La traviata: Love, Death and Divas

Violetta Valery is a heroine like no other.

When she made her debut,

a dangerous female blazed into life on the operatic stage.

A courtesan, a fallen woman, La Traviata.

# Oh Dio

# Oh Dio

# Oh... #

Today La Traviata is the most performed

and arguably best-loved opera in the world.

But it was a very different story following its London

premiere in 1856.

Presenting a fallen woman as a tragic heroine caused a very

British scandal.

SHE SINGS

"An exhibition of harlotry - upon the public stage!"

"This demoniacal stimulus to jaded sensibilities."

"It is the poetry of the brothel."

The story of this unconventional heroine will take us

from the glitter of the Parisienne demimonde,

where courtesans reigned as queens of debauchery.

That is one hell of a bed.

To the modern Babylon of Victorian London, where respectable

and disreputable jostled in the teeming streets.

Here is our poor fallen woman, fallen so very low.

It will take us from a composer struggling to reinvent

opera for the modern day.

Verdi said he wanted poetry but with big balls.

To the canny calculations of a London impresario who courted

scandal, hoping to make a killing.

But would the British public pay good money to see a prostitute die

onstage?

Violetta's London debut was seismic.

The gilded walls of the Opera House were shaken by the sordid

realities of bourgeois society and modern love.

It was a night of high drama and high emotions, applause

and abuse, success and scandal.

And it produced one of those revelatory moments when life

and art collide.

A night at the opera that no-one would ever forget.

SHE SINGS

APPLAUSE

The London to which Violetta came was a society without

safety nets.

If you fell there was little to break your fall except cold

hard flagstones and the rank waters of the river.

It was the engine of the most economically advanced

country on the planet, but it was being built over a chasm

separating rich and poor, damned and saved.

Though she sprang from the most hidebound of places,

the Opera House, Violetta was a radical

and when she made her debut here in the spring of 1856,

she dragged malignant hypocrisy into the limelight.

But she was heard first, not in London,

but in another city hundreds of miles and a world away.

We're off to the opera.

A performance of La Traviata, of course,

but this one is being given at La Felice in Venice.

The theatre where the opera received is very first

performance in the spring of 1853.

So, La Felice.

-It's unbelievably, exquisitely pretty, isn't it?

-It is.

The glowing pinkness of it all,

it's sort of opera as imagined by Barbara Cartland, isn't it?

-It's so lovely.

-TOM LAUGHS

Tom, I know the music, but I have never ever seen La Traviata.

What's it going to tell me that's new about love?

Really, it's summed up by the title Verdi first

thought of for La Traviata, which was Love And Death.

That's what the piece has at its absolute core.

Through a very intimate story that's told through three characters,

Violetta, the courtesan, Alfredo, her young lover,

and his father, Germont.

Alfredo believes in the power of love to transform the world

and fatefully, when he falls in love with a young courtesan,

he persuades her to believe it too.

She is Violetta Valery, La Traviata, a fallen woman.

She has never known what true love is.

Her motto is live for the moment, "sempre libera" - always free.

Enter Alfredo's father - Giorgio Germont,

determined to put an end to this foolish infatuation.

The battle lines between love

and conventional morality are starkly drawn.

But it's also a battle between love and death.

Because Violetta knows from the start of this opera she's

dying of consumption.

She's got a brief amount of time to try and find this other kind of

connection with a human being, which she's never had.

Have you brought me a hankie?

I have, but it won't be enough because if this piece does not rend

your heart in twain, then nothing will.

APPLAUSE

ORCHESTRA PLAYS OVERTURE

Seeing La Traviata for first time was a revelation.

I anticipated tragic love, camellias and crinolines,

but its frankness about the trade of the courtesan and its forensic

examination of the female predicament

came as a stunning surprise.

The power of this ground-breaking opera

draws its strength from the lives of real people.

To find out about them, Amanda and I went our separate ways,

the plan to rendezvous back in London for that scandalous first night.

APPLAUSE CONTINUES

MUSIC: The Drinking Song from La Traviata

Every pearl has a small piece of grit as its seed.

For La Traviata the grit was supplied by the short life

and tragic death of Rose Alphonsine Plessis.

Her childhood in Normandy was abysmal, deserted by her mother,

raped by her own father and then pimped out by him to an old roue.

In 1838, aged 15, she was sent to Paris to fend for herself.

And yet within a few years, this abused, abandoned child had

reinvented herself as Marie Duplessis, La Dame Aux Camelias.

