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Giuseppe Verdi (Joe Green) was the biggest composer of Italian opera from around 1840 until his death in 1901.   While some may disagree, for consistent high quality music, plots, character, suspense, entertainment - Verdi was the greatest opera composer who ever lived.   In his lifetime, he was the most famous opera composer in the world and the most popular and beloved man in all of Italy.  His fame was enormous.  And remember, this was before TV, movies, radio, recordings etc., when opera was the main form of popular entertainment in Italy and much of Europe.  Every small town had an opera house and large cities had several.  Everyone above a poor peasant went to the opera as often as he could afford to.  Everyone!  Not just cultured people but everyone.  And Verdi's operas were the most popular.  When he premiered a new opera, it was like a new Harry Potter book, the Lord of the Rings movie, Star Wars, the Super Bowl and more all rolled up in one package.  He changed the style of opera from the birdie chirping style of his predecessors and added much more drama into the plot and into the music itself.  Sort of like going from Hello Dolly to Les Miserables.  

Verdi's career was so long that brilliant scholars have categorized his works into three periods - cleverly labeled Early, Middle and Late.  While he was popular during his early composing period, suddenly with Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Traviata he really hit his stride in his 'middle' period.  These three masterpieces at the beginning of his middle period shot his career to Number One like a bullet and radically changed the style of opera composition to something more forceful and dramatic. 

To begin with, his plots were radically different.  Previous composers used traditional characters of kings/queens/nobility with plots of love/revenge etc.  Verdi started writing operas with controversial plots.  Rigoletto is about a murderous hunchbacked court jester out to murder his noble boss.  Il Trovatore is about gypsies, revenge, mistaken identities and burning people at the stake.  And La Traviata is about ladies of the night.  All three of these operas and particularly La Traviata had some problems with the government censors of the time and La Traviata was even banned in England for several years.  But eventually Verdi became so popular that the censors couldn't stop him and his operas spread all over the world.

It is difficult for anyone today to imagine how revered and beloved Verdi was in his day.  Try to imagine a combination of Tom Cruise, Bruce Springsteen, some supermodel, Oprah, and Tiger Woods all rolled up together.  This is how popular Verdi was in his later years.  His music was sung and played everywhere - in bars, cafes, music halls, by organ grinders in the streets, in family parlors around the piano, in concert halls, in opera houses.  He was absolutely adored in Italy.  When he died in 1901 in Milan, literally the entire city turned out for the funeral.  When his coffin was drawn through the city, the streets were lined with the entire population of the city and much of the population from miles around to pay their respects.  

La Traviata is certainly on anyone's list of the ten greatest and most popular operas ever written.  The La Dame aux Camelilas was a novel about a courtesan by French author Alexandre Dumas, fils that Verdi turned into La Traviata. In the opera, the courtesan's name is Violetta. La Traviata in Italian translates The Strayed One or The Wayward One.

The story of a high priced hooker falling in love with a regular guy and forced to give him up proved incredibly scandalous initially, but the idea has endured (think of the movie Pretty Woman).  The opera was booed at its first performance due to the subject matter- - also the tenor lost his voice and the soprano, supposed to look like a frail petite beauty, looked more like the before pictures in a successful diet book.  However, when it was revived a year later, it was received with thunderous applause and has remained enormously popular.  

No matter how little experience you have with opera, the soaring melodies, the passion, the drama will all sweep you up.  Just think how Julia Roberts responded when she was taken to see La Traviata by Richard Gere in Pretty Woman.  You might even notice a similarity in plots.  The melody of the toast aria in the first act has been used in the Three Tenor Concerts as well in countless commercials.  The music is instantly likeable and memorable.  

A Very Brief Synopsis:
Act I
The opera opens in Paris in 1840 (or whenever the director decides to place the action).  Violetta, a high class courtesan, is throwing a big party for all her clients.  We notice that she occasionally exhibits a hacking cough.

(Sidenote:  As anyone in 19th century Europe would instantly know because of her coughing, she has tuberculosis, consumption, the white death.  This disease was the scourge of the 18th and 19th centuries. Whenever a character in a play, novel, or opera coughed or fainted in the 19th century, they had tuberculosis and would die.  Fully 25% of Europe died from tuberculosis, including Chopin, the Bronte sisters, Thoreau and Kafka.  Even in the 20th century in the U.S. in 1924, over 200,000 Americans died of TB. As late as the 1940s, over 40,000 died each year in the U.S.  Not until streptomycin in the 1950s did we get a handle on TB.)

