Met Opera: La Traviata

This article was originally published on April 4, 2013

Certainly for me the high point of yesterday evening's performance of La Traviata was the appearance onstage of Placido Domingo as Giorgio Germont early in the second act.  At age 72, the legendary tenor still possesses a fine voice as well as a magnetic stage presence.  When he began to sing, the effect on the audience was electric.  In the crucial scene where Alfredo's father confronts Violetta, no one could have brought out better than Domingo the nuances in Verdi's critique of the hypocrisy underlying bourgeois morality.

Diane Damrau, whom I had never before heard, excelled as Violetta and I would go out of my way to hear her sing again, especially in bel canto roles.  In fact, all the cast were uniformly superb and worked diligently with the orchestra to bring this great opera to life in an admirable performance.  This despite the difficulties the music presents to the singers.  In an online interview, Ms. Damrau stated:

"People say you need three different voices for Traviata. You need to have the flexibility and brilliance for the first act. Then the centerpiece of the opera is the duet with Germont—that’s a big lyric soprano. And for the last act you want to have a dramatic soprano. Everything has to come together really, the colors, the emotions… In terms of difficulty, it’s a five-star role."

The production itself, which originally premiered in 2010, was a disappointment.  Though I have no wish to be negative, it seems whenever I have been at the Met this season I might just as well have been attending an exhibit of outsider art, so totally outlandish were many of the productions.  In this particular case, though I appreciate Willy Decker's point, in an essay in the Program Notes, that "there is no place for her [the dying Violetta] to hide from the inexorability of time passing," that does not excuse placing a giant replica of a Timex watch at center stage in the finale of the second act.  It's a bit much to think an audience as sophisticated as the Met's would need so heavy handed a metaphor to drive home so obvious a point.  In the end, affectations such as these prove only visually incongruous and distracting.

In any event, the great singing and wonderful music I witnessed last evening rescued La Traviata from whatever indignities a lackluster production may have imposed upon it.  But I would so much more have enjoyed hearing this same cast in a restaging of an earlier Zeffirelli production.