A dazzling star of the Parisienne demimonde, a courtesan who traded

her pale body for independence, possessions and status.

This charming watercolour purports

to be of the courtesan Marie Duplessis at the theatre.

She's got a lovely oval face,

and big, doe-like brown eyes,

and marked black eyebrows, and her hair is parted very demurely,

quite unlike the two fashionable ladies above her who have

elaborate ringlets and ribbons of the period.

If she's selling her wares, then I think the niche she's

going for is that of the innocent country maid.

So, it is a very knowing portrait of a woman's allure...

and market value.

Courtesans were dubbed the "lionesses of the demimonde".

Supported by rich and powerful clients,

in a manner to which they very soon became accustomed.

They lived in palaces, literally bathed in champagne and when it

came to the sleeping arrangements, well, just see for yourself...

That is one hell of a bed.

This spectacular sage green number belonged to a courtesan,

who styled herself "Voltesse" - meaning Her Majesty.

She's even had a V embroidered on her pillow cases

and she proudly bequeathed it to the nation.

MUSIC: La Marseillaise

The other thing that's interesting about these beds is,

often in prostitutes' apartments, it's not where they did the deed.

The bed was for show to make a statement about their status

and what a classy piece she might be.

They often got down to business on a couch.

And business it was.

Though their male clientele connected them to good society,

courtesans remained in the half shadow between the salon

and the street, and just like the saddest streetwalker,

Marie Duplessis and her fellow lionesses had to put out to get on.

The raw commerce of it all is brought home by the fact that

seven members of the Paris Jockey Club combined in a syndicate

so they could all afford part shares in her body.

To mark the occasion,

they even bought her a dressing table with seven drawers in it,

presumably so that each of them could keep their shaving tackle

and a spare shirt on site.

The man drawer marked their territory

and symbolised their possession.

And so the courtesan found her niche in Parisian society, admired,

desired, owned.

Sometimes a customer might even fall in love with her,

but as Violetta explains to Alfredo in Act One,

love is the one luxury the courtesan cannot afford.

THEY SING IN ITALIAN

To undercover Violetta's musical roots,

I've come to the hamlet of Roncole, just outside Busseto,

a small town in northern Italy where Giuseppe Verdi was born in 1813.

The offspring of innkeepers and farmers, Verdi's first

exposure to music would have been in the local parish churches.

By the age of eight, he was playing the organ himself

and before long Busseto realised it had a musical prodigy on its hands.

That was a big deal because everybody in Busseto was and is music mad.

MUSIC: The Drinking Song from La Traviata

There was a local amateur orchestra in Busseto,

many of whose members were freethinkers.

For them, the young and brilliant Giuseppe Verdi became a symbol

and a cause.

They stepped in financially to save him

from the clutches of the priests and also steered him

away from sacred music and towards secular music.

Secular music in Italy in the 19th century meant one

thing above all others, Opera!

Aged 18, Giuseppe Verdi came to Milan hoping to win

a place at the prestigious Conservatorio di Musica,

but they turned him down because his piano playing was not up to it.

The Conservatorio today bears his name.

But this initial failure is a reminder that success and

failure were by no means a foregone conclusions for Verdi.

To establish himself in the cut-throat world of Italian

opera took armour-plated ambition and nerves of steel.

Nabucco was Verdi's breakthrough opera.

Nabucco marked the start of what Verdi would call

his galley slave years, when he was really churning operas out.

Between 1842 and 1849 he wrote 12 new operas.

You're never bored in an early Verdi opera,

the music is always pushing forward relentlessly.

The way the scene changes are done and is more like the jump cuts of

cinema than the conventions of early 19th-century opera.

Verdi put all this distillation

and compression better than anybody else.

He said he wanted "poesia coi testicoli grossi, grossi, grossi" -

poetry with big, big, big balls.

The soprano who took the lead role in Nabucco was Giuseppina Strepponi,

a star of La Scala, a primadonna with an international reputation.

If Marie Duplessis the grit that produced La Traviata's pearl,

Strepponi is the ghost that haunts its score.

Verdi and Strepponi first met in Milan.

At that time, Verdi was struggling to come to terms

with the tragic loss of his young wife Margherita and their two

young children, all dead from disease within the space of just a few years.

Giuseppina Strepponi helped him through this dark period, first

by falling in love with the work and then by falling in love with a man.

Success on the operatic stage had given Strepponi financial

independence that was rare for a woman in those days.

But as Verdi biographer Susan Rutherford explains success

brought with it heavy responsibilities.