Alfredo, the tenor, has fallen in love with her, proclaims his love for her so ardently that she even wonders if he might be "the one".  

Act II
Violetta and Alfredo are living in sin together in her little country house.  Unknown to Alfredo, his father comes to visit Violetta to tell her that their affair is ruining his family's reputation.  She agrees to break up with Alfredo without saying why and does so in a Dear John letter.  Alfredo is naturally upset and when he crashes a big party that she is at, he publicly humiliates her for breaking up with him.  This greatly dismays the crowd and earns a stern rebuke from his father.  Even if she is a high class Madame, you should not publicly insult a woman in such a crude fashion.

Act IIi
Violetta is near death.  She receives a letter from Alfredo's father informing her that he told his son the truth and Alfredo is coming to see her.  Alfredo does arrive and they have a few minutes together before she dies in his arms.

Cast Biographies:
Starring as Violetta is famed soprano Mary Dunleavy, who has sung this role at the Metropolitan Opera, Barcelona's Gran Teatre del Liceu, the New York City Opera, the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and with the Nederlands Philharmonisch Orkest. She is also singing it at Glimmerglass this season.

Dunleavy has been featured in principal opera roles with major companies around the world, including Gilda (Rigoletto) at the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Hamburgische Staatsoper, Teatro Municipal de Santiago and others; Konstanze (The Abduction From the Seraglio) with the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris, Cincinnati May Festival, Washington National Opera, New York City Opera and Opera Company of Philadelphia; most of the principal Mozart soprano roles with the Metropolitan Opera and the opera companies of Philadelphia, Michigan, Boston and Portland; and roles from Strauss, Bizet, Massenet, Donizetti, Bellini and Thomas with  the Opéra National de Paris, De Nederlandse Opera, and Gran Teatre del Liceu, as well as the opera companies of Dallas, Amsterdam, Naples, Montreal and Washington.

Singing opposite Dunleavy will be tenor Chad Shelton as Alfredo. Shelton has previously appeared with the Lyric Opera in Cosi fan tutte and The Rake's Progress. His other roles include the title role of Mozart's Idomeneo, Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Duke in Rigoletto, Ottavio in Don Giovanni, which has sung with such companies as the San Francisco, Houston, Dallas, Portland, Arizona, Utah, Central City and Orlando operas. This season he also performs at Opéra National de Lorraine and Théâtre de Caen, and his other European venues include Opéra National de Lorraine and Opera Australia.

The third principal role, of Giorgio Germont, Alfredo's father, will be sung by baritone Lester Lynch. Known for the roles of Count DiLuna (Il Trovatore), Sharpless (Madama Butterfly), Amonasro (Aida), Crown (Porgy and Bess) and the title role in Macbeth, Lynch has sung with the opera companies of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Houston, Santa Fe, New York City, St. Louis, Kentucky, Nashville, Dayton and others. He has previously portrayed Germont in Houston and Cleveland. He is coming off a series of performances as both Porgy and Crown (alternating) in Lyric Opera of Chicago's Porgy and Bess.  His awards include the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, the George London Vocal Competition, and the Sullivan Awards, and the Richard Gaddes Award with Opera Theater of St. Louis.

Other singers appearing in La Traviata are Benjamin Hilgert as Gastone, Jonathan Stinson as Baron Duophol, Andrew Harris as Marchese D'Obigny and Scott Conner and Dr. Grenvil. Sarah Burke appears as Annina.

La Traviata is being conducted by Lyric Opera artistic director Ward Holmquist, and is being staged by Kathleen Smith Belcher, making her Lyric Opera debut. She is an assistant stage director at the Metropolitan Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the San Francisco Opera, and is an assistant professor of music and dance at the University of Kansas.

Special thanks to Don Dagenais for cast bios.


Lyric Opera of Kansas City
La Traviata
by Giuseppe Verdi
Saturday, March 14 at 8 p.m.
Monday, March 16 at 7:30 p.m.
Wednesday, March 18 at 7:30 p.m.
Friday, March 20 at 8 p.m.
Sunday, March 22 at 2 p.m.
Lyric Theater, 11th & Central, Downtown Kansas City, MO
For tickets call 816-471-7344 or online at www.kcopera.org

By Lee Goodman

Classical Contributor (Past writer)

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