Music: Giuseppe Verdi
Libretto: Francesco Maria Piave
Director: Rodula Gaitanou
Conductor: Matthew Kofi Waldren
Like many a good love story, there is a pall of death that hangs over La traviata. Its opening prelude introduces the opera’s love themes as an elegy, presaging the ill health of the heroine, Alison Langer’s Violetta, before the sprightly tunes of the Act I party that the Parisian courtesan throws to celebrate her recovery. But even that has reminders of the hostess’s mortality: in order to be in good shape to receive her guests, Violetta must keep her tuberculosis symptoms at bay with all manner of crude 19th-century breathing apparatuses.
Chordelia Chisholm’s set for Opera Holland Park is dominated by a wall of mirrors and double doors, perfect for doubling as a party ballroom and as Act II’s country greenhouse. But there is a circular chamber to one side – Violetta’s boudoir in Act I, later a potting shed – whose drapes are in funereal black, further foreshadowing the heroine’s fate.
Langer is delightful in her title role, charming the city’s menfolk at her party in Act I – one can quite believe multiple men have fallen for her – and gradually becoming enamoured herself of Alfredo (Matteo Desole), who has declared his love for Violetta during her illness, to the consternation of her love, Barone Douphol. During this opening stretch, Langer and Desole bounce off each other well, especially during the brindisi duet, Libiamo ne’ lieti calici.
After the party scene proceeds at quite a lick, Act II’s first scene, which takes us up to the interval, feels more appropriately sedate, taking place some months later as Alfredo and Violetta are making a new, pastoral life together in the French countryside. It is here that Francesco Maria Piave’s libretto makes some shortcuts that would make perfect sense for the opera’s original audiences, but for which those in the 21st century must make allowances: just why Alfredo would be so upset at his partner divesting the properties and possessions associated with her old life in Paris is left as an exercise.
Similarly, when Alfredo’s father Giorgio (Michel de Souza) arrives to denounce his son’s relationship and to persuade Violetta to break things off for the sake of the family’s reputation, Violetta’s eventual capitulation – albeit after some more bravura performance by Langer – seems perfunctory by today’s standards. In the heightened emotional state of grand opera, the heroine’s sudden disappearance from Alfredo’s life still results in tension, setting the scene for the confrontations to come.
One of the virtues of open-air theatre, including Opera Holland Park’s canopied auditorium, is the lighting change that evening light gives us. As Verdi’s Act II resumes after the interval back in Paris at a hedonistic party that Violetta has returned to, and to which Alfredo has followed her, the post-sunset light supplements Siam Corder’s lighting design to ensure that this is a darker, more foreboding environment than the soirée that opened Act I. Choreographer Steve Elias has fun with the party’s lewd dancers, but the real tension comes in the confrontation between Alfredo and the former lover he believes to have abandoned him in favour of her ex.
However grand such party sequences are, director Rodula Gaitanou never compromises their emotional integrity. And while a move downstage for the Act III climax of Alfredo and Violetta’s reunion threatens to reveal some of the drawbacks of Langer’s “sick woman” make-up when viewed up close, that emotion stays present throughout.
And that’s the beauty of this production of La traviata, a magnificent study of Verdi’s intimate tragedy. As Opera Holland Park celebrates 25 years with CEO and Director of Opera James Clutton at the helm, this is a company at the top of its game and with no signs of slowing down.
Continues until 2 August 2025
