
It's a thrilling operatic journey, | 0:30:05 | 0:30:07 | |
from almost childlike simplicity | 0:30:07 | 0:30:10 | |
to passages of tortured complexity. | 0:30:10 | 0:30:13 | |
These so-called coloratura passages | 0:30:13 | 0:30:16 | |
were a hallmark of Italian opera, | 0:30:16 | 0:30:18 | |
crowd-pleasing vocal athletics | 0:30:18 | 0:30:20 | |
designed to bring the house down in mid-act. | 0:30:20 | 0:30:23 | |
But in La Traviata, | 0:30:24 | 0:30:26 | |
coloratura is meant to be heart-stopping | 0:30:26 | 0:30:29 | |
as well as show-stopping. | 0:30:29 | 0:30:30 | |
Alfredo's declaration of love, | 0:30:32 | 0:30:34 | |
which Violetta initially rejected, | 0:30:34 | 0:30:36 | |
has left her struggling with a dilemma - | 0:30:36 | 0:30:39 | |
to stick with her life of pleasure | 0:30:39 | 0:30:42 | |
or to take a chance on love... | 0:30:42 | 0:30:43 | |
It's really after everyone's left, | 0:30:45 | 0:30:47 | |
this is the end of the party, | 0:30:47 | 0:30:50 | |
it's the crack of dawn and Violetta is left alone. | 0:30:50 | 0:30:53 | |
This is where her mood changes radically. | 0:30:53 | 0:30:55 | |
So you get the vocal vortex, right? | 0:30:55 | 0:30:57 | |
Just very difficult to play and even harder to sing. | 0:31:01 | 0:31:04 | |
It's an amazing coloratura display, | 0:31:26 | 0:31:28 | |
but it's coloratura as psychology, not as virtuosity almost. | 0:31:28 | 0:31:32 | |
And the more pyrotechnic it gets, | 0:31:32 | 0:31:34 | |
the more full of pleasure the music seems to get, | 0:31:34 | 0:31:37 | |
the more desperate she becomes. | 0:31:37 | 0:31:38 | |
It's like she's trying to hang on to something which is crumbling, | 0:31:38 | 0:31:41 | |
it doesn't exist any more. | 0:31:41 | 0:31:42 | |
It has a mania, this music, this joy, in a way. | 0:31:42 | 0:31:44 | |
She's torn apart at the end of Act One, actually. | 0:31:44 | 0:31:47 | |
That's what we hear. | 0:31:47 | 0:31:48 | |
Prostitution haunted the imagination of Victorian England | 0:33:28 | 0:33:32 | |
as you can tell, from the surprisingly large number of books | 0:33:32 | 0:33:36 | |
and pamphlets dedicated to the subject. | 0:33:36 | 0:33:39 | |
Men on the prowl... | 0:33:41 | 0:33:42 | |
for women on the game | 0:33:42 | 0:33:44 | |
could turn to the Swell's Night Guide, | 0:33:44 | 0:33:47 | |
a prototype Trip Advisor for the novice sex tourist. | 0:33:47 | 0:33:52 | |
Some of the richest hunting grounds, it turns out, | 0:33:52 | 0:33:55 | |
were backstage at London's theatres, including her Majesty's, | 0:33:55 | 0:33:59 | |
where La Traviata would receive its premiere. | 0:33:59 | 0:34:02 | |
According to the Night Guide, | 0:34:04 | 0:34:06 | |
an occasional trifle was all it took | 0:34:06 | 0:34:08 | |
to get to the chorus girls and ballerinas backstage. | 0:34:08 | 0:34:12 | |
But alongside the titillating trash | 0:34:14 | 0:34:16 | |
were weighty surveys and polemical reports | 0:34:16 | 0:34:19 | |
by muckraking journalists and evangelical reformers | 0:34:19 | 0:34:23 | |
for whom prostitution was the great social evil of the age, | 0:34:23 | 0:34:28 | |
to be measured, controlled, | 0:34:28 | 0:34:31 | |
but, most important of all, | 0:34:31 | 0:34:33 | |