She's the person who's keeping her mother and her siblings...

..in food.

She's supporting the whole family.

So the only way to earn enough money, because singers often

had quite short careers,

was to do quite crazy work schedule.

So you sang much, much more in that period than modern singers do.

And much earlier as well,

she'd have been younger taking on roles that now people say,

"You mustn't do that because it will ruin your voice."

So she was effectually throwing everything she could,

-wringing all she could out of her instrument...

-Yes. Exactly.

..in order to support her family and

-be the person she needed to be in public.

-Exactly.

Whatever her public persona, her private life was a mess.

With three, possibly four illegitimate children

from various lovers.

If not fallen, Giuseppina was certainly falling,

when Verdi came into her life.

But he stayed loyal to her despite the vindictive whispers of local

gossips and cold shouldering in his hometown of Busseto.

She describes him in letters in the early 1850s.

She calls him her redeemer.

She obviously feels that

their relationship has given her a life that, perhaps,

would have been very difficult

without Verdi taking that chance on the relationship.

Marie Duplessis' reign as queen of the demimonde

was as fleeting as spring blossom.

In February 1847,

less than nine years after her arrival in Paris,

she was dead from consumption, tuberculosis,

aged 23.

She was buried here in the cemetery of Montmartre.

And this is where the story of Marie Duplessis might have ended,

if it wasn't for a man who would also eventually find his way

into Montmartre's cemetery.

This is the tomb of author Alexander Dumas Junior.

Within 18 months of Marie's death,

he published a frank and thinly fictionalised account

of a brief liaison he had with her.

La Dame Aux Camelias was a publishing sensation,

which Dumas quickly adapted into a scandalous, seductive melodrama.

Two Italian tourists in Paris at the time were especially moved.

Giuseppe Verdi and Guiseppina Strepponi.

Within days of the premiere, Verdi sent off for a copy of the novel

and began work on a new opera, La Traviata.

When Verdi took on the life of Marie Duplessis,

he knew he was flying in the face of social convention

and operatic convention.

While his exact contemporary Richard Wagner

recruited gods and heroes to reinvent the opera,

Verdi sought out antiheroes and outcasts,

characters whose psychological reality

would give him what he wanted -

poetry with balls.

In Rigoletto, the leading role had been written for a hunchback jester.

But now Verdi would go further,

putting the ultimate outsider -

the fallen woman - centre stage,

from where she could reflect back on the audience

some uncomfortable home truths.

Verdi was particularly irritated by hypocrisy.

And the 19th century was, if nothing else,

the age of hypocrisy.

And sometimes, I think,

we get a little caught up in this particular narrative

as if Traviata is all about sex,

as if it is about the role of a courtesan.

In many respects, it is about love...

..which was at least as contentious an idea

in the 19th-century,

because it is about the right for women and men

to choose their own partners.

So it is a profoundly important topic at the time.

Violetta may have been born in Venice,

but she would come of age in London.

The world premiere of La Traviata at La Fenice

had been a purely musical affair.

But three years later in London,

the opera fell like a spark in a tinder-dry forest.

Britain's artists had prepared the ground.

They were fixated on our very own home-grown traviatas,

from adulterous wives and kept women,

to common prostitutes who sold themselves

day and night on the city's streets.

But first the ideal.

This, according to George Elgar Hicks,

is how a woman was expected to behave.

Loyal companion to man,

a domestic rock in good times and bad.

It couldn't be a more legible statement of Victorian values

if it tried.

A pure woman is the foundation of a strong family.

But what happens when the domestic foundation gives way?

This group of three pictures by Augustus Leopold Egg

is known as Past and Present

and it shows in three graphic scenes the catastrophe that ensues.

Scene one, we come in at a climactic moment.

The very second when the edifice of the Victorian family

is about to crumble.

The husband has received a letter

betraying his wife's infidelity.

In despair at exposure...

..the woman has collapsed on the floor.

She is literally a fallen woman.

The little girl's watching...

..playing with a house of cards, which is now collapsing.

The consequences for this little family play out

in the next two scenes.

It's a few years later...

On a moonlight night somewhere in London,

the two little girls, grown-up now,

are lost to despair.

Their father, we deduce, is dead.

His picture hangs on the wall of their lonely room,

but their mother's fate is even worse.

Here is our poor fallen woman,

fallen so very low.

She's under the arches of the Adelphi,

which is a known haunt of prostitutes.

But here, look, there's two little baby's feet sticking out.

The consequences of sin.

And in case you'd missed the point,

up here there are posters on the wall.

