The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Giuseppe Verdi · a melodramma in three acts, to a libretto in Italian by Francesco Maria Piave after La Dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils · three principal roles, comprimarios and chorus, in the Venice score of 1854, the standard performing version · about two hours and a quarter in performance
Mode
Melodramma; a serious opera of contemporary private life, held in the set forms of Italian opera and bent toward conversation
Mythos
The fallen woman who is the one pure heart, and the scapegoat: one woman’s life given to secure another’s marriage, while the feast goes on outside
Phase
From a party in Paris to a deathbed in carnival time; the deathbed music heard first, in the prelude, and again at the head of the last act
Presentation
Concert music; an opera in three acts, the second in two scenes, setting Piave’s Italian, with preludes to Acts I and III
Register
From a drinking song and a waltz to a contract argued in a country house, a letter spoken over violins and a last cry of joy
Scale
Three principal roles, comprimarios and chorus; two parties and two rooms; about two hours and a quarter
Governing Proposition
A Parisian courtesan who has lived for pleasure finds love, gives it up when her lover’s father asks her to save his daughter’s marriage, is paid off in public at a gaming table, and dies of consumption in carnival time as the lover comes back too late. The wager of the work is that a society’s respectability can be shown as a transaction paid for by the woman it buys, and that the set forms of Italian opera can make that private life a tragedy.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The opera begins at its end. The prelude opens on high divided violins, pianissimo, in B minor: the music that will return as the prelude to the last act, at the deathbed. A second theme follows, in E major, broad and warm, the melody Violetta will sing in the second act as she leaves Alfredo. Before the curtain rises the audience has heard the heroine’s death and her farewell, and the party that follows is heard from there.
Act I is Violetta’s salon in Paris, a party. Alfredo is brought to her and leads the brindisi, “Libiamo ne’ lieti calici” (“let us drink from the glad cups”), a toast to pleasure as fleeting. An offstage band strikes up a waltz, the guests go to dance, and Violetta, taken ill, stays behind. Alfredo declares himself in “Un dì, felice, eterea” (“one day, happy, ethereal”) with the band still playing next door, so that intimacy is heard inside noise. His melody names love “croce e delizia” (“cross and delight”). She gives him a flower and tells him to bring it back when it has withered.
Alone, she sings two arias in the old shape, and the shape is the drama. In the slow one, “Ah, fors’è lui” (“ah, perhaps it is he”), she takes up his melody, and the self that might love is heard. In the fast one, “Sempre libera” (“always free”), the coloratura is the self that refuses: pleasure as a defence against death. Into it, from outside, comes Alfredo’s voice singing his theme. The refusal has already failed, and the act ends with her voice running against his.
Movement II
Act II opens in a country house near Paris, where the two now live together. Alfredo sings of his happiness, “De’ miei bollenti spiriti” (“of my ardent spirits”), and the life there is being paid for by the sale of Violetta’s property. Then his father, Giorgio Germont, comes to see her. The opera has moved from the salon to a home, and the family has followed it there.
What follows is the centre of the opera: a long duet in many sections, the set form loosened into a conversation in which melodic sections and declamation follow the argument. Germont asks her to give up his son. He has a daughter, “Pura siccome un angelo” (“pure as an angel”), whose marriage is threatened by the scandal. The case he makes is a family’s marriage contract, and the price of it is to be paid by the woman the family will not receive. She resists, and in the end she agrees.
She agrees in “Dite alla giovine” (“tell the young girl”), a message to the daughter she will never meet. The scapegoat is built here, not named: two women stand on one axis, the courtesan on stage and the girl who never appears, and the plot is the transfer of one woman’s life to secure the other’s marriage. The opera shows the trade plainly. It also half honours it, letting Germont’s angel stand as the measure of her sacrifice, and that softening is the work’s own.
Movement III
Violetta writes to Alfredo that she is leaving him, and he comes in before she can go. Her farewell is a dozen bars at the summit of the scene: “Amami, Alfredo” (“love me, Alfredo”), the broad theme of the prelude now sung at full voice. She goes. Alfredo reads the letter, and his father tries to call him home with “Di Provenza il mar” (“the sea of Provence”), in D flat major, a song of the respectable provinces. It is warm, and it rises by warmth, not elevation; the cabaletta that follows it adds nothing to it.