to be acknowledged as a human tragedy on an industrial scale. | 0:34:33 | 0:34:37 | |
Artist historian Lynda Nead | 0:34:39 | 0:34:41 | |
has studied the appetites and anxieties of this Victorian Babylon | 0:34:41 | 0:34:45 | |
where the figure of the fallen woman looms so large. | 0:34:45 | 0:34:50 | |
Lynda, it's a Victorian obsession, isn't it? The great social evil. | 0:34:50 | 0:34:54 | |
There's definitely a fascination with prostitution... | 0:34:54 | 0:34:59 | |
..just as much as there's a kind of revulsion. | 0:35:00 | 0:35:03 | |
It's almost as if they can't stop talking about it. | 0:35:03 | 0:35:08 | |
They'll compare a group of prostitutes | 0:35:09 | 0:35:12 | |
to a heap of rubbish | 0:35:12 | 0:35:14 | |
that's fermenting and rotting. | 0:35:14 | 0:35:16 | |
And, of course, what that will create is a kind of miasma | 0:35:16 | 0:35:20 | |
and miasma was a theory of the spread of disease in the air, | 0:35:20 | 0:35:25 | |
invisible, that can, you know, cross social boundaries, | 0:35:25 | 0:35:29 | |
geographical boundaries | 0:35:29 | 0:35:32 | |
and spread into the respectable population. | 0:35:32 | 0:35:35 | |
But its ramifications go far beyond | 0:35:35 | 0:35:39 | |
the streets of London. | 0:35:39 | 0:35:41 | |
It's almost as if the disease | 0:35:41 | 0:35:44 | |
that's embodied in the figure of the prostitute | 0:35:44 | 0:35:47 | |
can spread beyond the city, beyond the nation | 0:35:47 | 0:35:51 | |
and even into the Empire. | 0:35:51 | 0:35:53 | |
It's almost as if the stability of the whole British system | 0:35:53 | 0:35:58 | |
rests on a notion of moral purity | 0:35:58 | 0:36:00 | |
and the family. | 0:36:00 | 0:36:02 | |
The lengths to which respectable society will go | 0:36:06 | 0:36:10 | |
to protect its morality are laid bare in Act Two of La Traviata. | 0:36:10 | 0:36:15 | |
In an extended duet between Violetta and Alfredo's father, | 0:36:15 | 0:36:19 | |
Germont Senior. | 0:36:19 | 0:36:20 | |
Three months have passed since the party in Act One. | 0:36:22 | 0:36:26 | |
Violetta and Alfredo are together and, for the sake of her health, | 0:36:26 | 0:36:29 | |
have left the bright lights of Paris for the country. | 0:36:29 | 0:36:32 | |
Then Alfredo's father appears. | 0:36:34 | 0:36:36 | |
His son's disastrous liaison, he claims, | 0:36:36 | 0:36:39 | |
has blighted the Germont family. | 0:36:39 | 0:36:42 | |
His angelic daughter's forthcoming marriage has been jeopardised | 0:36:42 | 0:36:45 | |
and all for what? | 0:36:45 | 0:36:47 | |
An infatuation that will one day pass. | 0:36:47 | 0:36:50 | |
The great British soprano Dame Josephine Barstow | 0:37:22 | 0:37:26 | |
has played Violetta many times. | 0:37:26 | 0:37:28 | |
For her, the scene is more of a duel then a duet... | 0:37:28 | 0:37:32 | |
and not just between the characters, | 0:37:32 | 0:37:34 | |
but between the singers and the audience. | 0:37:34 | 0:37:37 | |
I never felt that I had succeeded | 0:37:37 | 0:37:40 | |
if the audience applauded at the end of a section. | 0:37:40 | 0:37:43 | |
Our job is not to entertain them and to make them go away thinking, | 0:37:43 | 0:37:50 | |
"Oh, that was really good, I quite enjoyed it." | 0:37:50 | 0:37:52 | |