"Pleasure excursions to Paris."

Given the prevailing winds of Britain's moral climate,

how could Violetta,

with her roots deep in the mire of sinful Paris,

get a fair hearing in London?

Professor Francesco Izzo,

general editor of The Complete Works Of Verdi,

is the man to ask.

I think Verdi really wanted Violetta to be a human being

and one with whom we can not only sympathise, but actually empathise.

And so the character gets pulled away gradually,

but inexorably, from real life

and, you know, becomes idealised

and, ultimately, almost sanctified.

This transformation takes place before our eyes and ears

at the climax of Act One.

It's a thrilling operatic journey,

from almost childlike simplicity

to passages of tortured complexity.

These so-called coloratura passages

were a hallmark of Italian opera,

crowd-pleasing vocal athletics

designed to bring the house down in mid-act.

But in La Traviata,

coloratura is meant to be heart-stopping

as well as show-stopping.

Alfredo's declaration of love,

which Violetta initially rejected,

has left her struggling with a dilemma -

to stick with her life of pleasure

or to take a chance on love...

It's really after everyone's left,

this is the end of the party,

it's the crack of dawn and Violetta is left alone.

This is where her mood changes radically.

So you get the vocal vortex, right?

Just very difficult to play and even harder to sing.

It's an amazing coloratura display,

but it's coloratura as psychology, not as virtuosity almost.

And the more pyrotechnic it gets,

the more full of pleasure the music seems to get,

the more desperate she becomes.

It's like she's trying to hang on to something which is crumbling,

it doesn't exist any more.

It has a mania, this music, this joy, in a way.

She's torn apart at the end of Act One, actually.

That's what we hear.

Prostitution haunted the imagination of Victorian England

as you can tell, from the surprisingly large number of books

and pamphlets dedicated to the subject.

Men on the prowl...

for women on the game

could turn to the Swell's Night Guide,

a prototype Trip Advisor for the novice sex tourist.

Some of the richest hunting grounds, it turns out,

were backstage at London's theatres, including her Majesty's,

where La Traviata would receive its premiere.

According to the Night Guide,

an occasional trifle was all it took

to get to the chorus girls and ballerinas backstage.

But alongside the titillating trash

were weighty surveys and polemical reports

by muckraking journalists and evangelical reformers

for whom prostitution was the great social evil of the age,

to be measured, controlled,

but, most important of all,

to be acknowledged as a human tragedy on an industrial scale.

Artist historian Lynda Nead

has studied the appetites and anxieties of this Victorian Babylon

where the figure of the fallen woman looms so large.

Lynda, it's a Victorian obsession, isn't it? The great social evil.

There's definitely a fascination with prostitution...

..just as much as there's a kind of revulsion.

It's almost as if they can't stop talking about it.

They'll compare a group of prostitutes

to a heap of rubbish

that's fermenting and rotting.

And, of course, what that will create is a kind of miasma

and miasma was a theory of the spread of disease in the air,

invisible, that can, you know, cross social boundaries,

geographical boundaries

and spread into the respectable population.

But its ramifications go far beyond

the streets of London.

It's almost as if the disease

that's embodied in the figure of the prostitute

can spread beyond the city, beyond the nation

and even into the Empire.

It's almost as if the stability of the whole British system

rests on a notion of moral purity

and the family.

The lengths to which respectable society will go

to protect its morality are laid bare in Act Two of La Traviata.

In an extended duet between Violetta and Alfredo's father,

Germont Senior.

Three months have passed since the party in Act One.

Violetta and Alfredo are together and, for the sake of her health,

have left the bright lights of Paris for the country.

Then Alfredo's father appears.

His son's disastrous liaison, he claims,

has blighted the Germont family.

His angelic daughter's forthcoming marriage has been jeopardised

and all for what?

An infatuation that will one day pass.

The great British soprano Dame Josephine Barstow

has played Violetta many times.

For her, the scene is more of a duel then a duet...

and not just between the characters,

but between the singers and the audience.

I never felt that I had succeeded

if the audience applauded at the end of a section.

Our job is not to entertain them and to make them go away thinking,

"Oh, that was really good, I quite enjoyed it."

Our job is to pull them up on to the stage and say,

"Listen, this is about...this is about life,

"this is about the lives that we share."

She is about love.

She just does everything she does because of this...

Something beyond herself, not just for Alfredo.

You feel the whole feminist movement has moved everybody forward,

so they think to themselves, "Well, you know, she's an idiot.