The second scene is Flora’s party. A chorus of gypsy girls tells fortunes and a chorus of matadors tells of a matador’s proof of love: divertissement, which the plot waits through, though it is placed where the law of the work wants it, society as spectacle before the reckoning. Violetta has come with the Baron, her protector again. Alfredo sits down to cards with him and wins.
Then he calls the guests together and throws his winnings at Violetta, before them all, as payment. The transaction Germont made in private is made in public, by the son, in cash. Germont arrives and rebukes his son before the company, and the concertato gathers every voice over the shamed woman. The price has been made visible, and the act ends on it.
Movement IV
Act III is Violetta’s bedroom, in carnival time. The prelude is the opening’s music again, the high divided violins in B minor, and the opera now hears itself from the end it began with. She is consumptive and has no money left; there is a purse of twenty louis. The doctor comes, and the hours are counted.
She reads Germont’s letter aloud, and she reads it in speech, over the orchestra, while solo violins play the theme of “Di quell’amor” from the first act. The letter says Alfredo knows the truth and is coming. Her answer is two words: “È tardi!” (“it is too late!”). The voice has gone from coloratura in Act I to a lyric line in Act II to this, near speech, and the change of vocal type has been the change of her life.
Then “Addio, del passato” (“farewell to the past”), in A minor, in two strophes, the second restating the first. Outside, the carnival chorus passes under the window. Every festive sound in the opera has been heard against her, the brindisi, the waltz, Flora’s choruses, and this is the last of them: the feast goes on while the victim dies, and the feast is the world that used her.
Movement V
Alfredo comes. They plan to leave Paris together, in “Parigi, o cara” (“Paris, oh dear one”), in A flat major, a duet of a future neither can have. Germont arrives, and she gives Alfredo her portrait. The particulars of the work stay particular to the end: a flower to be returned when withered, a card table, a purse, a letter, a portrait.
She feels a last surge of strength, cries “Oh gioia!” (“oh joy!”), and dies. Whether the cry is transfiguration or delirium the work does not say, and the question has stayed open. The father is forgiven and the lovers reconciled in her last minutes, and the ending reconciles what the second act has exposed. It softens the ending without undoing what was shown: the trade was made, and she paid it.
Piave drew the libretto from Dumas fils’s play, given in Paris in 1852 and drawn from his novel of 1848. Verdi had written Rigoletto in 1851 and Il trovatore in January 1853. La traviata was first performed at La Fenice, Venice, on 6 March 1853, and failed. Revised, it was given at the Teatro San Benedetto in Venice on 6 May 1854, fourteen months later, and succeeded; that score has been published and performed since. Its heirs include La bohème, and the title role became the measure of the lyric soprano, answered by Callas in Visconti’s staging at La Scala in 1955 and by Willy Decker’s stripped Salzburg staging in 2005. What the work shows has outlasted the world it shows: a respectability bought from the woman it will not receive.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test meets resistance along the spine. Act I is required by Act III: the party Violetta sings over in “Sempre libera” is the carnival that passes her window as she dies, and the “Di quell’amor” theme she mocks is the one the violins play under the letter. Remove the duet with Germont and the opera has no cause; remove the card game and the money thrown and the sacrifice has no visible price. The test finds give in three places: Alfredo’s and Germont’s cabalettas in Act II, long cut in common practice with little loss to the argument; the gypsy and matador choruses at Flora’s, which the plot waits through; and the second strophe of “Addio, del passato”, which restates the first.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: a society that buys a woman’s body for its pleasure then requires her to pay for its respectability, and its morality is a transaction that she alone conducts honestly. Germont’s case is a family’s marriage contract. His word for his daughter is an angel, “Pura siccome un angelo” (“pure as an angel”), and the angel’s purity is bought by the courtesan. Money shows at every turn: her property sold, the winnings thrown as her wages, the purse of twenty louis left in Act III. Beside it a private truth: a life given to pleasure is a defence against death. Held below the top because the opera half endorses what it shows: the sacrifice is ennobled, the father forgiven, the ending reconciled.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Height is reached often, and in more than one register. The sublime of dread opens the work: divided violins, pianissimo, in B minor, a death heard before a life. The sublime of the self divided: “Ah, fors’è lui” with “croce e delizia” (“cross and delight”) rising in it, then the coloratura of “Sempre libera” broken by a voice from outside. “Amami, Alfredo”, the prelude’s theme at full voice as farewell. The concertato that ends Act II. Then all of Act III: the prelude again, the letter spoken, “È tardi!”, “Addio, del passato” and the last false surge of “Oh gioia!”