Our job is to pull them up on to the stage and say, | 0:37:52 | 0:37:56 | |
"Listen, this is about...this is about life, | 0:37:56 | 0:38:00 | |
"this is about the lives that we share." | 0:38:00 | 0:38:03 | |
She is about love. | 0:38:48 | 0:38:50 | |
She just does everything she does because of this... | 0:38:50 | 0:38:53 | |
Something beyond herself, not just for Alfredo. | 0:38:54 | 0:38:57 | |
You feel the whole feminist movement has moved everybody forward, | 0:40:06 | 0:40:10 | |
so they think to themselves, "Well, you know, she's an idiot. | 0:40:10 | 0:40:14 | |
"Why would she take any notice of what Papa Germont is saying?" | 0:40:14 | 0:40:18 | |
But when you're playing it, you're thinking as Violetta, | 0:40:18 | 0:40:22 | |
so this wonderful woman finds the strength in herself, | 0:40:22 | 0:40:26 | |
knowing the implications, | 0:40:26 | 0:40:28 | |
knowing that she will die as a result of what she's doing, | 0:40:28 | 0:40:32 | |
to give up her life. | 0:40:32 | 0:40:34 | |
You might call that a victim, I think that's a triumph. | 0:40:35 | 0:40:38 | |
I think it's a moral triumph within her own terms. | 0:40:38 | 0:40:41 | |
For operatic heroines, death is an occupational hazard. | 0:41:15 | 0:41:19 | |
Suicide, beheading, immolation, | 0:41:19 | 0:41:22 | |
tumbling off castle walls, | 0:41:22 | 0:41:25 | |
but Violetta would die as most of us will die - | 0:41:25 | 0:41:29 | |
of disease. | 0:41:29 | 0:41:30 | |
And this disease was all too familiar, | 0:41:31 | 0:41:35 | |
consumption or tuberculosis, | 0:41:35 | 0:41:37 | |
the number one killer in Victorian England. | 0:41:37 | 0:41:40 | |
Frighteningly mysterious in its causes, | 0:41:45 | 0:41:48 | |
the "White Death," as it was known, | 0:41:48 | 0:41:50 | |
claimed victims of all ages and backgrounds | 0:41:50 | 0:41:53 | |
as this specimen, | 0:41:53 | 0:41:54 | |
the lungs of an eight-month-old baby riddled with tumours, | 0:41:54 | 0:41:58 | |
makes poignantly clear. | 0:41:58 | 0:42:00 | |
Despite all the evidence that consumption struck down | 0:42:02 | 0:42:06 | |
the innocent and the worldly indiscriminately, | 0:42:06 | 0:42:09 | |
the condition became associated with the louche lifestyle | 0:42:09 | 0:42:12 | |
typical of the courtesan. | 0:42:12 | 0:42:15 | |
Unlike a lot of diseases, it wasn't especially disfiguring | 0:42:15 | 0:42:18 | |
and the symptoms - weight loss, pallor, bright eyes - | 0:42:18 | 0:42:23 | |
were seen as attractive. | 0:42:23 | 0:42:24 | |
So consumption became an aesthetic disease, | 0:42:24 | 0:42:29 | |
irresistible to artists, | 0:42:29 | 0:42:32 | |
a plot device allowing them to give full rein | 0:42:32 | 0:42:36 | |
to their reflections on erotic love | 0:42:36 | 0:42:39 | |
and death. | 0:42:39 | 0:42:40 | |
So who on earth would have the audacity to put on an opera | 0:42:44 | 0:42:47 | |
dealing with the two great waking nightmares of the day? | 0:42:47 | 0:42:51 | |
Prostitution and consumption. | 0:42:51 | 0:42:54 | |
His name was Benjamin Lumley, | 0:42:54 | 0:42:57 | |
impresario and manager of Her Majesty's Theatre on Haymarket. | 0:42:57 | 0:43:00 | |
Lumley enjoyed many triumphs in his career. | 0:43:01 | 0:43:04 | |