"Why would she take any notice of what Papa Germont is saying?"

But when you're playing it, you're thinking as Violetta,

so this wonderful woman finds the strength in herself,

knowing the implications,

knowing that she will die as a result of what she's doing,

to give up her life.

You might call that a victim, I think that's a triumph.

I think it's a moral triumph within her own terms.

For operatic heroines, death is an occupational hazard.

Suicide, beheading, immolation,

tumbling off castle walls,

but Violetta would die as most of us will die -

of disease.

And this disease was all too familiar,

consumption or tuberculosis,

the number one killer in Victorian England.

Frighteningly mysterious in its causes,

the "White Death," as it was known,

claimed victims of all ages and backgrounds

as this specimen,

the lungs of an eight-month-old baby riddled with tumours,

makes poignantly clear.

Despite all the evidence that consumption struck down

the innocent and the worldly indiscriminately,

the condition became associated with the louche lifestyle

typical of the courtesan.

Unlike a lot of diseases, it wasn't especially disfiguring

and the symptoms - weight loss, pallor, bright eyes -

were seen as attractive.

So consumption became an aesthetic disease,

irresistible to artists,

a plot device allowing them to give full rein

to their reflections on erotic love

and death.

So who on earth would have the audacity to put on an opera

dealing with the two great waking nightmares of the day?

Prostitution and consumption.

His name was Benjamin Lumley,

impresario and manager of Her Majesty's Theatre on Haymarket.

Lumley enjoyed many triumphs in his career.

He also had his share of disasters.

The worst, by far, being when his star singers mutinied

and set up a rival opera house in Drury Lane.

Disaster struck again when a legal dispute with his landlord

forced the closure of his theatre for three long dark seasons.

But then, the wheel of fortune turned again.

In March 1856, the rival house went up

in a spectacular bonfire of the vanities

at the end of a louche masked ball.

The gods of the theatre were smiling on Benjamin Lumley once again.

Lumley seized his opportunity

and in the space of just a few months,

with help from his aristocratic backers,

he'd swept aside his legal difficulties,

hired singers and dancers, put together a programme

and brought Her Majesty's back to life.

It was an astonishing feat of organisation,

energy and sheer chutzpah.

And yet, there was more that Lumley needed

to seal the success of his comeback season -

a moneyspinning, blockbusting box office sensation.

And that's where La Traviata came in.

For Lumley, it ticked a lot of boxes.

Verdi, though recognised as a rising star,

was still a novelty on the English opera scene.

The London premiere of his latest daring work

would be a must-see for aficionados.

Everyone knew that it was based on Dumas's risque play

which had only recently been banned from the London stage.

But Lumley reckoned the censors would be kinder to the opera.

After all, it was in Italian,

so hardly anyone would understand it anyway!

All that was needed to complete the package was a Violetta

and Lumley was prepared to pay over the odds

to secure the Italian soprano Marietta Piccolomini.

She was just 22 years old,

but what she lacked in experience,

she made up for with a flair for dramatic acting

and a personal story guaranteed to grab the headlines.

She is from an aristocratic family.

So for the London audience,

she's very, very interesting

because this aspect of her upbringing

is sold as part of the publicity.

This is an aristocrat playing a courtesan.

Saturday, May 24th, 1856.

The scenery had been painted, the costumes selected,

the orchestra had been rehearsed, the posters printed.

Lumley had done everything he could

to make the London premiere of La Traviata a night to remember.

But opera lovers, as Lumley knew,

could be passionate haters when crossed or disappointed.

And waiting in the wings were chauvinistic music critics,

for whom every Italian composer was, in the end,

a mere organ grinder.

And circling behind them,

were the big beasts of the leader page

and the thundering editorial,

self-appointed guardians of British morality,

nostrils already twitching with the scent of Parisian vice.

But for Benjamin Lumley, there was a more important issue,

really quite a simple question.

Would the great British public pay good money

to see a prostitute die on stage?

If you had a ticket that night, you'd be one of the fortunate.

Her Majesty's Theatre was one of the hubs of London society

and the first night of a new opera,

one of the high points of the season.

An opportunity for the female elite to see and be seen.

The opera had long been the chic-est entertainment in London

and few theatres were as prestigious as Her Majesty's,

with Queen Victoria's box in pride of place.

Aristocratic ladies liked to preen themselves

in the boxes on either side.

The cultured and comfortable middle classes swelled the stalls

in increasing numbers.

Shop girls and medical students settle for the cheap seats

in the gallery.

It was a true cross-section of London society.