. Held below the top on frequency: the Act I introduction and brindisi, Flora’s choruses and most of Germont’s music rise by charm or warmth, not elevation.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Built, not only evoked. The figure is old: the fallen woman who is the one pure heart, and with her the scapegoat, sent out so that the city’s purity can stand. The opera builds the second. Two women stand on its axis, the courtesan on stage and the daughter who never appears, and the plot is the transfer of one woman’s life to secure the other’s marriage. The carnival under the window in Act III is built too: the feast goes on while the victim dies, and the feast is the world that used her. The particulars stay particular: a flower, a card table, a purse, a portrait. Held a step down because the type is Dumas’s before it is myth, and the angel and the Magdalene are summoned in Germont’s language more than built in the music.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the melodramma of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti and its set form of scena, slow aria, transition and cabaletta, which Verdi had used and bent through Rigoletto (1851) and Il trovatore (January 1853). The departures: a courtesan of the 1840s as heroine of a serious opera, in a story the audience could take for its own city; a domestic scale of three principals, two parties and two rooms, with no court, battle or conspiracy; a prelude that opens on the deathbed; a heroine whose vocal type changes with her life, from coloratura to lyric line to near speech; and the central duet loosened into argument. The stake was paid: the first night failed. Held below the top because the forms are bent, not broken, and Rigoletto two years before had made the larger structural turn.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. The two arias of Act I are the instrument of its first knowledge: the slow one is the self that might love, the fast one the self that refuses, and Alfredo’s voice entering from outside the cabaletta is the knowledge that the refusal has already failed. The party is form: the waltz, the brindisi, Flora’s choruses and the carnival make society audible as music the heroine sings over and, in Act III, cannot join. The return of the prelude makes the opera a memory heard from its end, and the letter spoken, not sung, is the voice at its last. Recast as Dumas’s play, the work loses the divided self of Act I and the theme that crosses three acts. Held below the top where cabalettas and choruses are containers the convention supplied.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Evidence over promise, across more than a century and a half. Each generation has answered the role differently: Callas in Visconti’s production at La Scala (1955) and in the live Lisbon recording (1958); Carlos Kleiber’s recording with Ileana Cotrubas (1977); Willy Decker’s stripped Salzburg staging (2005). In print, the second volume of Julian Budden’s The Operas of Verdi (1978), and Catherine Clément’s L’Opéra ou la défaite des femmes (1979), which made the work central to the charge that opera kills its women. The questions stay open: whether the opera indicts the sacrifice or worships it; whether Germont is the villain or the most changed figure; whether “Oh gioia!” is transfiguration or delirium; whether the restored cabalettas belong. Held below the top because much of the yield is in performance and the role, and the semantic questions are few and near the surface.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force: the work showed that serious opera could take a contemporary private life, without history or rank, and make tragedy of illness, money and a family’s respectability, held in melodramma’s own forms. That is a real reorganisation of possibility, carried more by subject and tone than by structure. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the line to verismo and to Puccini is direct, La bohème above all, whose consumptive heroine dies in a cold room with her lover; the fallen-woman heroine runs on through Massenet’s Manon and Puccini’s Manon Lescaut; and the role became the measure of the lyric soprano. Discounted because the reorganisation of Italian form was more Verdi’s later work and Wagner’s than this one’s, and because much of what travelled was Dumas’s subject.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: the 1854 score has been in print and in performance since 1854, 172 years, and nothing is lost or in doubt beyond performance practice, the traditional cuts, the second strophes, the cadenzas and the interpolated high notes. Presence has been continuous since the revision, and the brindisi and the preludes are known well beyond the opera house; that width earns one tenth above the usual step for the span, and no more is taken for it. The surface fixed to its moment is small: the demimonde of 1850 now reads as the work’s own world, not as a period to be excused. The one early cost, the failure of the first night, lasted fourteen months, until the revision was heard.