He also had his share of disasters. | 0:43:04 | 0:43:07 | |
The worst, by far, being when his star singers mutinied | 0:43:07 | 0:43:10 | |
and set up a rival opera house in Drury Lane. | 0:43:10 | 0:43:13 | |
Disaster struck again when a legal dispute with his landlord | 0:43:15 | 0:43:18 | |
forced the closure of his theatre for three long dark seasons. | 0:43:18 | 0:43:22 | |
But then, the wheel of fortune turned again. | 0:43:24 | 0:43:28 | |
In March 1856, the rival house went up | 0:43:28 | 0:43:31 | |
in a spectacular bonfire of the vanities | 0:43:31 | 0:43:34 | |
at the end of a louche masked ball. | 0:43:34 | 0:43:38 | |
The gods of the theatre were smiling on Benjamin Lumley once again. | 0:43:38 | 0:43:41 | |
Lumley seized his opportunity | 0:43:43 | 0:43:45 | |
and in the space of just a few months, | 0:43:45 | 0:43:47 | |
with help from his aristocratic backers, | 0:43:47 | 0:43:50 | |
he'd swept aside his legal difficulties, | 0:43:50 | 0:43:52 | |
hired singers and dancers, put together a programme | 0:43:52 | 0:43:55 | |
and brought Her Majesty's back to life. | 0:43:55 | 0:43:57 | |
It was an astonishing feat of organisation, | 0:43:57 | 0:44:00 | |
energy and sheer chutzpah. | 0:44:00 | 0:44:02 | |
And yet, there was more that Lumley needed | 0:44:02 | 0:44:05 | |
to seal the success of his comeback season - | 0:44:05 | 0:44:08 | |
a moneyspinning, blockbusting box office sensation. | 0:44:08 | 0:44:12 | |
And that's where La Traviata came in. | 0:44:16 | 0:44:18 | |
For Lumley, it ticked a lot of boxes. | 0:44:18 | 0:44:21 | |
Verdi, though recognised as a rising star, | 0:44:22 | 0:44:25 | |
was still a novelty on the English opera scene. | 0:44:25 | 0:44:28 | |
The London premiere of his latest daring work | 0:44:28 | 0:44:31 | |
would be a must-see for aficionados. | 0:44:31 | 0:44:35 | |
Everyone knew that it was based on Dumas's risque play | 0:44:35 | 0:44:38 | |
which had only recently been banned from the London stage. | 0:44:38 | 0:44:42 | |
But Lumley reckoned the censors would be kinder to the opera. | 0:44:42 | 0:44:45 | |
After all, it was in Italian, | 0:44:45 | 0:44:47 | |
so hardly anyone would understand it anyway! | 0:44:47 | 0:44:50 | |
All that was needed to complete the package was a Violetta | 0:44:50 | 0:44:54 | |
and Lumley was prepared to pay over the odds | 0:44:54 | 0:44:57 | |
to secure the Italian soprano Marietta Piccolomini. | 0:44:57 | 0:45:00 | |
She was just 22 years old, | 0:45:01 | 0:45:04 | |
but what she lacked in experience, | 0:45:04 | 0:45:06 | |
she made up for with a flair for dramatic acting | 0:45:06 | 0:45:09 | |
and a personal story guaranteed to grab the headlines. | 0:45:09 | 0:45:12 | |
She is from an aristocratic family. | 0:45:14 | 0:45:18 | |
So for the London audience, | 0:45:18 | 0:45:20 | |
she's very, very interesting | 0:45:20 | 0:45:22 | |
because this aspect of her upbringing | 0:45:22 | 0:45:25 | |
is sold as part of the publicity. | 0:45:25 | 0:45:28 | |
This is an aristocrat playing a courtesan. | 0:45:28 | 0:45:31 | |
Saturday, May 24th, 1856. | 0:45:36 | 0:45:40 | |
The scenery had been painted, the costumes selected, | 0:45:40 | 0:45:43 | |