And then, of course,

there were the OTHER women for whom the theatre acted as a magnet.

The dress lodgers, the dolly mops, the gay ladies of Haymarket,

who plied their trade on the very steps of Her Majesty's Theatre.

From respectable to disreputable,

all the women of London were represented

the night that Violetta made her debut.

And so the stage is set for the tragic climax of La Traviata.

Persuaded by Germont's arguments, Violetta has given up Alfredo

and returned to Paris.

Ignorant of the sacrifice she had made,

Alfredo insults her publicly at a party,

flinging money at her, branding her a whore.

She is left alone, in poverty, close to death.

Violetta has taught me how to love.

I think you could say that.

Addio Del Passato is a prayer.

There is the awareness that we all have,

including Violetta herself,

that death is approaching.

Verdi actually writes the word "Traviata" at this point

with an upper case T.

So she's not just a fallen woman, but she's THE fallen woman,

almost as if she's, you know, asking for universal forgiveness.

So, did Lumley's gamble pay off?

Did La Traviata soar or did it bomb?

"The performances at Her Majesty's Theatre on Saturday night

"were interesting on two accounts,

"one, being the first production in this country of Verdi's Traviata,

"the other, the debut of Mademoiselle Marietta Piccolomini.

"The claims of the Traviata as a musical work are poor indeed.

"It required something extraordinary in the way of representation

"to lift it from the oblivion to which it was evidently doomed."

On the other hand,

the soprano obviously melted this critic's heart.

"That Marietta Piccolomini painted these scenes with great talent

"no-one for a moment disputed.

"The effect upon the audience was universal."

Marietta Piccolomini was the big sensation that night.

Others had sung the role before her, but she embodied it.

Her performance turned notes on the page into flesh and blood.

And that's where the trouble began.

By putting a face and a voice to the great social evil, Piccolomini

created a somebody who demanded sympathy, even admiration.

Cue moral backlash.

"By the fascination with which Mademoiselle Piccolomini throws

"around the character and the poetry she infuses into it,

"the moral sense is deadened and our perceptions of right

"and wrong are in danger of becoming misty and confused."

"It is for her that pity is asked. And it is to her that pity is given."

Obviously a huge problem.

"Now, we say that morally speaking, this is most hideous and abominable."

Well, The Times clearly got up on its hind legs.

"An exhibition of harlotry... upon the public stage.

"It is the poetry of the brothel."

It's infuriated them, hasn't it? And needled them.

But it was the appeal of La Traviata

to female audiences that really spooked the critics.

As the season progressed, they were aghast at the large number

of women who flocked to see it and their swooning embrace of Violetta.

What on earth had got into the ladies?!

Actually, Tom, I think it's obvious why the ladies of England were

so attracted to La Traviata.

It's her tale, absolutely, from beginning to end.

The men don't get a look in. They're mere accessories.

It's her suffering, her predicament, her gallantry, and her redemption.

So I don't think that the women in the audience fantasised about being

courtesans, I think they wanted to be the centre of attention.

It's about female megalomania. No wonder they lapped it up.

SINGING

'But in the end, as Benjamin Lumley put it,

'the public was not to be lectured out of its treat.

'While the newspapers thundered, the punters fought for tickets.

'And Violetta herself was invited into the most respectable Victorian

'homes in the form of sheet music.

'And so it was that Libiamo, that great anthem of live for today

'and to hell with tomorrow, was sung by dainty misses,

'and by others less dainty!'

# Tis best to take what fortune sends

# And smile at future sorrows

# Why should we fear the morrow

# When joy today attends... #

And the chorus of approval grew even louder.

Within a year of the first night,

there were three Violettas vying for applause on London stages.

Queen Victoria herself opened a state ball by dancing to

the La Traviata Quadrille.

Against the odds, the courtesan had achieved respectability

and immortality,

established for ever as an iconic role in the operatic repertoire.

Violetta still speaks to us

as an individual who defied society's definitions of her.

A fallen woman who became the hero of her own life.

After Violetta, operatic heroines would never be quite the same again.

Carmen, Mimi, Tosca, Salome, they all owe a debt to Violetta

and that's because she had shown it was possible to be bad,

but also to be good, to be beyond the pale but also to be centre stage.

Just as long as you died in the final act.

SHE SINGS IN ITALIAN

BOTH MEN: # O cielo! Muor!

# Violetta!

# Oh Dio, soccorrasi!

BOTH: # Oh mio dolor! #

ORCHESTRAL FINAL FLOURISH