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Command of the medium, with the making load-bearing in many places: the divided violins of the prelude; the offstage band of Act I, which sets the waltz behind the duet so that intimacy is heard inside noise; the voice from outside in “Sempre libera”; the long duet with Germont, where melodic sections and declamation follow the argument; the letter spoken over solo violins; vocal writing that changes with the heroine’s state. Piave’s verse is plain and theatrical, often apt, as in “croce e delizia”, sometimes stock. The costs are real. Much of the accompaniment is the guitar-like figuration of the period, which serves and does no more; Germont’s cabaletta and Flora’s choruses are routine; the Act I introduction is busy rather than shaped. A score commanded this well at its centre, and routine at its edges, stands here.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the matador chorus at Flora’s and “Addio, del passato”. One law reaches both: the world’s gaiety is the frame in which the heroine is consumed, and every festive sound in the work is heard against her. The brindisi toasts pleasure as fleeting, the waltz plays while she coughs, Flora’s divertissement plays before the cards are dealt and the money thrown, and the carnival chorus passes under a dying woman’s window. The “Di quell’amor” theme crosses all three acts and binds the private line. The range governed is a whole social world, a party and a deathbed, comedy and lament. The strain is at Flora’s: the gypsy and matador choruses obey the law by where they stand more than by their music, and their matter is decoration.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The orders are held through one woman’s life, not listed. Consciousness: Violetta divided against herself in Act I, deciding in Act II, remembering in Act III. The family: a father, a son, a daughter never seen, and the marriage contract that governs them. Money and labour: the demimonde as a trade, the sold property, the purse, the winnings thrown as wages. Society: the salon, Flora’s party, the respectable provinces of “Di Provenza il mar”. The body: consumption, the doctor, the hours counted. The sacred, in the angel and the Magdalene, held in the drama’s language. Nature is glimpsed, in the country house and Provence. What holds the axis lowest is absence: the state and history do not enter, and the scale is two rooms and two parties.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.2, The Imperishable at 9.2 and The Sublime at 9.1. Set forms that are the drama, the slow aria for the self that might love and the cabaletta for the self that refuses, with the prelude returning so that the opera is heard from its end; a score whole and continuously present since 1854; and height reached often, from the divided violins of the opening to the letter spoken and the last false surge.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.0: consciousness, the family, money, society, the body and the sacred are held through one life, but the state and history do not enter, and the scale is two rooms and two parties. Next above it, The Archetypal Deep at 8.6: the scapegoat is built on two women and one axis, but the type is Dumas’s before it is myth, and the angel and the Magdalene live more in Germont’s words than in the music.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.2, The Unconcealment at 8.9, The Swerve at 8.7, Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.6, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · the score and libretto of La traviata and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, libretto or recording was in hand. The work is scored in its standard performing version, the revision Verdi made for the Teatro San Benedetto in 1854, which has been published and performed since; Act II is in two scenes. The version that failed at La Fenice in 1853 is not scored and is weighed only on The Swerve and The Imperishable. Words and music are scored together, on Piave’s Italian as Verdi set it. Dumas fils’s La Dame aux camélias is the source, not the work: the opera is scored on what it achieves in its own medium, and what travelled as Dumas’s subject is discounted. Italian is quoted only where the desk is certain of the words, four words or fewer; every English gloss is the desk’s own, plain and literal, and is not charged to the work, and no published translation is quoted. The span and intervals were computed by script. Figures that could not be verified, among them the extent of the 1854 revisions, the period in which the first staging set the action, the kind of flower, the length of the central duet, the critical edition and the opera’s rank in the repertory, are not given; the running time is a range across the recorded tradition, not a measurement. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.