the orchestra had been rehearsed, the posters printed. | 0:45:43 | 0:45:47 | |
Lumley had done everything he could | 0:45:48 | 0:45:51 | |
to make the London premiere of La Traviata a night to remember. | 0:45:51 | 0:45:54 | |
But opera lovers, as Lumley knew, | 0:45:57 | 0:45:59 | |
could be passionate haters when crossed or disappointed. | 0:45:59 | 0:46:03 | |
And waiting in the wings were chauvinistic music critics, | 0:46:03 | 0:46:06 | |
for whom every Italian composer was, in the end, | 0:46:06 | 0:46:09 | |
a mere organ grinder. | 0:46:09 | 0:46:11 | |
And circling behind them, | 0:46:12 | 0:46:14 | |
were the big beasts of the leader page | 0:46:14 | 0:46:16 | |
and the thundering editorial, | 0:46:16 | 0:46:18 | |
self-appointed guardians of British morality, | 0:46:18 | 0:46:21 | |
nostrils already twitching with the scent of Parisian vice. | 0:46:21 | 0:46:26 | |
But for Benjamin Lumley, there was a more important issue, | 0:46:27 | 0:46:31 | |
really quite a simple question. | 0:46:31 | 0:46:33 | |
Would the great British public pay good money | 0:46:33 | 0:46:36 | |
to see a prostitute die on stage? | 0:46:36 | 0:46:39 | |
If you had a ticket that night, you'd be one of the fortunate. | 0:46:44 | 0:46:48 | |
Her Majesty's Theatre was one of the hubs of London society | 0:46:48 | 0:46:52 | |
and the first night of a new opera, | 0:46:52 | 0:46:54 | |
one of the high points of the season. | 0:46:54 | 0:46:57 | |
An opportunity for the female elite to see and be seen. | 0:46:57 | 0:47:00 | |
The opera had long been the chic-est entertainment in London | 0:47:03 | 0:47:07 | |
and few theatres were as prestigious as Her Majesty's, | 0:47:07 | 0:47:11 | |
with Queen Victoria's box in pride of place. | 0:47:11 | 0:47:15 | |
Aristocratic ladies liked to preen themselves | 0:47:15 | 0:47:18 | |
in the boxes on either side. | 0:47:18 | 0:47:20 | |
The cultured and comfortable middle classes swelled the stalls | 0:47:20 | 0:47:23 | |
in increasing numbers. | 0:47:23 | 0:47:26 | |
Shop girls and medical students settle for the cheap seats | 0:47:26 | 0:47:29 | |
in the gallery. | 0:47:29 | 0:47:31 | |
It was a true cross-section of London society. | 0:47:31 | 0:47:34 | |
And then, of course, | 0:47:36 | 0:47:38 | |
there were the OTHER women for whom the theatre acted as a magnet. | 0:47:38 | 0:47:42 | |
The dress lodgers, the dolly mops, the gay ladies of Haymarket, | 0:47:42 | 0:47:46 | |
who plied their trade on the very steps of Her Majesty's Theatre. | 0:47:46 | 0:47:51 | |
From respectable to disreputable, | 0:47:51 | 0:47:54 | |
all the women of London were represented | 0:47:54 | 0:47:57 | |
the night that Violetta made her debut. | 0:47:57 | 0:47:59 | |
And so the stage is set for the tragic climax of La Traviata. | 0:48:05 | 0:48:10 | |
Persuaded by Germont's arguments, Violetta has given up Alfredo | 0:48:12 | 0:48:16 | |
and returned to Paris. | 0:48:16 | 0:48:19 | |
Ignorant of the sacrifice she had made, | 0:48:19 | 0:48:22 | |
Alfredo insults her publicly at a party, | 0:48:22 | 0:48:25 | |
flinging money at her, branding her a whore. | 0:48:25 | 0:48:27 | |
She is left alone, in poverty, close to death. | 0:48:29 | 0:48:32 | |
Violetta has taught me how to love. | 0:49:23 | 0:49:25 | |
I think you could say that. | 0:49:26 | 0:49:28 | |
Addio Del Passato is a prayer. | 0:50:37 | 0:50:40 | |
There is the awareness that we all have, | 0:50:40 | 0:50:43 | |
including Violetta herself, | 0:50:43 | 0:50:45 | |
that death is approaching. | 0:50:45 | 0:50:47 | |
Verdi actually writes the word "Traviata" at this point | 0:50:47 | 0:50:50 | |
with an upper case T. | 0:50:50 | 0:50:52 | |
So she's not just a fallen woman, but she's THE fallen woman, | 0:50:52 | 0:50:56 | |
almost as if she's, you know, asking for universal forgiveness. | 0:50:56 | 0:51:00 | |
So, did Lumley's gamble pay off? | 0:52:27 | 0:52:30 | |
Did La Traviata soar or did it bomb? | 0:52:30 | 0:52:34 | |
"The performances at Her Majesty's Theatre on Saturday night | 0:52:37 | 0:52:40 | |
"were interesting on two accounts, | 0:52:40 | 0:52:41 | |
"one, being the first production in this country of Verdi's Traviata, | 0:52:41 | 0:52:45 | |
"the other, the debut of Mademoiselle Marietta Piccolomini. | 0:52:45 | 0:52:50 | |
"The claims of the Traviata as a musical work are poor indeed. | 0:52:50 | 0:52:55 | |
"It required something extraordinary in the way of representation | 0:52:55 | 0:52:58 | |
"to lift it from the oblivion to which it was evidently doomed." | 0:52:58 | 0:53:02 | |
On the other hand, | 0:53:05 | 0:53:06 | |
the soprano obviously melted this critic's heart. | 0:53:06 | 0:53:09 | |
"That Marietta Piccolomini painted these scenes with great talent | 0:53:09 | 0:53:14 | |
"no-one for a moment disputed. | 0:53:14 | 0:53:17 | |
"The effect upon the audience was universal." | 0:53:17 | 0:53:20 | |
Marietta Piccolomini was the big sensation that night. | 0:53:23 | 0:53:26 | |
Others had sung the role before her, but she embodied it. | 0:53:26 | 0:53:30 | |
Her performance turned notes on the page into flesh and blood. | 0:53:30 | 0:53:35 | |
And that's where the trouble began. | 0:53:36 | 0:53:38 | |
By putting a face and a voice to the great social evil, Piccolomini | 0:53:38 | 0:53:44 | |
created a somebody who demanded sympathy, even admiration. | 0:53:44 | 0:53:50 | |
Cue moral backlash. | 0:53:50 | 0:53:52 | |
"By the fascination with which Mademoiselle Piccolomini throws | 0:53:54 | 0:53:59 | |
"around the character and the poetry she infuses into it, | 0:53:59 | 0:54:04 | |
"the moral sense is deadened and our perceptions of right | 0:54:04 | 0:54:09 | |
"and wrong are in danger of becoming misty and confused." | 0:54:09 | 0:54:15 | |
"It is for her that pity is asked. And it is to her that pity is given." | 0:54:15 | 0:54:20 | |
Obviously a huge problem. | 0:54:20 | 0:54:22 | |
"Now, we say that morally speaking, this is most hideous and abominable." | 0:54:22 | 0:54:27 | |
Well, The Times clearly got up on its hind legs. | 0:54:29 | 0:54:31 | |
"An exhibition of harlotry... upon the public stage. | 0:54:31 | 0:54:36 | |
"It is the poetry of the brothel." | 0:54:36 | 0:54:38 | |
It's infuriated them, hasn't it? And needled them. | 0:54:42 | 0:54:45 | |
But it was the appeal of La Traviata | 0:54:47 | 0:54:50 | |
to female audiences that really spooked the critics. | 0:54:50 | 0:54:54 | |
As the season progressed, they were aghast at the large number | 0:54:54 | 0:54:57 | |
of women who flocked to see it and their swooning embrace of Violetta. | 0:54:57 | 0:55:03 | |
What on earth had got into the ladies?! | 0:55:04 | 0:55:07 | |
Actually, Tom, I think it's obvious why the ladies of England were | 0:55:13 | 0:55:18 | |
so attracted to La Traviata. | 0:55:18 | 0:55:22 | |
It's her tale, absolutely, from beginning to end. | 0:55:22 | 0:55:26 | |
The men don't get a look in. They're mere accessories. | 0:55:26 | 0:55:29 | |
It's her suffering, her predicament, her gallantry, and her redemption. | 0:55:29 | 0:55:35 | |
So I don't think that the women in the audience fantasised about being | 0:55:35 | 0:55:40 | |
courtesans, I think they wanted to be the centre of attention. | 0:55:40 | 0:55:45 | |
It's about female megalomania. No wonder they lapped it up. | 0:55:45 | 0:55:49 | |
SINGING | 0:55:51 | 0:55:53 | |
'But in the end, as Benjamin Lumley put it, | 0:55:56 | 0:55:59 | |
'the public was not to be lectured out of its treat. | 0:55:59 | 0:56:02 | |
'While the newspapers thundered, the punters fought for tickets. | 0:56:02 | 0:56:07 | |
'And Violetta herself was invited into the most respectable Victorian | 0:56:07 | 0:56:12 | |
'homes in the form of sheet music. | 0:56:12 | 0:56:16 | |
'And so it was that Libiamo, that great anthem of live for today | 0:56:16 | 0:56:20 | |
'and to hell with tomorrow, was sung by dainty misses, | 0:56:20 | 0:56:25 | |
'and by others less dainty!' | 0:56:25 | 0:56:27 | |
# Tis best to take what fortune sends | 0:56:27 | 0:56:30 | |
# And smile at future sorrows | 0:56:30 | 0:56:34 | |
# Why should we fear the morrow | 0:56:34 | 0:56:38 | |
# When joy today attends... # | 0:56:38 | 0:56:42 | |
And the chorus of approval grew even louder. | 0:56:43 | 0:56:46 | |
Within a year of the first night, | 0:56:46 | 0:56:49 | |
there were three Violettas vying for applause on London stages. | 0:56:49 | 0:56:54 | |
Queen Victoria herself opened a state ball by dancing to | 0:56:54 | 0:56:59 | |
the La Traviata Quadrille. | 0:56:59 | 0:57:01 | |
Against the odds, the courtesan had achieved respectability | 0:57:01 | 0:57:05 | |
and immortality, | 0:57:05 | 0:57:07 | |
established for ever as an iconic role in the operatic repertoire. | 0:57:07 | 0:57:13 | |
Violetta still speaks to us | 0:57:13 | 0:57:17 | |
as an individual who defied society's definitions of her. | 0:57:17 | 0:57:22 | |
A fallen woman who became the hero of her own life. | 0:57:22 | 0:57:26 | |
After Violetta, operatic heroines would never be quite the same again. | 0:57:26 | 0:57:31 | |
Carmen, Mimi, Tosca, Salome, they all owe a debt to Violetta | 0:57:31 | 0:57:37 | |
and that's because she had shown it was possible to be bad, | 0:57:37 | 0:57:40 | |
but also to be good, to be beyond the pale but also to be centre stage. | 0:57:40 | 0:57:45 | |
Just as long as you died in the final act. | 0:57:45 | 0:57:48 | |
SHE SINGS IN ITALIAN | 0:57:50 | 0:57:52 | |
BOTH MEN: # O cielo! Muor! | 0:58:28 | 0:58:30 | |
# Violetta! | 0:58:30 | 0:58:31 | |
# Oh Dio, soccorrasi! | 0:58:31 | 0:58:32 | |
BOTH: # Oh mio dolor! # | 0:58:36 | 0:58:38 | |
ORCHESTRAL FINAL FLOURISH | 0:58:44 | 0:58:47 |